Part Two. Notebooks, Journals and Memory Chapter 6. Who Are You? Somebody!
Chapter 7. Put Your Heart on the Page
Chapter 8. People from the Past: Characters of the Future
Chapter 9. Mining Memory
Chapter 10. Changing Your Life (From Joy Nolan)
Chapter 11. Journal Keeping for Writers (From William Melvin Kelley)

Part Three. Characterization Chapter 12. He/She: Switching Gender
Chapter 13. Funny, You Don't Look Seventy-Five
Chapter 14. Naming Your Characters
Chapter 15. Oh!...That Sort of Person
Chapter 16. What Do You Know about Your Characters?
Chapter 17. Creating a Characters Background, Place, Setting, and Milieu (From Robie Macauley)
Chapter 18. Deny Everything
Chapter 19. Psychic Clothing

Part Four. Perspective and Point of View Chapter 20. The Engagement Party
Chapter 21. An Early Memory, Part One: The Child as Narrator
Chapter 22. An Early Memory, Part Two: The Reminiscent Narrator
Chapter 23. The Unreliable Narrator

Part Five. Dialogue Chapter 24. Speech Flavor, or Sounding Real (From Talia Selz)
Chapter 25. Dialogue Is All Art, Not Talk
Chapter 26. The Invisible Scene: Interspersing Dialogue with Action
Chapter 27. Not Quite a Fight
Chapter 28. Telling Talk: When to Use Dialogue or Indirect Discourse (Summarized Dialogue)

Part Six. Plot Chapter29. Three by Three (From William Melvin Kelley)
Chapter 30. The Skeleton
Chapter 31. From Situation to Plot
Chapter 32. What If? How to Develop and Finish Stories
Chapter 33. Magnifying Conflict (From David Ray)
Chapter 34. The Story as Machine (From Perry Glasser)
Chapter 35. Plot Potential

Part Seven. Story Elements as a Given Chapter 36. Sunday: Discovering Emotional Triggers
Chapter 37. Five Different Versions: And Not One Is a Lie
Chapter 38. Accounting: How Did We Get Here?
Chapter 39. Psycho: Creating Terror
Chapter 40. The Newspaper Muse: Ann Landers and "The National Enquirer
Chapter 41. The Letter Home
Chapter 42. Stranger Than Truth (From Rhoda Lerman)
Chapter 43. Stirring Up a Fiction Stew (From Sharon Sheehe Stark)

Part Eight. Resolution And Final Meaning Chapter 44. Titles and Keys
Chapter 45. With Revision Comes Final Meaning
Chapter 46. It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Part Nine. Invention and Transformation Chapter 47. The Inner Life of Characters
Chapter 48. Sex Is Not All It's Cracked Up to Be--It's More (From Christopher Noel)
Chapter 49. Its All in Your Head
Chapter 50. My Pet (From Alison Lurie)
Chapter 51. Faraway Places
Chapter 52. You Had to Be There
Chapter 53. The Enemy's Life (From Lore Segal)
Chapter 54. Taking Risks
Chapter 55. Total Recall (From Alison Lurie)
Chapter 56. Writing Outside the Story (From Elizabeth Libbey)

Part Ten. Mechanicals Chapter 57. Identifying Story Scenes During Revision
Chapter 58. Dynamic Scening (From Thalia Selz)
Chapter 59. Handling the Problems of Time and Pace (FromRobie Macauley)
Chapter 60. The Power of Seemed and Probably
Chapter 61. Bringing Abstract Ideas to Life
Chapter 62. The Five-Highlighter Exercise (From David Ray)
Chapter 63. Suit Your Sentence to Its Meaning (From Thalia Selz)
Chapter 64. Word Packages Are Not Gifts
Chapter 65. Spice: Varying Sentence Structure
Chapter 66. Write A Story Using a Small Unit of Time
Chapter 67. Taboos: Weak Adverbs and Adjectives
Chapter 68. Transportation: Getting There Isn't Half the Fun--It's Boring
Chapter 69. Practice Writing Good, Clean Prose (From Christopher Keane)
Chapter 70. Adding Texture
Chapter 71. Naming the Diner, Naming the Diet, Naming the Dog
Chapter 72. Cutting to the Bone (From David Ray)

Part Eleven. Games Chapter 73. Learing to Lie
Chapter 74. The Dictionary Game
Chapter 75. Fictionary: A Variation of Dictionary

Part Twelve. Learning From The Greats Chapter 76. Finding Inspiration in Other Sources--Poetry, Nonfiction, etc.
Chapter 77. Places Without People
Chapter 78. The Sky's the Limit: Homage to Kafka and Garcia Marquez (From Christopher Noel)
Chapter 79. Learning from the Greats
Chapter 80. Imitation: Sincere Flattery and Learning
Chapter 81. Borrowing Characters
Chapter 82. What Keeps You Reading?

Selected Bibliography

About the Contributors

Anne Bernays, a novelist and writing teacher, is the author of eight novels, including Professor Romeo and Growing Up Rich as well as two works of nonfiction, including The Language of Names written with Justin Kaplan and What If? written with Pamela Painter. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous major publications, among them The Nation, the New York Times, Town & Country, and Sports Illustrated. She lives in Cambridge and Truro, Massachusetts with her husband, Justin Kaplan. They have three daughters and six grandchildren.