Washoe County Library System

Text explains how putting letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters ends up creating a book.

""When I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait." With that insight, Pat Schneider invites readers to contemplate their lives through spiritual observation and exploratory writing. In seventeen concise thematic chapters that include meditations on topics such as fear, prayer, forgiveness, social justice, and death, How the Light Gets In gracefully guides readers through the...

The Artful Edit explores the many-faceted and often misunderstoodor simply overlookedart of editing. The book brims with examples, quotes, and case studies, including an illuminating discussion of Max Perkins's editorial collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby. Susan Bell, a veteran book editor, also offers strategic tips and exercises for self-editing and a series of remarkable interviews, taking us into the studios of successful...

"The sentence is the common ground where every writer walks. A good sentence can be written (and read) by anyone if we simply give it the gift of our time, and it is as close as most of us will get to making something truly beautiful. Using minimal technical terms and sources ranging from the Bible and Shakespeare to George Orwell and Maggie Nelson, as well as scientific studies of what can best fire the reader's mind, author Joe Moran shows how we...

"In this witty "how-to" guide, Wisława Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: "I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories," she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave-anonymously-for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly....

Gail Carson Levine offers a behind-the-scenes take on writing and teaches listeners how to become a world-class author. Drawing from her popular blog, Gail answers readers' fiction and poetry-writing questions and dives into how to make a story come alive. With her trademark humor and vast writing knowledge, Gail Carson Levine reveals the tricks of her trade, writer to writer.

Once upon a time, in pencil school, a brave little red pencil sets out to write an exciting story with nouns and adverbs and everything--but first she has to face the ravenous pencil sharpener, the Wolf 3000.