The Wall (French: Le Mur) by Jean-Paul Sartre, a collection of short stories containing the eponymous story "The Wall", is considered one of the author's greatest existentialist works of fiction. Sartre dedicated the book to his lifelong companion Olga Kosakiewicz, a former student of Simone de Beauvoir.
From Where You Dream - The Process of Writing Fiction
Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University — his version of literary boot camp. In From Where You Dream,Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler reinterprets the traditional tools of the craft using the dynamics of desire. Offering a direct view into the mind and craft of a literary master,From Where You Dreamis an invaluable tool for the novice and experienced writer alike.
This book shows the reader how to take timeless storytelling structures and make them immediate, now, for fiction that's universal in how it speaks to the reader's heart and contemporary in detail and impact. Each chapter includes brief excerpts and descriptions of fiction from many times, many genres - myth and fairy tale, genre and mainstream fiction, film plots of all types, short story and novel.
Musicians and artists might need talent to succeed, but writers don't, says Jerry Cleaver in Immediate Fiction. Cleaver allows that talent is needed to win a National Book Award, say, but otherwise, any of us can do it. All we need is the ability to "develop and exercise sadistic license." The operative word is conflict. As Cleaver puts it, "Happy lives make lousy novels.... If the characters are having a good time, the reader is not." He takes the mystery out of fiction writing. You don't have to write about what you know, he says; write what you can imagine. .
Edward Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946), self-styled "prince of storytellers," was an English novelist, a major and successful writer of genre fiction including thrillers. He composed more than a hundred novels during his lifetime.
