Covering the entire process from story building to manuscript preparation and marketing, Jerry Cleaver shows the novice and experienced writer how to start writing and how to get immediate results.
Readers will find everything they need to know about managing time, finding an idea, getting the first word down on the page, staying unblocked, shaping ideas into compelling stories, and submitting their work to agents and publishers.
Immediate Fiction goes beyond the old "Write what you know" to "Write what you can imagine." Filled with insightful tips on how to manage doubts, fears, blocks, and panic, Immediate Fiction will help writers develop their skills in as little minutes a day, if necessary.
Believing that all writing is rewriting, Cleaver says, "You can't control what you put on the page. You can only control what you leave on the page." With this book Cleaver shows how to get that control and produce results.
**
Amazon.com Review
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. Don't fret if you can't find large chunks of time to write. Start with five minutes on weekdays and 20 on weekends, and you'll have 100 to 300 pages by year's end. Perhaps most refreshing about Cleaver's approach is the lack of directives. Some writing instructors demand that you work with an outline; others forbid it. Cleaver claims that teachers who tell you to do it one way or the other are telling you not how you work best, but how they work best. --Jane Steinberg
From Publishers Weekly
Adages ("Want + obstacle = conflict"), advice ("Make all of your story worth showing") and even an assortment of solitary words author Jerry Cleaver considers important ("fear," "worry," "hope") stand out in boldfaced type on the pages of Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course. Cleaver, who founded the Chicago writers' workshop the Writers' Loft and has ghostwritten several books, insists that all one needs to be a successful writer is the "right tools" (while painting may require "inborn talent," writing doesn't) and in enthusiastic prose, he describes those tools one by one. With its writing exercises, time management hints and endlessly jocular encouragement, this volume will please many a would-be Welty or Wilde. (St. Martin's, $24.95 304p ISBN 0-312-28716-X)
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