The 'Backwards' Research Guide for Writers: Using your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration (Frameworks for Writing) - Softcover

Huber, Sonya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845534425 ISBN 13: 9781845534424

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2011

Synopsis

The "Backwards" Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection and Inspiration demystifies the writing process by inviting writers of all levels to focus on their passions, questions, and obsessions as the key to generating seeds for further exploration of the world around them. Writers then develop these questions into focused projects that explore the teller's central role in the open-ended quest of unfolding a research topic. The boom in narrative journalism, memoir, and creative nonfiction has generated wonderful writing, but no resource for writers exists to bridge the gap between passionate research and the page. This book addresses that gap by turning the task of "research" on its head and by speaking to students who resist the idea of research as an objective and dry assignment. Students are invited to experiment creatively with collecting observations and information and then to step beyond their subjective realities to interact with the world around them and ultimately become vulnerable authors willing to change their perspectives as they research and write. Developed with input from college student writers, The "Backwards" Research Guide for Writers is relevant as a text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in composition, creative nonfiction, literary journalism, and feature writing as well as for working journalists and other writers seeking a new way of approaching a writing project. It includes interviews with notable authors that focus not on the completed and intimidating project of a successful author, but on the project as it took shape and mystified a researcher. Another unique feature is a section in every chapter on ethics, as ethical questions are central to the writing process as well as a method for sparking interest in writing and learning. The guide includes extensive examples of research challenges and dilemmas, strategies for planning a research project, exercises for generating ideas, a guide for writing the research-based work, an appendix of on-line databases, a section in each chapter focused on ethics in research and writing called "gray matter," a selection of recommended readings, and a bibliography of conventional research guides.

About this title

About the Author

Sonya Huber (BA Carlton College, MA & MFA The Ohio State University) is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University with a background in journalism and college composition. Huber's writing has appeared in many magazines, newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies. She has published articles in Psychology Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Sojourner, as well as creative writing in Literary Mama and Fourth Genre. Huber's recent book, Opa Nobody (University of Nebraska Press), tracks the challenges and changes born of a passionate and lived research project of family history focused on her grandfather, a committed activist in World War II Germany shoes story echoes her own activist life story.

Review

"An organized, thought-provoking and practical guide...refreshing and timely. The book is well-written and carefully edited and invites both cover-to-cover reading and intermittent dipping into. Instructors and students alike will find something to appeal to their needs and tastes..." --Melanie Rockenhaus, The Linguist

"Backwards offers a very helpful perspective on the writing and research process. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates, two-year technical program students, and general readers." --J. Stevens, George Mason University, CHOICE

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1845534425
• ISBN 13: 9781845534424
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 360