Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Fiction Writing - Softcover

Olsen, Lance

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1878914502 ISBN 13: 9781878914507

Publisher: Cambrian Pubns, 1998

Synopsis

A cutting-edge, heading-for-the-millennium guide to the craft of fiction writing. Rebel Yell is ideal for individual or classroom use.

Fast-paced and entertaining Rebel Yell, by acclaimed award-winning novelist Lance Olsen, begins with a concise but thorough presentation of compositional basics and quickly progresses to more sophisticated concerns, such as navigating the murky waters of the publishing industry, jump-starting your creative muse, and getting the most out of writing workshops. Whether you are sculpting a great hook, deciphering contract rights and wrongs, or coping with the challenges of a writer's life, hip and honest Rebel Yell can guide you to find your own best solutions.

Innovative writing exercises at the end of each chapter encourage writers of all abilities to stretch and flex their creative muscles, while supplemental reading lists guide those who want to push the power of their pens to the next level. Best of all, Rebel Yell features something entirely lacking in many texts: more than 40 interviews with contemporary authors, editors, and publishers (including Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Raymond Federman, and Larry McCaffery) working in diverse media, providing significant insights into the multifaceted worlds of "them that's doin' it." Witty and informative, Rebel Yell is the definitive guide to writing fiction that will grab attention in a crowded literary world.

About this title

About the Author

Lance Olsen, former Idaho Writer-in-Residence and 1998 Pushcart Prize winner, was raised in a jungle compound in Venezuela, where his father worked for an oil company, and in the hermetically sealed, climate-controlled malls of northern New Jersey, where he seldom breathed unfiltered air. He received his BA (with honors, 1978) in English and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin, his MFA (1980) from the renowned Iowa Writers Workshop, and his MA (1982) and PhD (1985) from the University of Virginia. Since then he has taught at universities in Kentucky, London, and Oxford. In 1990 he joined the faculty at the University of Idaho, where he is professor of contemporary fiction, British and American literature, and creative writing. He lives with his wife on an eighty-acre farm near Deary.

His fiction is marked by diversity, ranging from conventional realism to vanguard experimentation, from high orbit to Moscow, Idaho, and from textured observation of suburban life to philosophical meditation on Ludwig Wittgenstein.

His first novel, Live from Earth (Ballantine/Available Press, 1991), which Booklist called "often absurd, sometimes disturbing, and wholly engrossing," is a magical realist tale in the tradition of Gabriel Garc'a Mrquez about a young woman's love affair with her dead husband. His second, Tonguing the Zeitgeist (Permeable, 1994), finalist for the 1995 Philip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel, is a social satire in the tradition of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange about the commercialization of the arts. His short story collection, Scherzi, I Believe (Wordcraft, 1994) is, as literary critic Thomas E. Kennedy writes, "a collection to water a parched place with laughter, delight, and that rarest of commodities as we approach the third millennium: intelligence."

His latest novels are Burnt (Wordcraft, 1996) and Time Famine (Permeable, 1996). Burnt, which Publishers Weekly calls "a funny cautionary tale" marked by "true wit," is a comic murder mystery involving a professor who kills one of his students because of his bad prose style. Time Famine, which Asimov's calls "relentless, savage, [and] hysterically funny," and which Science Fiction Chronicle cited as one of the best novels of 1996, is a literary science fiction involving smart space probes in the twenty-first century, government radiation experiments in the Northwest in the twentieth, and the ill-fated Donner Party in the nineteenth.

His most recent publication is Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Writing Fiction (Cambrian Press), which covers everything from the current climate in publishing to jump-starting your creative muse, writing stories and novels, deciphering contracts, and getting the word out about your work after the fact. It also features over forty interviews with writers, editors, and publishers.

In addition to being a prolific fiction writer (his work has appeared in over fifty journals and anthologies), Olsen has published a chapbook of poems, nearly sixty critical essays, and more than a hundred reviews. He has also written four books about postmodern fiction, including the first study of the father of cyberpunk, William Gibson, and has edited two collections of essays on the future of American fiction. His interests include the future of the book in an increasingly market-driven publishing industry, the impact of the Internet on fiction, and (with his artist wife, Andi Olsen) the nexus where art and fiction kiss.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambrian Pubns
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1878914502
• ISBN 13: 9781878914507
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 239