Turning Life into Fiction

Hemley, Robin

ISBN 10: 1555974449 / ISBN 13: 9781555974442

Published by Graywolf Press, 2006

About this Item

Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc.

Seller Inventory # 00093693236

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Turning Life into Fiction
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555974449
• ISBN 13: 9781555974442
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 2nd Edition
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

A highly entertaining and indispensable manual on how to write good fiction

If you want to write at all, whether from real life or not, you must be willing and able to use your imagination. That means you must be willing to take risks and sometimes look the fool. You must be willing to transform experience, not simply record it. If you were a good liar, daydreamer, or troublemaker as a child, you'll probably make a good fiction writer. Daydreams, lies, and trouble. That's the stuff of fiction.

In Turning Life into Fiction, Robin Hemley offers a highly entertaining and in-depth manual―with writing exercises on how to convert real life into good storytelling. He covers a wide range of subjects, including how to record and generate ideas from daily life and how to write effectively using true anecdotes, real places, and real people. A self-proclaimed liar and thief, Hemley also addresses the legal and ethical concerns of "borrowing" experience from the lives of strangers and loved ones.

Lively, informative, and inspirational, Turning Life into Fiction is an invaluable text for any fiction writer. First published in 1994, this new edition is updated and expanded to include nearly a dozen short stories that Hemley refers to throughout
the book.

About the Author

Robin Hemley is Director of the George Polk School of Communications as well as Parsons Family Chair in Creative Writing, University Professor and Co-Chair of the MFA in Writing at LIU-Brooklyn, USA. He is also Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa, USA, and a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop where The Digital Storytelling Lab was recently dedicated in his honor. He is the award-winning author of 16 books of fiction and nonfiction, including most recently the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021). His new collection of essays is How to Change History: A Salvage Project (2025). His work has been published and translated widely and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. He is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference, NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years, inaugural director of The Writers' Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore, and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction.