Writing Prose: Techniques and Purposes

by Thomas S. Kane, Leonard J. Peters (Editor)

This anthology teaches writing by demonstrating the techniques and literary styles of established authors.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 23, 1986

Reviews

[Mad Woman in the Attic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've spent nearly the last five years undoing everything I knew or felt about writing prose and poetry. Undoing is harder than doing. It's erasing old habits and replacing them with new ones. How I feel now about writing prose is so different from what I knew about writing prose twenty-five years ago. I was always a writer, but I did not grow up wanting to be a novelist or author. That meant commercialization and some sort of democracy of art and I never really believed in that or wanted that. I also could not make other people understand how I felt.

Since about 2013, I have worked to reinvent my life and my writing world. This is one of the books I have used. It took me a long time to read all of it and I spent most of 2019 practicing aspects of this book. Basically I want to think about stories and writing differently, to question all my former habits, what I even read. TO MAKE SERIOUS CHANGES. That has been a burden and very, very difficult. It's been a lonely journey, too. This book is like a lot of other writing books. But it's an older one. I bought it used. It's divided into ten sections, has a nice glossary. It's like a college course and was intended for that. It's excellent, the best of its kind, and I have a whole shelf of its kind.

This is NOT a book about grammar, or one of those self-help books on writing, or one of those how to, etc. etc. etc. It about writing prose and knowing why a person wrote something a certain way. It's the discovery of techniques, styles, and yes, strategies. It's really about composing and understanding what that means. Process. Work. Doing it. Understanding it. PRACTICE. I have been practicing all year so that I can write a novel I need to write. That's all.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've fallen madly in love with this text.