The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

Product Description
MP3 CD Format An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit. His 1990 National Book Award–winning novel
Middle Passage is a modern classic, revered as much for its daring plot as its philosophical underpinnings. For thirty-three years, Johnson taught and mentored students in the art and craft of creative writing.
The Way of the Writer is his record of those years, and the coda to a kaleidoscopic, boundary-shattering career.

Organized into six accessible, easy-to-navigate sections,
The Way of the Writer is both a literary reflection on the creative impulse and a utilitarian guide to the writing process. Johnson shares his lessons and exercises from the classroom, starting with word choice, sentence structure, and narrative voice, and delving into the mechanics of scene, dialogue, plot, and storytelling before exploring the larger questions at stake for the serious writer. What separates literature from industrial fiction? What lies at the heart of the creative impulse? How does one navigate the literary world? And how are philosophy and fiction concomitant?
Review
A meditation on the daily routines and mental habits of a writer . . . the book radiates warmth . . . a writer's true education might start in institutions, it seems, but for Johnson it is more a lineage of good, memorable talk.-- "New York Times"
About the Author
Captain Charles Johnson is a pseudonym for an unknown British author of the book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724. There are no records of a captain by that name. Some scholars believe that the author was actually Daniel Defoe, who was known to have written about pirates. Others believe it was Nathaniel Mist, a journalist, publisher, and former seaman who had sailed in the West Indies. It was Mists name that was attached to the first filing of this book with the office of Her Majestys Stationery.
Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. Kings Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing, and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle.