Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them by Peter Selgin

Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them by Peter Selgin

Unlike other craft books on writing, Your First Page is based on the premise that almost everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes wrong or right on the first page.

Praise for the first edition

“I have long taught the critical importance of the first few pages of any work of fictionWhat a delight to find a smart, perceptive, enormously useful book that focuses on the craft and technique issues of these same make-or-break first 500 words. I heartily recommend Peter Selgin’s Your First Page to any aspiring young writer.” — Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“Like a detective dusting for fingerprints, in Your First Page Peter Selgin demonstrates how a close examination of the opening paragraphs of a story, novel, or essay can reveal much more than a beginning writer might imagine: the entire work’s DNA. In example after example, he demonstrates the kind of close reading that will serve any writer well and offers sound advice on exposition, scene, characterization, point of view, style, and many more essential components of effective prose. Though it can serve the individual writer toiling away at home, I look forward to sharing it with students in my classes, too.” — Peter Turchi, author of A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

“An excellent, unique book. I use this book in my English 307: Writing the Literary Novel course. What's special about it is its rich collection of good quality brief samples of work in progress. The strengths and weaknesses of these texts are clearly analyzed by Peter Selgin with an intelligent eye, and students can see how to improve their own work. Reading the contemporary masters of fiction is valuable, but inevitably a chasm is created. This book helps to realistically bridge that chasm and get students on the road to increasingly more efficient results in their own writing.” — Vic Cavalli, Trinity Western University

Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O'Connor Prize for Fiction, Life Goes to the Movies, a novel, and several children's books are among Peter Selgin's works. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist's Memoir, his book, was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Award in 2012. The Water Master, his most recent novel, won the Pirate's Alley/William Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel. The Missouri Review Editors' Prize, a Dana Award for the Essay, and a Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights' Conference Award for his full-length play, A God in the Home, based on Dr. Kevorkian and his suicide machine, are among his other achievements. He teaches at Antioch University's MFA Creative Writing Program and is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia College and State University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781554814732
ISBN 10	1554814731
Title	Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them
Author	Peter Selgin
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Broadview Press Ltd
Year published	2019-07-30
Number of pages	360
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.