About this ebook
From Stephen Koch, former chair of Columbia University’s graduate creative writing program, comes essential and practical advice drawn from The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop.
With nearly thirty years of teaching experience, Stephen Koch has earned a reputation as an astute and benevolent mentor; and with Advice to the Writer, his lucid observations and commonsense techniques have never been more accessible. Here Koch dispenses sound guidance for those moments when the muse needs a little help finding her way: in “Shaping the Story,” he untangles plot; in “Working and Reworking,” he explains the most teachable (yet least often taught) of all writerly skills: revision; and in “The Story of the Self,” he delves into autobiography. Featuring handpicked commentary from some of our greatest authors, Advice to the Writer is a unique introduction to this maddening and intoxicating pursuit.
Praise for Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop
“An extraordinarily comprehensive and practical work by a master craftsman and a master analyst of the craft.”—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising and Anything Goes
“Stephen Koch was my teacher long ago. Now he is everyone’s teacher, indelibly. This is a book not just for the beginning writer but for every writer.”—Martha McPhee, author of the National Book Award nominee Gorgeous Lies
“The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop is a treasure trove of wisdom, both immensely practical and philosophical, entertaining and thought-provoking. Koch takes us inside the writing process, and it is impossible not to emerge transformed.”—Joanna Hershon, author of Swimming
With nearly thirty years of teaching experience, Stephen Koch has earned a reputation as an astute and benevolent mentor; and with Advice to the Writer, his lucid observations and commonsense techniques have never been more accessible. Here Koch dispenses sound guidance for those moments when the muse needs a little help finding her way: in “Shaping the Story,” he untangles plot; in “Working and Reworking,” he explains the most teachable (yet least often taught) of all writerly skills: revision; and in “The Story of the Self,” he delves into autobiography. Featuring handpicked commentary from some of our greatest authors, Advice to the Writer is a unique introduction to this maddening and intoxicating pursuit.
Praise for Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop
“An extraordinarily comprehensive and practical work by a master craftsman and a master analyst of the craft.”—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising and Anything Goes
“Stephen Koch was my teacher long ago. Now he is everyone’s teacher, indelibly. This is a book not just for the beginning writer but for every writer.”—Martha McPhee, author of the National Book Award nominee Gorgeous Lies
“The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop is a treasure trove of wisdom, both immensely practical and philosophical, entertaining and thought-provoking. Koch takes us inside the writing process, and it is impossible not to emerge transformed.”—Joanna Hershon, author of Swimming
About the author
Stephen Koch taught the craft of fiction to graduate students for twenty-one years in the writing division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University and to undergraduates for seven years in the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. Koch is the author of two enthusiastically acclaimed and widely translated novels, Night Watch and The Bachelor’s Bride, and several nonfiction works, including Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York City.
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