WD Editors

Alone With All That Could Happen: Embracing the Infinite Possibilities of Fiction Writing
By David Jauss
ISBN 978-1-58297-538-2
Available in June 2008!

An Innovative, Introspective Look at Fiction Writing

In Alone With All That Could Happen, award-winning author and respected creative writing professor David Jauss addresses important and often neglected—and even more often misunderstood—matters of craft, offering practical information and advice that will help writers make smart creative and technical decisions about such topics as using autobiographic elements in fiction, manipulating narrative distance via point of view, writing valid and convincing epiphanies, and harnessing the power of contradiction in the creative process. In one thought-provoking chapter after another, Jauss sorts through unique fiction-writing conundrums, including how to write those exquisite quite corners that resonate in all great works of fiction, where truth and fabrication intersect in a way that’s far more powerful, far more telling than the obvious “write what you know” approach that’s so often preached.

About the Author

David Jauss (www.davidjauss.com) is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and essayist. He has been teaching creative writing from more than thirty years and speaks regularly at writing conferences like the annual AWP. He is currently a tenured professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. In addition, he’s instructed at the University of Iowa; Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota; and Syracuse University.

Table of Contents

I. Autobiographobia: Writing and the Secret Life
II. From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View in Fiction
III. What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow
IV. Remembrance of Things Present: Present Tense in Contemporary Fiction
V. Some Epiphanies About Epiphanies
VI. Stacking Stones: Building a Unified Short Story Collection
VII. Lever of Transcendence: Contradiction and the Physics of Creativity
Notes on the Essays