Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror: Speculative Genre Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers
- Author
- Laurie Lamson (ed.)
- Year
- 2014
- Cluster
- dark & speculative
- Format
- book
The Now Write! series has one idea, and this 2014 volume applies it to the speculative genres: skip the lecture, assign the exercise. Laurie Lamson collects short pieces from working genre writers and teachers, each one a brief setup — a technique, a problem, a way into material — followed by a concrete writing assignment. Worldbuilding from an artifact. Fear written from the body outward. Aliens that are not humans in rubber suits. Dozens of prompts, each a door into a draft.
An exercise anthology is fragmentary by design, and this one inherits the format’s whole deal: contributors vary in depth, some exercises will read as beneath you and others as written for exactly your current block, and there is no argument or through-line to follow. You do not read this book; you work it, ideally with a timer and low standards for the results.
That makes it the shelf’s only pure practice book, and the natural second step after Wonderbook — VanderMeer wakes the imagination, Lamson makes it do reps. Writers who already generate more ideas than they can draft need nothing here.
You learn by writing, not by reading about writing — this is the only book on the shelf built entirely of things to do.
You want sustained argument or theory; exercise anthologies are fragmentary by design.
Wonderbook — the theory these exercises put into practice · How to Write Tales of Horror… — the same genre territory, taught by essay