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    The Art of Creative Research: A Field Guide for Writers
    Unavailable
    The Art of Creative Research: A Field Guide for Writers
    Unavailable
    The Art of Creative Research: A Field Guide for Writers
    Ebook300 pages5 hours

    The Art of Creative Research: A Field Guide for Writers

    By Philip Gerard

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    All writers conduct research. For some this means poring over records and combing, archives but for many creative writers research happens in the everyday world—when they scribble an observation on the subway, when they travel to get the feel for a city, or when they strike up a conversation with an interesting stranger.

    The Art of Creative Research helps writers take this natural inclination to explore and observe and turn it into a workable—and enjoyable—research plan. It shows that research shouldn’t be seen as a dry, plodding aspect of writing. Instead, it’s an art that all writers can master, one that unearths surprises and fuels imagination. This lends authenticity to fiction and poetry as well as nonfiction.

    Philip Gerard distills the process into fundamental questions: How do you conduct research? And what can you do with the information you gather? He covers both in-person research and work in archives and illustrates how the different types of research can be incorporated into stories, poems, and essays using examples from a wide range of writers in addition to those from his own projects. Throughout, Gerard brings knowledge from his seasoned background into play, drawing on his experiences as a reporter and a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His enthusiasm for adventure is infectious and will inspire writers to step away from the keyboard and into the world.
    “Research can take you to that golden intersection where the personal meets the public, the private crosses the universal, where the best literature lives,” Gerard writes. With his masterly guidance, anyone can become an expert in artful investigation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 23, 2017
    ISBN9780226179940
    Unavailable
    The Art of Creative Research: A Field Guide for Writers
    Author

    Philip Gerard

    Philip Gerard is the author of three novels and six books of nonfiction, including Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey Through the Heart of North Carolina and The Patron Saint of Dreams, winner of the 2012 North American Gold Medal in Essay/Creative Nonfiction from The Independent Publisher.

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    • 5/5
      Very useful book on research for everything from poetry to nonfiction. As an academic, I am very familiar with the research for a dissertation, but not the kind of research for engaging reading and telling stories. This book even includes a chapter on memory for memoir. I especially appreciated the chapter on how much research and filtering the research - explicitly stating that you will need to complete much more and know much more than written in the book or poem or other art. The exercises at the end of the chapters were also excellent, for example picking a person from a graveyard and researching them or recreating an event from memory and finding ways to fact check your memory.