Personal Fiction Writing: A Guide to Writing from Real Life for Teachers, Students & Writers

by Meredith Sue Willis

Willis treats the writing of fiction as a natural process that anyone can do with pleasure. The book includes over 400 helpful writing assignments for all age levels. In addition, teachers will appreciate the appendixes on writing ideas according to age level, other books on writing, and magazines that publish student writing. "A terrific resource for the classroom as well as the novice writer."-Harvard Educational Review.

Genres: Writing

248 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1984

About the author

A well-known speaker and writer about the teaching of writing, her own novels include A Space Apart, Higher Ground, Only Great Changes, Trespassers, and Oradell at Sea. Her short story collections are In the Mountains of America and Dwight's House and Other Stories. Her work has been praised in periodicals like The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many other periodicals.

She has won major awards including literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the arts, and her fiction has won prizes like the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and the West Virginia Library Association Award (1980)[2], as well as the Chaffin Award for fiction.

An early writer-in-the-schools with Teachers and Writers Collaborative, she has turned many of her experiences teaching writing into three books for teachers and writers (Personal Fiction Writing, Deep Revision, and Blazing Pencils) and three novels for children (The Secret Super Powers of Marco, Marco's Monster, and Billie of Fish House Lane). She is a past Distinguished Teaching Artist of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts."

Reviews

[Heather Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good ideas here - borrowed from a teacher friend and found it lacking in layout but some good examples along with the prompts for getting creative writing from kids.

[Erin George]

Awesome writing exercises in here for your classroom or personal use. I've used many to help when I get stuck in writing my memoir.