Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages That Follow Them: Revised Workshop and Classroom Edition - Paperback

by Peter Selgin (Author)

This engaging guide has a unique approach to creative writing instruction, focusing only on the first page of a prose work.

Back Jacket

Your First Page is unlike any other craft book on writing. It is based on the premise that practically everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes wrong or right on the first page. Those first 300 or so words function like canaries in coal mines, forecasting success or predicting trouble. They establish the crucial bond between writer and reader, setting them off together on a path toward the heart or climax of a story--or they fail to do so. From first pages we stand to learn most of what we need to know to succeed as authors.

This new workshop and classroom edition of Your First Page has been revised to better fit the needs of creative writing classrooms and workshops.

Author Biography

Peter Selgin is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has published a novel, an essay collection, a memoir, three books on the writer's craft, and several children's books. His play, A God in the House, was a Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference finalist. He is a visual artist as well as a writer, and his illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Forbes, and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of English (Creative Writing), Georgia College & State University.