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  • Published: 31 March 1999
  • ISBN: 9780553346305
  • Imprint: Bantam Dell
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $45.00

Starting from Scratch

A Different Kind of Writers' Manual





From the bestselling author of Rubyfruit Jungle and Bingo, here is a writers' manual as provocative, frank, and funny as her fiction.

Unlike most writers' guides, this one had as much to do with how writers live as with mastering the tools of their trade. Rita Mae Brown begins with a very personal account of her own career, from her days as a young poet who had written a novel no publisher wanted to take a chance on, right up to her recent adventures as a Hollywood screenwriter. In a sassy style that makes her outspoken advice as entertaining as it is useful, she provides straight talk about paying the rent while maintaining the energy to write; and dealing with agents, publishers, critics, and the publicity circus; about pursuing journalisim, academia, or screen-writing; and about rejecting the Hemingway myth of the hard-living, hard-drinking genius.

In addition Brown, a former teacher or writing, offers a serious examination of the writer's tool—language, plotting, characters, symbolism—plus exercises to sharpen the ear for dialogue, and a fascinating, annoted reading list of important works from the seventh century to the late twentieth.

  • Published: 31 March 1999
  • ISBN: 9780553346305
  • Imprint: Bantam Dell
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $45.00

About the author

Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of the Mrs. Murphy mystery series (which she writes with her tiger cat, Sneaky Pie) and the Sister Jane novels, as well as Rubyfruit Jungle, In Her Day, The Six of One Trilogy, and The Sand Castle, among others, and of the memoirs Animal Magnetism and Rita Will. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, Brown lives in Afton, Virginia, with cats, hounds, horses, and big red foxes.

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