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The Emotional Craft of Fiction

How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

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The Emotional Craft of Fiction

By: Donald Maass
Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
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About this listen

Engage your readers with emotion.

While writers might disagree over showing versus telling or plotting versus pantsing, none would argue this: If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you.

That's where The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes in. Veteran literary agent and expert fiction instructor Donald Maass shows you how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers. Topics covered include:

● Emotional modes of writing

● Beyond showing versus telling

● Connecting the inner and outer journeys and much more

Readers can simply read a novel...or they can experience it. The Emotional Craft of Fiction shows you how to make that happen.

©2016 Donald Maass (P)2020 Tantor Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing Emotions Fiction Emotional Craft
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Ever read an instruction manual that made you feel like you were at the World Cup and your team was winning? I don’t even like soccer, and there I was yelling at my car stereo.

Have you ever had to pull over, furious at yourself for losing the thread, just to rewind because someone finally named the concept you’d been chasing for months? That thing you loved in one chapter but couldn’t trap again, because you never knew how you caught it the first time?

This audiobook is both coach and cheer squad - telling me exactly where I’ve been wrong while making me cheer when I finally scored a goal in understanding. It made me squirm, too - because I realised how many years I’ve been fumbling in the dark.

I’ve got a candle addiction, but this book outshone them all - and honestly, that felt unfair. Candles just flicker. This thing burns.

Micro-tension in an Instruction Manual

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I don’t know if it was the soothing voice of the narrator or the lengthy extracts from other books but I could not focus and constantly felt drowsy. This book has good insights, however, I sense the points could have been made more succinctly.

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