Chance particulars : a writer's field notebook for travelers, bloggers, essayists, memoirists, novelists, journalists, adventurers, naturalists, sketchers, and other note-takers and recorders of life / Sara Mansfield Taber ; illustrated by Maud Taber-Thomas.
Introduction -- Elements of fine writing -- Purpose of the notebook -- Goal, quest, story -- Chance particulars -- Use of the senses -- Specificity and concrete detail -- Place -- Landscape and nature -- Towns, streets and buildings -- People -- Portraits and interviews -- Encounters, observations and activities -- Facts, history and culture -- Basic facts, history and culture -- Technical and other pertinent information -- Informational notes -- Chronicle -- Record of daily activities and travels -- Personal responses -- Emotional responses -- Commonplace notes: perspectives of others, and miscellanea -- Quotations and thoughts from experts, scholars and literary forebears-and other miscellanea -- Reflections -- Thoughts and musings -- Associations and figurative language -- Metaphor and simile -- Writing notes -- About the author.
Summary:
"A writer's goal--whether they are a traveler, memoirist, journalist, novelist, or blogger--is to live with the keenness of the foreigner, that is, to experience the sensations and events offered up by their surroundings and evoke them so thoroughly on the page that readers are transported to a rich and miraculous world. A time-honored way this may be accomplished is through a field notebook. For many years Sara Mansfield Taber has welcomed adults into her writing seminars--wonderful people writing of their travels, their explorations of interesting people, their childhoods, their fictional characters, and their complex lives. Each and every one has unique tales to tell and wisdom to impart. The one thing they too-often lack is adequate notes on the very people and places they want to write about. Their notes--and consequently their writings--have a fundamental flaw: an insufficiency of concrete and sensory detail with which to build flavorful, satisfying stories. Taber has written this field notebook to rectify the situation. She offers a concise guide--both a writer's handbook and a field-ready notebook--to ensure that writers will record their experiences so richly that their writing, and the essays and stories that may later come from the jottings, will fall off the page like ripe plums."-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.