cover image Immediate Fiction

Immediate Fiction

Jerry Cleaver. St. Martin's Press, $24.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-312-28716-0

Adages (""Want + obstacle = conflict""), advice (""Make all of your story worth showing"") and even an assortment of solitary words author Jerry Cleaver considers important (""fear,"" ""worry,"" ""hope"") stand out in boldfaced type on the pages of Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course. Cleaver, who founded the Chicago writers' workshop the Writers' Loft and has ghostwritten several books, insists that all one needs to be a successful writer is the ""right tools"" (while painting may require ""inborn talent,"" writing doesn't) and in enthusiastic prose, he describes those tools one by one. With its writing exercises, time management hints and endlessly jocular encouragement, this volume will please many a would-be Welty or Wilde. (St. Martin's, $24.95 304p ISBN 0-312-28716-X)