| Introduction | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| Getting Started | |
| Germs | John Dufresne |
| Writing Prompts | Joyce Carol Oates |
| Nothing But The Truth | Christopher Castellani |
| Fiction through Artifacts… | Thisbe Nissen |
| The Importance of Being Envious | Tom Robbins |
| Mourning Falls | Daniel Wallace |
| A Postcard from the Velvet Revolution | Rachel Cline |
| What If It Was More Than That | Lee Martin |
| The Title Game | Dan Chaon |
| Living to Tell, Telling to Live | Norma E. Cantu |
| My Favorite Fiction Writing Exercise | Alan Cheuse |
| How to Name the World | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| Untold Stories | Dorothy Allison |
| Bullies I Have Known | C. Michael Curtis |
| Our Ever Curious Minds | Tom Barbash |
| Adopt a Myth | Tom Bligh |
| Character | |
| On Character | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| Writing as Parlor Game | Debra Spark |
| Object of Affection: Prose Exercises | R.T. Smith |
| Nonfiction Time Travel Exercise | Kyoko Mori |
| Your Five Seconds of Shame! | Steve Almond |
| Interviewing Your Character | Ann Packer |
| From Autobiography to Fiction | Jason Brown |
| Putting Characters into Action | Varley O’Connor |
| Subversive Details and Characterization | Lee Martin |
| Writing Exercise: Complex Characters | Eric Goodman |
| Two Literary Exercises | Melissa Pritchard |
| Get Closer: Exposing Your Characters… | Julia Fierro |
| Through Your Character’s Eyes | Michael Knight |
| Point of View | |
| On Point of View | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| Narrative Strategies of the Storyteller… | Thane Rosenbaum |
| Exercise on Point-of-View | Elizabeth Strout |
| The Point of Point-of-View | Paula Priamos |
| An Exercise in Writing Memoir | James Brown |
| What Do You Want Most in Life | Vu Tran |
| Point-of-View Exercise | Susan Straight |
| Two Exercises | Tom Grimes |
| The Chicken Crossed the Road | Katherine Min |
| Walking a Mile in Their Shoes | Amy Hassinger |
| The Glory of Gossip | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| Plot and Narrative | |
| On Plot and Narrative | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| The Five Modes | Dan Pope |
| Thickening Your Plots | Jacob Appel |
| The Pleasure Principle | Josh Emmons |
| From Anecdote to Story | Elizabeth McCracken |
| Seeing the Scene | Adam Johnson |
| The Particular Gesture: Writing Sex Scenes | Michelle Wildgen |
| Creating the Memory Map… | Danielle Trussoni |
| Rewriting the Clichés | Aimee Phan |
| Useful Lies | Robert Boswell |
| From Imagination to Plot | Vanessa Furse Jackson |
| What Every Fiction Writer… | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| On Plot | Michelle Wildgen |
| Props | Nick Arvin |
| Dialogue and Voice | |
| On Dialogue and Voice | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| Dynamic Dialogue: Three Exercises | Jewell Parker Rhodes |
| He Said What | Colette Sartor |
| Character and Situation Through Dialogue | Richard Bausch |
| On Dialogue | Katherine Min |
| The Thing About Dialogue | Bret Anthony Johnston and Robert Torres, Illustrator |
| Using Summary, Indirect, and Direct Dialogue | Robert Rosenberg |
| Dialogue: Master of Multitasking… | Kate Myers Hanson |
| The Foreign Voice | Jose Skinner |
| A Dialogue Exercise | Michael Jayme Becerra |
| Descriptive Language and Setting | |
| On Descriptive Language and Setting | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| Destroying What You Love | Sarah Shun-lien Bynum |
| A Stranger Comes to Town | Rebecca Johns |
| The Monster in the Attic | Jonathan Liebson |
| Simultaneous Actions in Fiction | DeWitt Henry |
| Learning to Lie | Mark Winegardner |
| Artistic Perspective | Nick Arvin |
| All About Rhythm | Paul Lisicky |
| Emotion in Fiction | Margot Livesey |
| Revision | |
| On Revision | Bret Anthony Johnston |
| The First Draft of Anything | Don Lee |
| On the Wheel: Revising the Personal Essay | John Smolens |
| Silences and Blank Spaces | René Steinke |
| Re-Seeing in Revision | Jason Brown |
| Revise/Re-Envision/Re-Invent | Holiday Reinhorn |
| Hiding the “I” in Fiction and Nonfiction | Marlin Barton |
| Shopping for Conflict in the Second Draft | Merrill Feitell |
| The Right Word In Tails | Stephen D. Marlowe |
| Acknowledgments | |
| Daily Warm-Ups | |
| Notes on Contributors | |