Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal with 80 Prompts from Beloved Authors to Improve Your Style

by Nina Schuyler

Overview

Sentences are alive. Done well, they can help us see the world anew.

To create such sentences you need fresh, varied rhythms and imagery. In this creative writing journal, Nina Schuyler, award-winning author of the bestseller How to Write Stunning Sentences, presents 80 new prompts that show the breathtaking stretch of language. With stunning sentences from beloved writers like Toni Morrison, Lauren Groff, Virginia Woolf, and Jesmyn Ward, coupled with Nina’s precise analysis, you will be propelled to create your own striking sentences. This journal will renew your writing skills and allow you to see through any sentence to the bones of style.

Sibylline Press is proud to announce its new imprint, Sibyl Writing Craft, dedicated to providing definitive titles on writing craft and the book business for writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798897400027
Publisher:	Sibylline Press
Publication date:	01/13/2026
Pages:	214
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Revered writing instructor Nina Schuyler is a former professor at University of San Francisco, and currently teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies, Book Passage, and Sibyl Writing Craft. She also facilitates the popular Stunning Sentences Substack. Her fiction has received accolades as well and includes, In This Ravishing World, and the novels, Afterword, The Translator, and The Painting. Her short stories have been widely published and honored. She lives in San Francisco, CA.

Table of Contents

Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal

By Nina Schuyler

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: Syntax

Part Two: Rhythm and Sound

Part Three: Schemes and Tropes

Part Four: Diction

Part Five: Imagery

Glossary: Grammar

Glossary: Rhetoric

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Nina Schuyler's Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal

“Nina Schuyler’s book is a creative antidote for anyone experiencing stuckedness, malaise, bad news, the doldrums. And just as useful for those who aren’t feeling stuck but just want fresh, new ways to charge their writing. In her book you’ll find a host of stunning sentences and prompts for she’s a finder, she knows how to find the stunners, then shows you through specific examples how to bring forth your own great lines.” —Toni Mirosevich, author of Spell Heaven

“Stunning Sentences is simply wonderful. There are eighty magical prompts that author Nina Schuyler has carefully curated, providing writers a wide range of tips and techniques to try out. This workbook is a roadmap to hone skills and will give writers tools to effectively inject imagery and rhythm in their own work.” —Devi S. Laskar, author of Circa and The Atlas of Reds and Blues

Praise for Nina Schuyler's How to Write Stunning Sentences

“Nina Schuyler’s How to Write Stunning Sentences is like a Kama Sutra for sentences: it describes the positions and passions of her artful love, and through sharp analyses and generous prompts suggests how you too, writer, may become such an artful lover...Read it and the pleasure will be yours.” —Aaron Shurin, author of King of Shadows and The Skin of Meaning

“Passionately intense and exquisitely precise, Nina Schuyler’s brilliant readings of gorgeously disparate sentences by a wide spectrum of innovative writers illuminate the subversive pleasures of suspension and subordination, the joys of complexity and extravagance, and the potent, piercing delights of language distilled to spare perfection.” —Melanie Rae Thon, author of Voice of the River, Silence & Song, and The 7th Man

“Nina Schuyler is an alchemist of style. This book is a fantastic contribution to the literature of craft.” —Caro De Robertis, author of Cantoras: A Novel

From the Publisher