Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) - Softcover

Burroway, Janet; Stuckey-French, Elizabeth; Stuckey-French, Ned

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022661669X ISBN 13: 9780226616698

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

More than 250,000 copies sold!

A creative writer’s shelf should hold at least three essential books: a dictionary, a style guide, and Writing Fiction. Janet Burroway’s best-selling classic is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and for more than three decades it has helped hundreds of thousands of students learn the craft. Now in its tenth edition, Writing Fiction is more accessible than ever for writers of all levels—inside or outside the classroom.

This new edition continues to provide advice that is practical, comprehensive, and flexible. Burroway’s tone is personal and nonprescriptive, welcoming learning writers into the community of practiced storytellers. Moving from freewriting to final revision, the book addresses “showing not telling,” characterization, dialogue, atmosphere, plot, imagery, and point of view. It includes new topics and writing prompts, and each chapter now ends with a list of recommended readings that exemplify the craft elements discussed, allowing for further study. And the examples and quotations throughout the book feature a wide and diverse range of today’s best and best-known creators of both novels and short stories.

This book is a master class in creative writing that also calls on us to renew our love of storytelling and celebrate the skill of writing well. There is a very good chance that one of your favorite authors learned the craft with Writing Fiction. And who knows what future favorite will get her start reading this edition?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, essays, poetry, children's books, and eight novels, including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone, and Bridge of Sand. She also edited the essay collection A Story Larger than My Own for the University of Chicago Press. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University. She lives in Chicago and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Elizabeth Stuckey-French is professor of English at Florida State University. Ned Stuckey-French (1950-2019) was associate professor of English at Florida State University and director of the FSU Certificate Program in Publishing and Editing.

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Writing Fiction

A Guide to Narrative Craft

By Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Ned Stuckey-French

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2019 Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Ned Stuckey-French
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-61669-8

Contents

Preface, 
1 WHATEVER WORKS: The Writing Process, 
2 SEEING IS BELIEVING: Showing and Telling, 
3 BUILDING CHARACTER: Characterization, Part I, 
4 THE FLESH MADE WORD: Characterization, Part II, 
5 LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY: Fictional Setting, 
6 THE TOWER AND THE NET: Plot and Structure, 
7 CALL ME ISHMAEL: Point of View, 
8 IS AND IS NOT: Comparison, 
9 PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM: Revision and Theme, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Whatever Works THE WRITING PROCESS

Get Started
Keeping a Journal
Freewriting and Freedrafting

Keep Going
Prompts
The Computer
The Critic: A Caution
Choosing a Subject
Reading as a Writer

A Word about Theme

You want to write. Why is it so hard?

There are a few lucky souls for whom the whole process of writing is easy, for whom the smell of fresh paper is better than air, whose minds chuckle over their own agility, who forget to eat, and who consider the world at large an intrusion on their good time at the keyboard. But you and I are not among them. We are in love with words except when we have to face them. We are caught in a guilty paradox in which we grumble over our lack of time, and when we have the time, we sharpen pencils, check email, or clip the hedges.

Of course, there's also joy. We write for the satisfaction of having wrestled a sentence to the page, for the rush of discovering an image, for the excitement of seeing a character come alive. Even the most successful writers will sincerely say that these pleasures — not money, fame, or glamour — are the real rewards of writing. Fiction writer Alice Munro concedes:

It may not look like pleasure, because the difficulties can make me morose and distracted, but that's what it is — the pleasure of telling the story I mean to tell as wholly as I can tell it, of finding out in fact what the story is, by working around the different ways of telling it.

Nevertheless, writers may forget what such pleasure feels like when confronting a blank page, like the heroine of Anita Brookner's novel Look at Me:

Sometimes it seems like a physical effort simply to sit down at my desk and pull out the notebook. ... Sometimes the effort of putting pen to paper is so great that I literally feel a pain in my head.

It helps to know that most writers share the paradox of least wanting to do what we most want to do. It also helps to know some of the reasons for our reluctance. Fear of what could emerge on the page, and what it may reveal about our inner lives, can keep us from getting started. "What's called writer's block," claims novelist Tom Wolfe, "is almost always ordinary fear." Indeed, whenever I ask a group of writers what they find most difficult, a significant number answer that they feel they aren't good enough, that the empty page intimidates them, that they are in some way afraid. Many complain of their own laziness, but laziness, like money, doesn't really exist except to represent something else — in this case fear, severe self-judgment, or what Natalie Goldberg calls "the cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure."

There's another impediment to beginning, expressed by a writer character in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Durrell's Pursewarden broods over the illusory significance of what he is about to write, unwilling to begin in case he spoils it. Many of us do this: The idea, whatever it is, seems so luminous, whole, and fragile, that to begin to write about that idea is to commit it to rubble. Knowing in advance that words will never exactly capture what we mean or intend, we must gingerly and gradually work ourselves into a state of accepting what words can do instead. No matter how many times we find out that what words can do is quite all right, we still shy again from the next beginning. Against this wasteful impulse I have a motto over my desk that reads: "Don't Dread; Do." It's a fine motto, and I contemplated it for several weeks before I began writing this chapter.

The mundane daily habits of writers are apparently fascinating. No author offers to answer questions at the end of a public reading without being asked: Do you write in the morning or at night? Do you write every day? Do you compose longhand or on a computer? Sometimes such questions show a reverent interest in the workings of genius. More often, I think, they're a plea for practical help: Is there something I can do to make this job less horrific? Is there a trick that will unlock my words?

GET STARTED

The variety of authors' habits suggests that there is no magic to be found in any particular one. Donald Hall spent a dozen hours a day at his desk, moving back and forth between as many projects. Philip Larkin said that he wrote a poem only every eighteen months or so and never tried to write one that was not a gift. Gail Godwin goes to her workroom every day "because what if the angel came and I wasn't there?" Julia Alvarez begins the day by reading first poetry, then prose, by her favorite writers "to remind me of the quality of writing I am aiming for." Like Hemingway, Andre Dubus advised students to stop writing midsentence in order to begin the next day by completing the thought, thereby reentering the creative flow. Yelizaveta P. Renfro always begins with lists, "often in the margins or endpapers of books I'm reading." T. C. Boyle starts knowing "nothing. Nothing at all. The first line comes and I start." Shawn Wong wants "to hear the language in my ears before I start writing." Dickens could not deal with people when he was working: "The mere consciousness of an engagement will worry a whole day." Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up. Some writers can plop at the kitchen table without clearing the breakfast dishes; others need total seclusion, a beach, a cat, a string quartet.

There is something to be learned from all this, though. It is not an "open sesame" but a piece of advice older than fairy tales: Know thyself. The bottom line is that if you do not at some point write your story down, it will not get written. Having decided that you will write it, the question is not "How do you get it done?" but "How do you get it done?" Any discipline or indulgence that helps nudge you into position facing the page is acceptable and productive. If jogging after breakfast energizes your mind, then jog before you sit. If you have to pull an all-nighter on a coffee binge, do that. Some schedule, regularity, pattern in your writing day (or night) will always help, but only you can figure out what that pattern is for you.

But you don't have time! It's true, you don't. You have a job, six courses, two kids, a dying parent, a divorce. I know; I've gone through all those things. One truth is that these hour-eaters will never get any easier; obligations and pleasures accumulate, and if you're lucky, life is always too full. If you're not, it's worse. So it's not that there will be no better time to develop the writing habit; there will no other time.

Another really important part of my writing process is that I have a writing group. ... You sit down, you're in a room, everyone has the experience together.

— Jennifer Egan

Yet I believe it is not really, or not...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022661669X
• ISBN 13: 9780226616698
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland