The belated Topic of the Month for June is Books on the Craft of Fiction. If you are like me, you have accumulated a few sagging shelves of sundry guides to the art of writing fiction. By my quick count I've got over 50 of these babies, titles like, Narrative Design, Writing Fiction, Fiction Writer's Workshop, Immediate Fiction, The Lie that Tells a Truth, etc. etc. Some of these books I found to be soothing and inspirational and a hell of a lot easier than actually writing. Others I found had tidbits of practical writing guidance. What do you think? Are Books on the Craft of Fiction worth a damn? Do you have any keepers? Any must-haves for the library of a serious fiction writer?

Yes! Among the many, many "how to write" books I have looked at, only two emerge as BRILLIANT and down-to-earth practical. In my opinion, these are the only two you will ever need:



1. MARK WISNIEWSKI

Writing and Revising Your Fiction (ISBN 0-87116-174-5, c. 1995)



2. STEPHEN KING

On Writing (ISBN 0-684-85352-3, c. 2000)



Having said that, allow me immediately to contradict myself and suggest that what you need are not books to tell you how to write, but two physically fit young people bearing a U-Haul trailer attached to their vehicle (not yours).

With the U-Haul trailer parked in front of your place, lock yourself inside your bedroom while the physically fit young people load into the U-Haul trailer:

The television(s)
The radio(s)
The telephone(s)
The answering machine(s)
All of the cell phones
All of the games (you know exactly what I mean)
The beer cooler
The wine rack
The liquor cabinet and its contents
The ping-pong table
The pool table
The fishing gear
The golf clubs
The dirt bike
The Doberman pinscher

Soon you will hear the vehicle attached to the U-Haul trailer pull away from your place and fade into the distance.

Then you can come out of your room.

To write.



Love y'all!

Arlene

Edited: 06/11/2008 at 08:52 PM by Arlene Sanders

A good basic is David Lodge's The Art of Fiction. A good, concise book of literary techniques with fabulous examples. I had the book long before I was in the program, but Bill also suggested it in my first class. Hey, and not expensive either - Amazon has a used copy for $1.70! A note of caution, however. They should have a warning label on such books about excessive use of literary techniques. Too much is not good! The people in my first workshop said they could tell I had just taken Ed's class! I've toned down my writing a lot but it was fun trying them all out! Ha! I did get my symbolic, imagery-ridden story (the worst transgressor from my thesis) accepted for publication though.

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marystojak

Mary --

Tell us more! Your story was accepted for publication? Recently? If so, then huge CONGRATULATIONS!

Where will we be able to see it? Online? We want to look out for it. When will your story appear?

Is your thesis a story collection? Are the stories loosely linked?

This sounds wonderful!


Arlene

In addition to the fine recommendations already made by others, here are a few books on craft that I found helpful and enjoyable:

Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway, ISBN 0-673-52345-4
A good, comprehensive, general-purpose guide. This was a textbook behind a fiction course I took at George Mason before coming over to Hopkins.

Narrative Design, Madison Smartt Bell, ISBN 0-393-32021-9
A nice discussion about linear and modular designs with story examples and line by line analysis.

Novel Voices, Levasseur & Rabalais, ISBN 1-58297-247-8
Interviews of 17 award-winning novelists, e.g. Bausch, Baxter, Dubus, Dybek, etc. on writing, editing, and getting published.

The Lie that tells a Truth, John Dufresne, ISBN 0-393-05751-8
Inspirational and practical.

English Fundamentals, Emery, Kierzek, Lindblom, ISBN 0-205-30903-8
If you plan to take Ed's terrific Sentence Power course and you have at your fingertips concepts such as: sentence patterns with intransitive and transitive verbs; clause and phrase coordination and subordination; infinitives, absolutes, and appositives, then you will be in good shape. If not, then review English Fundamentals as I did before taking the course or the course may seem like a bus that you're always running to catch.

In back of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (5th ed.) is a marvelous compilation of short essays by "famous" writers on writing. Featured are words of wisdom by Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tolstoy, whose essays on art relate to a spirited debate going on as we speak in another section of this forum. Anyway, the essay titles include, "Why the Novel Matters," "What is Real?"and "The Nature and Aim of Fiction." There are also interviews of Doris Lessing, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, plus a few letters written by Chekhov.

As an example, here's some stuff from the Hemingway interview (the last quote here also relates to the "literature" debate):

"A writer, if he is any good, does not describe. He invents or makes out of knowledge, personal and impersonal, and sometimes he seems to have unexplained knowledge which could come from forgotten racial or family experience. Who teaches the homing pigion to fly as he does; where does a fighting bull get his bravery, or a hunting dog his nose?"

"A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the Year Book of a school for exceptional children than writing novels."

When asked about the function of literature, Hemingway said, "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"

Thanks Arlene! Just a local anthology - so the story will be in a book. I think they're going to have it out in time for the book festival in Baltimore this fall. I did link my stories together in my thesis by using the color red! Ha! Even though I don't normally write short stories, I enjoyed giving them a whirl during school. Now, when I need a break from book-long work I have a tendency to work on non-fiction pieces, go figure! Except this last one is getting so long, I think it's turning into a book. M

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marystojak

Edited: 06/19/2008 at 12:07 PM by Mary Stojak

I would second the earlier suggestions --- Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction and Josip Novakovich's Fiction Writer's Workshop are both excellent. I also like Donald Maass's Writing the Breakthrough Novel, which is a little more commercial than literary but is a good reminder that you have to remember your readers.

I also wanted to ask if anyone can recommend a good craft novel for planning and plotting a novel -- maybe a good text you used in the craft course on the novel or just one you came across along the way.

I agree you can spend far too much time reading about writing instead of writing, but sometimes a good craft book can help get you unstuck when you need a little help.

Mark,

In the Novel Form/Style/Structure course that Margaret Meyers taught in Fall 2006, we didn't use texts on the craft of writing novels. We did analyses of eight or nine novels -- all very different -- and used those as our texts. We were reading to see what (if any) aspects of the novels we read might be useful in our own writing.

So, in that regard, any novel can be used as a kind of textbook for thinking about how you'll put together your own novel. I don't think it matters if you love the book, hate it, or regard it neutrally -- the trick seems to be learning to think analytically enough about novels to understand WHY a novel calls forth a particular emotion for you, and how different novels work to achieve certain effects. I made a kind of list of cool techniques from each book we read that I thought I'd like to experiment with in my own novel. Some have been more successful, some less. I've been trying to keep a kind of "reading journal" with notes about neat techniques and effects I've found in the things I've read -- but to be honest, I'm not always that organized about my reading!

We did look at a few chapters out of the first part of Francine Prose's book Reading Like A Writer. They were quite helpful in understanding ways of thinking about published novels and one's own writing.

Jerri

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Jerri Bell
Moderator

Edited: 06/23/2008 at 11:21 AM by Jerri Bell

Jerri --

This got my attention:

"I made a kind of list of cool techniques from each book we read that I thought I'd like to experiment with in my own novel. "

Do you still have this list? Would you think of allowing us to see it here? I'd be interested in techniques that attracted your attention.

I have lost my way and wonder if I will ever be able to produce a novel. I have finished drafting the novel, but everything that could possibly be wrong with it is wrong with it. The short stories are easy to write. The novel is huge, unwieldy, threatening -- frightening at times -- and I cannot control it. The stories are like children. They misbehave and then fall into line when you love and cajole them.

But the novel is monstrous, hungry and hostile. I actually feel afraid of it.

I even know what the problem is. In a story, you go to dark and frightening places briefly, and then you can leave. In the novel, you can get lost and swept away in those [emotional] places, and you can't always get out when you want to. The stories play across the surface and only suggest what may lie below them, because they don't have time. But the novel, which has all the time in the world, becomes a descent. It is a descent into what lies beneath it.

Kevin Haworth, author of The Discontinuity of Small Things, finished his novel on a wall. He cut and pasted things all over a wall, so he could see the whole thing all at once. I'm going to try this. I think you could not be lost and frightened of something that was splayed out like pieces of a puzzle on a flat surface. How could you be?

One solution to the problem of dealing with fear and confusion in writing may be to concentrate on the trappings of the story or the novel -- the craft of fiction. To keep the idea of craft always at hand.

"Black B'ar" is a case in point. Now in the middle of writing it, "Black B'ar" is a short story about Georgia ex-cons who cage a vicious black bear in the wilderness and get their kicks by tossing young women into the cage and heaving a bottle of Jack among themselves while enjoying the show.

So this is a story about rednecks watching a bear maul and gobble up young women, isn't it?

Of course not.

"Black B'ar" is me trying to convey to you what it feels like emotionally to be trapped inside a "cage" (in a marriage? in a job with a tyrannical boss? in a childhood home with parents who hate you?) with someone who derives intense enjoyment and satisfaction from inflicting cruelty upon you.

I compare the emotional suffering and destruction of self in one of life's many "cages" to the literal pain and horror of being thrown to a crazed and starving wild beast.

My editor just responded to the first draft with a major attack on my abuse - not of the poor women! - but of fiction techniques I failed to use well and wisely, shifting POV being the prime culprit among them. The second draft is under way.

The story is complex, with disparate parallels to bring together, and if not out of my depth emotionally - which it is not, and you can trust me on that - then maybe beyond me artistically. And if it is artistically beyond me, it is not beyond him, and so we will work this story together until it gets to where it has to go.

But all of us have to reach: "We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have."



Arlene

Edited: 06/25/2008 at 10:53 PM by Arlene Sanders