By Peter Selgin

Ten classes for the Fiction Writer

&break;&break;Writing winning fiction is a stability among trusting one's personal instincts and making the perfect wakeful offerings. In By crafty & Craft, award-winning novelist and short-story author Peter Selgin exhibits you ways to mix the instinctive technique of construction with sound technical ingenuity.

&break;&break;With targeted guide and examples from vintage and best-selling works, this authoritative consultant is helping you grasp the 10 crucial fiction-writing components: notion; personality; perspective; constitution and plot; subject matter; discussion; description; scenes, precis, and flashback; voice and magnificence; and revision.

&break;&break;Whether you are dealing with the clean pages of a primary draft or attempting to revise a accomplished manuscript, By crafty & Craft provide you with the tips you must outfox universal writing pitfalls and confirm your paintings is not in need of in wit - or perfection.

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Extra resources for By Cunning and Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers

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But then it occurred to me that if I were to do so, I might easily intrude upon her private grief. —Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day We call this narrator unreliable not because he plays loose with the facts (he doesn’t), but because he fails to grasp what the facts reveal. Though he tells the story accurately, he doesn’t understand the story that he’s telling. That the butler narrator of Ishiguro’s novel is in love with his assistant, Miss Kenton, is plain enough for us, the readers, to see.

18 chapter i People Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy” 19 chapter i 1. Fiction Is About People On the oak-paneled wall of his den, my father-in-law keeps a varnished wooden plaque. ” In fiction writing, the hierarchy is reversed. What readers of fiction most want to learn about is people. Not ideas, opinions, or philosophy; not The Communist Manifesto, Robert’s Rules of Order, The Merck Manual, or lore about nuclear submarines.

7. Names Names tell us as much about a character as the other things I’ve listed above. Sally Bowles, Bigger Thomas, Augie March, Ignatius Reilly. The Manhattan white pages is as good a source for names as any. Whatever names you choose for your characters, they should feel right. And even if they are your narrators, and their names appear nowhere in their stories, still, you should name your main characters, since you can’t possibly know them and not know their names. In naming characters, you sometimes need to walk a line between the memorable and the ridiculous.

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