The Art of Writing Fiction

by Andrew Cowan

Overview

The Art of Writing Fiction guides the reader through the processes of creative writing from journal-keeping to editing, offering techniques for stimulating creativity and making language vivid. Readers will master key aspects of fiction such as structure, character, voice and setting. Andrew Cowan provides an insightful introduction that brings his own well-crafted prose style to bear on the processes and pleasures of writing fiction, offering practical and personal advice culled from his own experience and that of other published writers. He lays open to the reader his own notes, his writing, and the experiences from his own life that he has drawn on in his fiction allowing the reader to develop their own writing project alongside the author as they go through the book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138436626
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/28/2017
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andrew Cowan is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of six novels, including Pig (Sceptre, 2002) and, most recently, Your Fault (Salt, 2019), and the winner of numerous literary awards. He is also the author of the monograph Against Creative Writing (Routledge, 2023), a defence of the art of writing.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Writers’ routines

2 Write about what you know: observational journals

3 Write about what you don’t know you know: automatic writing

4 Don’t tell me…

5 Write about what you used to know: remembering and place

6 Write about who you know: character

7 Voices

8 Viewpoints

9 Middles, ends, beginnings: structure

10 Making strange: defamiliarisation

11 Making clear: revision, grammar and punctuation

12 Workshopping

Appendix: Approaching agents & publishers

Bibliography
Index