An elegant and intimate insight into the personal and practical processes of writing, Andrew Cowan’s The Art of Writing Fiction draws on his experience as a prize-winning novelist and his work with emerging writers at the University of East Anglia.
As illuminating for the recreational writer as for students of Creative Writing, the twelve chapters of this book correspond to the twelve weeks of a typical university syllabus, and provide guidance on mastering key aspects of fiction such as structure, character, voice, point of view, and setting, as well as describing techniques for stimulating creativity and getting the most out of feedback.
This new edition offers extended consideration to structure, point of view, and the organisation of time in the novel, as well as the conduct of the Creative Writing workshop in the light of the decolonising the curriculum movement. It features additional writing exercises, as well as an afterword with invaluable advice on approaching agents and publishers. The range of writers surveyed is greatly expanded, finding inspiration and practical guidance in the work of Margaret Atwood, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Richard Beard, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Richard Ford, Ashley Hickson-Lovence, Anjali Joseph, James Joyce, James Kelman, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Sam Selvon, Vikram Seth, and Ali Smith, among many others.
With over 80 writing exercises and examples taken from dozens of novels and short stories, the new edition of The Art of Writing Fiction is enriched by the author’s own experience as a novelist and lecturer, making it an essential guide for readers interested in the theory, teaching, and practice of Creative Writing.
Introduction
1 Writers’ routines
1. When where what...
2. Timewasting
3. Friends and foes
4. What where when…
2 Write about what you know: observational journals
5. Keeping an observational journal
6. Keeping a scrapbook
7. Weather report
8. Street life
9. Workplace
10. Home life
3 Write about what you don’t know you know: automatic writing
11. First thoughts
12. First things
13. First thoughts, second thoughts
14. First drafts
4 Don’t tell me…
15. Telling it slant
16. Don’t mention it
17. How does this feel?
18. Sightless
19. Hyacinths
20. Scene and summary
5 Write about what you used to know: remembering and place
21. Lost things
22. Lost lands
23. Lost selves
24. Lost loves
25. ‘Lost’
26. Departures
27. Typical
28. Untypical
29. A place
30. A person
6 Write about who you know: character
31. A portrait of yourself as you are to yourself
32. A portrait of yourself as you are to someone else
33. Twenty questions
34. Q&A gimmick
35. Notes towards a character
36. Envelopes
37. A character as an item of furniture
38. Still life
39. Two characters
7 Voices
40. Oral history
41. Conversation
42. Formatting dialogue
43. Dramatic twist
44. Cross-purposes
45. Vernacular voices
46. In summary
8 Viewpoints
47. Something is happening out there
48. Something else is happening
49. Captors and captives
50. Eye witness
51. You
52. You, too
53. Third, and finally
9 Middles, ends, beginnings: structure
54. Story vs plot
55. Diagnostics
56. Beginning middle end
57. Because
58. n times what happened once
59. Pause
60. Middle beginning end
61. End middle beginning
62. Sub-plotting
63. Shuffling
64. Never mind ‘because’...
65. Mapping
66. Rearranging
10 Making strange: defamiliarisation
67. Literally
68. Figuratively
69. Lipogram
70. Given words
71. Given moods
72. Exercises in style
73. Mathews’s Algorithm (almost)
74. Horizontal
75. Vertical
11 Making clear: revision, grammar and punctuation
76. Punctuation
77. Some more First Thoughts
78. Prepositions
79. Checklist
80. Next thoughts
81. Simple
82. Compound
83. Complex
84. Compound-complex
12 Workshopping
Appendix: Approaching agents & publishers
85. Approaching agents & publishers
Bibliography
Index
Biography
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.
