Writing Fiction
This one-stop practical guide will show you how to write the novel that’s in you bursting to get out. To make your progress easier, it comes in a handy ebook format with expert advice throughout.For those who have always wanted to write fiction but didn’t know where to start, look no further. In Need to Know? Writing Fiction, respected novelist and creative writing teacher Alan Wall lends his expertise and advice on how to tap into your creative resources and give fiction writing a go.In this comprehensive guide, Alan Wall takes you through all aspects of the complex process, breaking down the many elements that go into crafting a good piece of writing.With his sharp analysis of literary classics, Alan deconstructs the text and lays bare the techniques behind the art, including everything from character, plot and setting, to narrative style, genre and the intricacies of language.Whether you want to write a short story or a novel, this book is a comprehensive and authoritative guide on how to fulfil your creative potential.Includes chapters on: Character, plot, setting, genres, humour, narrative structures, language, atmosphere, conclusions, drafting, and preparing for publication.
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Collins
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First published by Collins 2007
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2007
Text: Alan Wall
Writing exercises: Gill Paul
Editor: Grapevine Publishing Services Ltd
Typesetter: Judith Ash
Series design: Mark Thomson
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007244355
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007591848
Version: 2017-01-12
Contents
Fiction is the creation of character and narrative in prose. Theatre and cinema have images and music; they even have holograms and special effects. Radio at least has the intonations of an actorâs voice, to beckon and cajole. Fiction relies entirely on the written word as it is presented to the reading eye on the page. In this lies its enormous freedom, and its peculiar difficulties. There is nothing in principle that the fiction writer cannot do. The writing must be accomplished though, or the reader will soon be lost.
Ancient writers used to say that fiction stood midway between history and fable. It employs the inventiveness of legend but must make itself convincing by use of that historical element which produces a kind of ârealismâ, even in the modern form of writing called âmagic realismâ. In a fairy story, a giant eagle can swoop out of the sky and carry away our hero to a safer land. If the modern writer of fiction is to employ the same device then there can be no automatic reliance upon the readerâs acceptance or credulity.
Fiction must convince, and it achieves this by the skilfulness of the writing, and the sense of localized reality it generates. The means by which such skilfulness might be achieved are the subject of this book. Writing Fiction does not make any pretence to being exhaustive, since it could not possibly be so. What it does is to try to cover some of the techniques required for any serious writer of fiction today.
Fiction creates an imaginary world. It may be only a cameo of a world, as in a short story. It may be an enormous, panoramic world with multiple characters, the sort we find in George Eliot or Tolstoy. It may be a world of considerable external activity, as in Gulliverâs Travels or Tom Jones, or one of unrelenting interiority, as with much of Samuel Beckettâs later writing. Sometimes it is obsessed with war, sex or history. It may be set in the past, as a great deal of contemporary writing is; or it may be set in the future, like much of the work we normally refer to as science fiction. This last term is not a very helpful one, since much futuristic writing is relatively unconcerned with science. But we are stuck with it, and will use it here, referring to this type of writing from now on as SF.
An imaginary world convinces us of its verisimilitude â its truthfulness within its own form â by the specific gravity of its characters and the different aspects of fiction writing which allow the writer to shape such an imaginary world successfully. We will look at such aspects of fiction writing as character, plot, voice, setting, humour and irony. We will look carefully at the writerâs use of language. This is, after all, our medium; lack of attention here would be fatal. We are shaping worlds and we do it with words.
The fiction writer can go anywhere, be anyone, travel in an instant to the other side of the world or even to another planet. But the writing must have weight. The words on the page must have substance, or the reader will not believe that they actually convey the reality of anyone at any time. Fiction explores its realities through the probing and exposition of character, so one of the first steps for a writer is to think about how to create believable characters.
All about character
We read fiction to enter a new world; and we write it to create one. Fiction is a way of exploring reality through invention. Letâs start, logically enough, with ways of establishing the characters who are going to tell us the story.
