Writing Fiction: Guide to Narrative Craft

満足しました。娘の大学の教科書として利用されており、必須のもの。娘は日々使っており、満足と答えた次第です。

Literally, my bible for writing anything fiction. Janet Burroway’s intellect is that she makes it easy to understand where we as writers fail and just how manageable it is to transform a sentence into something brilliant.

How was I introduced to this?

I was recommended it by my writing teacher Lynn Stegner during one of Stanford’s Continuing Studies programmes in the fall of 2021. An amazing professor. This book was just in a random supplementary handout on texts that might be of good use, and I ordered a few of them.

Others I bought were:

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner
ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster

But Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (8th Edition) was by far my favourite! Now having the 8th edition is a must, and I’ll tell you more about that in a quick minute, so don’t go off buying the newest one and thinking you are all trendy. The primary texts for the Stanford course I took (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. I, Vol. II, & Vol. IV) are just as superior as this book and no wonder Lynn chose them.

So why the 8th edition?

This is tricky because you need to read the Amazon reviews to understand that the newer edition doesn’t include the example stories. Which are a must! Because otherwise, you don’t get to see what Burroway is talking about, she picks some really great short stories in the 8th edition, and I learned a lot from the supplemental text. The downside is that the earlier editions of this book are much more expensive than the newest edition. But just buy a used copy then! That’s what I did, and although it came with already highlighted passages and stains, I didn’t care one bit. I saved 60 bucks!

Some of my favourite short stories from the 8th edition are:

“We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek
“Big Me” by Dan Chaon
“The Red Fox Fur Coat” by Teolinda Gersão
“Fiesta, 1980” by Junot Diaz
“Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff
“Tandolfo the Great” by Richard Bausch

I could name more, but these ones are early on in the book and the ones that come to mind. I think “We Didn’t”, “Fiesta, 1980”, and “Tandolfo the Great” have to be the best out of all those.

So say if you bought the newest version and they gave these as examples but didn’t print them. Well…. “We Didn’t” is a short story by American writer Stuart Dybek, included in The Best American Short Stories 1994, retailing for 19.54, “Big Me” by Dan Chaon is printed in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards (The O. Henry Prize Collection) and retails for 23.00, “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff is in his collection The Night In Question: Stories retailing for 15.79 and “Tandolfo the Great” by Richard Bausch, appears in The Stories of Richard Bausch for 16.99. Which, by the way, is now on my wish list of books to buy because Richard Bausch is a genius. So just getting access to those short stories equals 75.32, and a new version of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (8th Edition) is 66.99 at the time of writing, while the latest edition titled Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft with no examples is 18.99. Go figure.

Now, if you read the reviews on Amazon, the 9th edition drops some of the stories in the 8th edition and adds stories by George Saunders, Stacy Richter, and Sandra Cisneros. I’ve only read “The Red Bow” by George Saunders but loved it and don’t know the work of Richter and Cisneros. Saunders is a masterful storyteller, and not surprised Burroway included him.

Essential information:

Published in 2010, the book is 410 pages long and written mainly by Janet Burroway with additional authors Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Ned Stuckey-French. Burroway is an author who once had a book that was runner-up for the National Book Award. It states in the Editorial Review section on Amazon that Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in the United States. It’s now in its 10th edition and seems to have gone through many changes along the way, primarily by changing the examples of the short stories to make them more contemporary. After being recommended the book, I went for the 8th edition and have not read the others, so my opinion can only be said that the 8th edition is by far the one I found with the best reviews, and it surely does not disappoint.

What’s it about?

Taken from the words of the author herself, Writing Fiction attempts to guide the writer from the first impulse to final revision, employing concepts of fiction’s elements familiar from literature study, but shifting the perspective toward that of the practising writer. I couldn’t agree more.

The book is broken down into nine chapters, and each chapter is supplemented with short stories as examples of the topics talked about, including well-thought-out writing prompts or writing exercises that you, as a reader, can do to perfect your craft better.

The chapters include:
Topics around the writing process.
Showing verse telling.
Building character.
Fictional place and time.
Story form.
Plot and structure.
Point of view and revision.

My favourite chapters were on showing verse telling and the two on characterisation.

My praise and critique:

What I loved is that this book is not just in the words of Burroway herself. It is filled with the wisdom of others, and Burroway takes that wisdom and breaks it down for us, weaving it together to tell a story of juxtaposition that makes way for a greater understanding. She includes quotes and stories from hundreds of different artists and then relates them specifically to each chapter’s theme, thereby connecting everything to a collective wisdom that only someone of great knowledge could do.

For example, when writing about emotion, she states that…

“Fiction offers feelings for which the reader doesn’t pay—and yet to evoke those feelings, it is often necessary to portray sensory details that the reader may have experienced.”

She then brings up a story about the Russian director Stanislavski, the man behind “Method” acting, and how he told his students to forget what was common at the time, which was cliched dynamic postures of the stage, and instead connect more to personal past traumas. Burroway then follows with a quote from Virginia Woolf.

“The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past…. That is why we dwell on the past, I think.”

Then putting in her own two cents and giving us a literary sample, Burroway talks about how in fiction, the writer triggers emotion by the reader’s own sense memory and illustrates that with an excerpt from Tom Perrotta’s “The Easy Way”, where a lottery winner learns of a jealous friends death.

“I stood perfectly still and let the news expand inside of me, like a bubble in my chest that wouldn’t rise or pop. I waited for anger or grief to fill the space it opened, but all I felt just then was an unsteadiness in my legs, a connection with the ground.”

Burroway explains that Perrotta conveys the impact of loss by tracing the physical reaction to staying true to the moment.

Within just three short paragraphs, Burroway has connected her own thoughts with those of Stanislavski, Woolf and Perrotta, juxtaposing them against each other to provide a collective wisdom that provides a more thorough understanding of emotion.

Getting hundreds of small excerpts from short stories throughout the book, quotes from writers talking about the process of writing and all of them supporting the theme of the chapter you are in makes for a great read. You discover a world of writing and artists whose work you one day might explore.

Would I recommend it?

I give it (5 airplanes), a rating system I employ on my blog, meaning it took me to a place I never thought imaginable. It was a land where I learned something new on each page and kept rereading paragraphs so I wouldn’t forget the newfound knowledge. Maybe I’m just going through a writing phase at the moment because I didn’t learn this stuff growing up. Having gone to a Chinese college, I never got the chance to take a creative writing course, so I’m eating up writing books left and right these days as if they are Turkish delights. But what I can say is that this book helped me become a better writer, and in the end, what more can you ask for?

Who is it for?

Overall I find this book for people who don’t have access to an actual class they could take themselves. It’s a course in itself, and no wonder it’s the most widely used creative writing text in the United States. I only wish I could have read it with others so I could have discussed the stories and debated the topics with people that disagreed with me. But me being someone that travels, not staying in one place, not having access to a physical classroom, this is the book that fits. Just have the discipline to follow through and do the work! It’s worth it in the end! I saw a significant improvement in my writing halfway through reading this, and I hope to reread it. Like I said in the beginning, it is literally my bible for writing anything fiction.

What I listened to while reading it:

Eelke Kleijn