The Stuff of Fiction : Advice on Craft (2nd ed)

In this book, prizewinning novelist and popular creative writing instructor Douglas Bauer shares the secrets of his trade.

His lively and candid essays on subjects critical to the fiction writer's success demystify the essential elements of fiction writing, how they work, and work together.

He draws heavily on models of published fiction, with more than fifty writers called upon to demonstrate the skills he describes.

Bauer's focus is on the building blocks of successful fiction, including dialogue, characters, dramatic events, openings and closings, and the issue of sentiment versus sentimentality.

This revised and enlarged edition incorporates three new chapters which discuss the prose sentence, narrative context, and implicit narrative, thus presenting an expanded model of the writer's success.

By assuming the point of view of someone at the task, engaged in the work, inside the effort to bringing an invented world to life, "The Stuff of Fiction" speaks to writers of all ages in a pleasurable yet practical voice.