Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French — Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft

44 published claims from this book.

• A story’s theme often emerges only after a year of drafting
• A successful story always changes the narrator, not just the observed subject.
• A symbol must first function as a concrete thing before carrying meaning
• Anthropomorphism is a literary necessity, not a scientific error.
• Character is defined by desire and backward reasoning toward action.
• Commercialization of publishing has eroded public respect for literature
• Comparison is the fundamental basis of all learning and reasoning
• Conceits force authors to explain a comparison that resists immediate sense
• Convincing character change is subtle, not abrupt or total
• Deep fiction requires conflict of one good against another, not good against bad.
• Dialogue becomes action only when it can change something.
• Emotion is a bodily sensory response, not an abstract label.
• Every plot requires both intense desire and danger in pursuing it.
• Everyday quarrels are conducted through indirect symbolic objects and gestures
• Good dialogue is distilled, not transcribed, speech.
• High ambition creates creative block while low standards enable writing.
• Identical setting conditions generate opposite characters depending on social position
• Imagining the absent is the defining human capacity behind story
• Individuality emerges from the layering and clash of overlapping social types
• Limited omniscience suits short fiction because it mirrors real-life limits on knowing others.
• Literary fiction is character-driven, genre fiction plot-driven
• Magic realism convinces readers the extraordinary occurs within the ordinary
• Narrative credibility depends on skill, not factual accuracy.
• People are poorly equipped to name precise bodily emotional states.
• Reader trust in a fallible narrator is the story’s hardest task.
• Reader-suggested fixes often encode a different problem than the one named
• Readers cannot distinguish forced writing from inspired flow.
• Readers simultaneously believe fiction and know it is fabricated
• Readers take pleasure in drawing their own conclusions from concrete details.
• Received moral imperatives often mask what we actually care about.
• Reliable unreliable narrators reveal social institutions through their distorted views.
• Representing other minds is an immemorial and growing requirement of imaginative fiction.
• Revision scratches at scenes can reveal fundamental truths about the story
• Sei Shōnagon’s quirky lists offer a self-revealing journal device.
• Significant details either reveal character or advance plot development.
• The basic difference between short stories and novels is simply their length
• The most profound dramatic dangers lie close to home, not in spectacle.
• Ultimate motives work backward to justify immediate actions.
• Understanding arises only from perceiving causal links among facts, not from the facts themselves
• Western literature has descended socially and moved inward toward the unconscious
• Writer’s block in fiction stems from insufficient knowledge of characters and scene.
• Writing a first draft at one sitting produces more coherent, faster-paced fiction.
• Writing often requires passing through a muddle and despair before shape emerges.
• YA fiction is a marketing category, not a narrative genre