Fiction Writers on Fiction Writing

The fundamental problem with most writing manuals, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman argued, is that they're written by people who've never actually created fiction worth reading. Editors who can't write a story, professors who've never faced a blank page, theorists convinced they can reduce storytelling to formulas. This book offers something different: over one hundred working authors, each explaining in their own words how they actually build characters, find their plots, and survive the daily labor of writing fiction. Not prescriptions, but testimonies. Not rules, but revelations from the trenches. Hoffman believed aspiring writers needed to hear from practitioners, not pundits, and this volume is his answer to every correspondence course and literary professor pontificating on craft they had never practiced. The advice here dates from the early twentieth century, yet the dilemmas remain eternal: how do you make a character live? How do you know when a story is finished? How do you keep working when the words refuse to come?