Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing

by Debra Spark

Curious Essays on Fiction Writing is a book about what makes fiction work. In nine entertaining and instructive essays, novelist and master teacher Debra Spark pursues key questions that face both aspiring and accomplished writers, How does a writer find inspiration? What makes a story's closing line resonate? How can a writer "get" style? Where should an author "stand" in relation to his or her characters?

While the book will have immediate appeal for students of writing, it will also be of interest to general readers for its in-depth reading of contemporary fiction and for its take on important issues of the Should writers try to be more uplifting? How is emotion best conveyed in fiction? Why are serious writers in North America wedded to the realist tradition?

When she was only twenty-three, Debra Spark's best-selling anthology 20 Under 30 introduced readers to some of today's best writers, including David Leavitt, Susan Minot, Lorrie Moore, Ann Patchett, and Mona Simpson. Almost twenty years later, Spark brings this same keen critical eye to Curious Attractions, discussing a broad range of authors from multiple genres and generations.

A collection of essays in the belles-lettres tradition, Curious Attractions offers lively and instructive discussions of craft flavored with autobiographical reflections and commentary on world events. Throughout, Spark's voice is warm, articulate, and engaging as it provides valuable insights to readers and writers alike.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

184 pages, Paperback

First published May 20, 2005

About the author

Debra Spark is the author of The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception that will be published in April 2012 by Four Way Books. She is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews. Spark edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers and her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

Reviews

[Ann Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really thought-provoking book about writing. I particularly liked the author's musings on how vision informs craft, and how "vision develops through the arc of a life."

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reread. The magical realism chapter is a little cringe by 2025 standards, but most of the other essays still hold up all these years later. Regardless, I enjoyed the use of specific text examples in all the chapters.

[Norman Birnbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love American short stories, and are serious about writing, this is a very useful book. She gets you thinking about the difference between an accomplished short story -- no easy achievement -- and one that is something more. Reading it may be like taking one of Ms. Spark's classes. She provides examples and insights as well as advice without ever being prescriptive.

[Dewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spark's book is shoptalk, in the best sense. As a two book novelist, writing teacher, and program director, Spark writes about her reading and writing, posing her sensibility as a prompt, model, and guide to other writers. Most of the essays appeared in the Associated Writing Programs' Writer's Chronicle, appropriately, where the address is to graduate students and their mentors. The topics and content (e.g. the difference between sentiment and sentimentality) are those I rehearse in fiction workshops.

Debra Spark is very bright, enthusiastic, and a genuine individual in her forthright, entertaining manner. She presents a personal culture of "curious attractions." Her passion for reading and writing is infectious and instructive. Her essays focusing on Lorrie Moore's WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF THE FROG HOSPITAL, and on Stuart Dybek's wonderful and myserious story "Hot Ice," are superb. Her citation and intelligent reading of writers I have not read also makes me want to read them.

[Theresa]

Recommended by writing teacher, Martha. I'm looking forward to it, even though I don't consider myself a fiction writer. Creative non-fiction and fiction obviously overlap:) Also hoping to find some good prompts for my students.