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Курс по творческо писане. Стъпка по стъпка
Това е книга, образец на най-доброто, което един курс по творческо писане предлага - основни принципи, които провокират мисълта, и примери от творчеството на класически и съвременни майстори на литературата, които илюстрират разглежданите теми. Всяка глава завършва с упражнения по творческо писане. В тях ще намерите въпроси за самооценка, които ще ви помогнат да изградите представа за своята работа, да придобиете по-внушителен авторски глас и да усъвършенствате собствения си стил.
Йосип Новакович е сред все по-многобройния кръг от съвременни писатели, които са убедени, че писането се учи не просто чрез четене на много художествена литература, но и чрез курсове по творческо писане и практически упражнения. Учебникът му достойно опровергава спектицизма и преодолява подозрението, че програмите по художествено писане неизбежно толерират унификацията. Силата му е в способността да показва как по пътя на универсалните модели може да се поощрява индивидуалността, как чрез конкретни задачи и примери може да се компенсира недостигът на знания върху класическата литература и литературата изобщо и да се тренира и култивира талантът. И не на последно място, доказва, че техника и идеи трябва да се допълват, за да се създадат текстове, които има с какво да заинтригуват бъдещия читател.
Йосип Новакович е сред все по-многобройния кръг от съвременни писатели, които са убедени, че писането се учи не просто чрез четене на много художествена литература, но и чрез курсове по творческо писане и практически упражнения. Учебникът му достойно опровергава спектицизма и преодолява подозрението, че програмите по художествено писане неизбежно толерират унификацията. Силата му е в способността да показва как по пътя на универсалните модели може да се поощрява индивидуалността, как чрез конкретни задачи и примери може да се компенсира недостигът на знания върху класическата литература и литературата изобщо и да се тренира и култивира талантът. И не на последно място, доказва, че техника и идеи трябва да се допълват, за да се създадат текстове, които има с какво да заинтригуват бъдещия читател.
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
22 people are currently reading
258 people want to read
About the author
Josip Novakovich
36 books64 followersJosip Novakovich (Croatian: Novaković) is a Croatian-American writer. His grandparents had immigrated from the Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Cleveland, Ohio, and, after the First World War, his grandfather returned to what had become Yugoslavia. Josip Novakovich was born (in 1956) and grew up in the Central Croatian town of Daruvar, studied medicine in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad. At the age of 20 he left Yugoslavia, continuing his education at Vassar College (B.A.), Yale University (M.Div.), and the University of Texas, Austin (M.A.).
He has published a novel (April Fool's Day), three short story collections (Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust), two collections of narrative essays (Apricots from Chernobyl, Plum Brandy: Croatian Journey) and a textbook (Fiction Writer's Workshop).
Novakovich has taught at Nebraska Indian Community College, Bard College, Moorhead State University, Antioch University in Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, and is now a professor at Pennsylvania State University.
Mr. Novakovich is the recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, an award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He was anthologized in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize, and O.Henry Prize Stories.
He taught in the Master's of Fine Arts program at Pennsylvania State University, where he lived under the iron rule of Reed Moyer's Halfmoon Township autocracy. He is currently in Montreal, Quebec teaching at Concordia University.
He has published a novel (April Fool's Day), three short story collections (Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust), two collections of narrative essays (Apricots from Chernobyl, Plum Brandy: Croatian Journey) and a textbook (Fiction Writer's Workshop).
Novakovich has taught at Nebraska Indian Community College, Bard College, Moorhead State University, Antioch University in Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, and is now a professor at Pennsylvania State University.
Mr. Novakovich is the recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, an award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He was anthologized in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize, and O.Henry Prize Stories.
He taught in the Master's of Fine Arts program at Pennsylvania State University, where he lived under the iron rule of Reed Moyer's Halfmoon Township autocracy. He is currently in Montreal, Quebec teaching at Concordia University.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 15, 2018
Другата на Новакович ми се струва по-добра, но и от тази има какво да се вземе.
April 27, 2018
This really isn't a book to be read, it's a book to be studied with plenty of exercises to be worked. If you do work all the exercises you will have enough material for a first novel by the time you finish studying this book. This has to be one of the best, if not the best books, that I have ever encountered for anyone that wants to teach themselves to become a published fiction writer. It's a book that should be in every writer's and aspiring writer's library.
September 22, 2015
3.5/5, в полза на писателя - 4. Хубава е книгата, и определено помага на твореца с упражненията си, но не е чак толкова добра и полезна като предишната на същата тематика от Новакович. Все пак, ако искате да потренирате писането си и вече сте минали "Курс по творческо писане", хвърлете един поглед и на тази.
November 30, 2019
Втората книга за творческо писане на Новакович не е така хубава като първата му, но не е и лоша. Нещата са по-структурирани и подредени, но им липсва ентусиазмът и игривостта, които се усещаха в първата.
Тази книга определено ми дойде малко скучна, а и някои упражнения и идеи като да се повтаряха. Последната глава беше всъщност най-полезната част, тъй като там направи анализ как е създал един свой разказ, споделяйки и самия разказ, което се оказа доста необикновено надничане в съзнанието на писателя.
Тази книга определено ми дойде малко скучна, а и някои упражнения и идеи като да се повтаряха. Последната глава беше всъщност най-полезната част, тъй като там направи анализ как е създал един свой разказ, споделяйки и самия разказ, което се оказа доста необикновено надничане в съзнанието на писателя.
December 24, 2025
Josip Novakovich’s “Writing Fiction Step by Step” begins by refusing the most seductive lie writing culture tells: that fiction is an aura you either have or don’t. The book arrives without mysticism. It does not flatter you with the romance of inspiration; it hands you a set of tasks. Its voice is brisk, teacherly, and workmanlike, the voice of someone who has watched enough students freeze at the blank page to know that the cure is rarely insight alone. The cure is motion. Do something. Try again. Change the conditions. See what happens. In that sense, the book’s title is not marketing. It is a contract.
What makes the contract unusual is how little it resembles a sermon. Novakovich is not trying to convince you that fiction is important, or that writers are special, or that art is salvation. He treats writing as a craft you practice the way you might practice an instrument: with drills, variations, repetitions, and a willingness to sound bad in order to sound better. The prose is clear, sometimes wry, generally economical. It is a book that speaks with the impatience of the useful. It wants to get you out of the chair and into the act of making.
That usefulness is organized, almost architecturally, into a progression that tracks the way many stories come into being: from the first stir of an idea, through the shaping forces of character and plot, into the deliberate choice of point of view, then outward into setting, then inward again into the mechanics that give narrative its pulse: beginnings that commit, scenes that turn, dialogue that behaves like action. After that, the book tilts toward the expressive layer – voice, description, image and metaphor, style – before arriving at a concluding synthesis and a “Guide to the Exercises” that clarifies the book’s real identity. This is not only a book to read; it is a system to use.
The early emphasis is on curiosity. Novakovich treats wonder not as a mood but as a method. What you cannot fully explain, what you hesitate around, what you circle and return to, contains energy. He urges writers to begin there, in the region where knowledge thins and imagination has to work. That is a quietly subversive idea in a time when writers are encouraged to “research” their way into authority. Research can enrich a story; it can also become a stall tactic, a way to avoid the vulnerability of invention. Novakovich’s stance is that fiction does not move because you know more facts. It moves because something is unresolved: a desire, a fear, a contradiction, a pressure that forces a choice.
When the book turns to character, its attitude sharpens. Character is not a biography. Character is behavior under strain. What does a person want, what do they fear, what do they tell themselves to justify what they do, and what do they do when justification fails? Novakovich’s exercises do not merely ask you to “develop” characters; they ask you to test them. Build a figure from a remembered self, from someone you love, from someone you resent, from a composite, then place that figure in a situation that demands action. The implicit argument is that character is revealed not by description but by consequence. A character who never has to pay for anything is not a character; it is a sketch.
Plot, in this book, is not a pattern you paste over that sketch. It is causality. Novakovich stresses that one action should tug the next into being, that events should produce consequences that narrow options and intensify pressure. He offers multiple structures – from straightforward chronological narrative to reverse order, from diary-like accumulations to impressionistic or pointillist arrangements – but the underlying demand remains consistent: do not let things merely happen. Make them matter. Cause, effect, escalation. The best moments here are less about formula than about moral physics. A lie has a cost. A betrayal creates a new reality. A secret produces motion whether the character wants motion or not.
His discussion of point of view, meanwhile, treats narrative perspective not as a grammatical decision but as a commitment of attention. First person gives you immediacy and limitation. Third-person limited gives you intimacy with a degree of flexibility. Omniscience gives you range, but it comes with a different burden: control, steadiness, an earned authority. Novakovich is particularly alert to the way point of view distributes sympathy and knowledge. Who is allowed interiority? Who is seen from the outside? Who is granted complexity and who is reduced? The book does not announce this as an ethics lesson, but it lives there, in the insistence that perspective is not neutral.
The setting chapters are some of the book’s most convincing precisely because they resist the common beginner’s impulse to treat setting as background. Landscape and cityscape are pressure systems, not scenic postcards. Weather changes behavior. Distance changes decision-making. Crowds alter privacy; noise alters thought; surveillance alters speech. When Novakovich moves into interiors, he becomes more intimate and more incisive. Rooms are not neutral. Objects are not inert. A room is an arrangement of values and fears, a map of what is used and what is avoided, what is displayed and what is hidden. If a character lives in a space, the space is already a kind of confession.
In “Beginning and Developing,” Novakovich’s voice tightens into something like a warning. Beginnings are commitments. A beginning is not a warm-up lap; it is the engine’s first spark. He discourages throat-clearing exposition and encourages writers to begin where pressure already exists: where something is at stake, where something can change, where consequence is felt even if it has not yet arrived. Development, in his view, is not repetition but escalation. The story should not hover; it should deepen, complicate, narrow. This insistence can feel stern to writers who love drift and atmosphere, but it has the virtue of diagnosing a frequent failure: stories that spend pages establishing a mood without ever applying a force that requires response.
The chapter on scene continues the same discipline. A scene is a unit of change. Enter late. Leave early. Make something shift – knowledge, power, desire, allegiance, circumstance. The book’s insistence on turning points does not require melodrama; it requires consequence. Even a quiet scene must alter the balance, if only by tightening a dilemma or forcing a small admission. Novakovich’s best craft advice often comes in this form: less a trick than a demand for accountability. What changed? If nothing changed, why did the reader need this scene?
Dialogue is treated, rightly, as action. Novakovich is suspicious of dialogue that exists merely to transmit information or to mimic real speech. Real speech is full of filler, repetition, politeness rituals. Fictional dialogue, he argues, must be shaped. It should reveal desire and resistance. It should carry subtext: what is said around what is meant, the evasions and interruptions that show power dynamics at work. He prefers implication over explanation, and he urges writers to use speech to press conflict rather than to summarize it. The chapter’s implied instruction is not “be witty.” It is “make speech consequential.”
When the book reaches voice, description, image and metaphor, and style, it risks drifting into the kind of craft talk that becomes cloudy and self-referential. Novakovich mostly avoids that trap because he remains practical. Voice is a stance toward the world, a consistent attitude that must be earned. Description is selection under pressure, filtered through perception, controlling pace as much as it supplies imagery. Metaphor is not decoration; it is concentration, a way to compress emotional truth into a precise connection. Style, finally, is discipline – sentence rhythm, clarity, economy – rather than adornment. The book’s underlying faith is that clarity is not the enemy of complexity; it is the condition that allows complexity to be perceived.
All of this makes the book easy to admire, and easy, too, to critique without cruelty. “Writing Fiction Step by Step” is not a seductive read. Its prose is functional rather than lush, and it does not aspire to the essayistic pleasures of a more autobiographical craft book. The point is not to charm you into writing; it is to move you into writing by giving you something to do. For some readers, that will feel liberating. For others, it will feel dry. The book is more workshop than salon.
The exercises, which are the book’s beating heart, are also its most intimidating feature. There are many of them, and they range widely in subject matter and intensity. The abundance is a strength: the book can sustain years of practice if you return to it the way you return to a set of scales. But abundance also creates a danger: the writer who treats completion as virtue can confuse activity with progress. You can generate page after page without internalizing what each exercise was meant to train. Novakovich does encourage recombination and selectivity, but the responsibility for self-curation remains with the reader. This is, arguably, part of the book’s seriousness. It does not infantilize the writer. It assumes agency. Still, agency can feel like weight when you are already exhausted.
Another limitation is temperament. The book tends to privilege what might be called muscular narrative: pressure, conflict, consequence, turn. For many writers, that is medicine. It cures the story that stagnates in mood. Yet there are modes of fiction that thrive on accumulation, ambiguity, and the slow deepening of perception – stories whose power is not in a visible hinge but in an incremental change of consciousness. Novakovich gestures toward impressionistic and pointillist forms, and he does not forbid drift, but the book’s central drive remains kinetic. It wants stories to move. When your artistic ambitions lean toward the quieter and more associative, you may need to translate some of his imperatives into your own idiom, finding “change” not only in event but in attention.
And yet: the longer one sits with “Writing Fiction Step by Step,” the more its deeper virtue becomes apparent. It treats fiction as a living system rather than as isolated categories. A flat scene is often a character problem. A dead dialogue exchange is often a desire problem. A cluttered descriptive passage is often a pacing problem, a way of hiding from narrative consequence. A confusing voice is often a point-of-view problem. Novakovich trains the writer to diagnose in this holistic way. The book’s final synthesis and its guide to the exercises function as a kind of diagnostic chart: if your story is failing, do not merely polish the sentences; change the conditions that produce the failure.
There is also, under the briskness, an unexpected tenderness. It is not the tenderness of praise; it is the tenderness of assumption. The book assumes you can learn. It assumes the mind can be trained. It assumes stories can be made by people who are willing to practice. In a culture that treats talent as destiny, this is a quietly democratic proposition. It suggests that the writer is not an anointed figure waiting for the muse, but a worker who can return to the bench, pick up a tool, and try again.
Perhaps that is the most “literary” thing about this book: its insistence that fiction is not merely self-expression but a way of thinking. It is a way of turning wonder into consequence, a way of making the inner life visible without exhausting it in explanation. You finish the book not with a single secret but with a repertoire of questions and a set of drills that make those questions actionable. You finish with a sharper sense of how stories are built, and how they fail, and how to intervene when they fail. That is what serious instruction should do. It should not replace your judgment; it should sharpen it.
“Writing Fiction Step by Step” earns admiration for its clarity, its practical intelligence, and its refusal to romanticize the work. It also earns a certain reservation for its dryness as prose and for the way its exercise abundance can overwhelm the undisciplined reader. But taken on its own terms – as a manual designed to be used, not merely read – it succeeds. It is a toolkit that keeps its promises, and a teacher who does not flatter you, only equips you. My rating: 78/100.
What makes the contract unusual is how little it resembles a sermon. Novakovich is not trying to convince you that fiction is important, or that writers are special, or that art is salvation. He treats writing as a craft you practice the way you might practice an instrument: with drills, variations, repetitions, and a willingness to sound bad in order to sound better. The prose is clear, sometimes wry, generally economical. It is a book that speaks with the impatience of the useful. It wants to get you out of the chair and into the act of making.
That usefulness is organized, almost architecturally, into a progression that tracks the way many stories come into being: from the first stir of an idea, through the shaping forces of character and plot, into the deliberate choice of point of view, then outward into setting, then inward again into the mechanics that give narrative its pulse: beginnings that commit, scenes that turn, dialogue that behaves like action. After that, the book tilts toward the expressive layer – voice, description, image and metaphor, style – before arriving at a concluding synthesis and a “Guide to the Exercises” that clarifies the book’s real identity. This is not only a book to read; it is a system to use.
The early emphasis is on curiosity. Novakovich treats wonder not as a mood but as a method. What you cannot fully explain, what you hesitate around, what you circle and return to, contains energy. He urges writers to begin there, in the region where knowledge thins and imagination has to work. That is a quietly subversive idea in a time when writers are encouraged to “research” their way into authority. Research can enrich a story; it can also become a stall tactic, a way to avoid the vulnerability of invention. Novakovich’s stance is that fiction does not move because you know more facts. It moves because something is unresolved: a desire, a fear, a contradiction, a pressure that forces a choice.
When the book turns to character, its attitude sharpens. Character is not a biography. Character is behavior under strain. What does a person want, what do they fear, what do they tell themselves to justify what they do, and what do they do when justification fails? Novakovich’s exercises do not merely ask you to “develop” characters; they ask you to test them. Build a figure from a remembered self, from someone you love, from someone you resent, from a composite, then place that figure in a situation that demands action. The implicit argument is that character is revealed not by description but by consequence. A character who never has to pay for anything is not a character; it is a sketch.
Plot, in this book, is not a pattern you paste over that sketch. It is causality. Novakovich stresses that one action should tug the next into being, that events should produce consequences that narrow options and intensify pressure. He offers multiple structures – from straightforward chronological narrative to reverse order, from diary-like accumulations to impressionistic or pointillist arrangements – but the underlying demand remains consistent: do not let things merely happen. Make them matter. Cause, effect, escalation. The best moments here are less about formula than about moral physics. A lie has a cost. A betrayal creates a new reality. A secret produces motion whether the character wants motion or not.
His discussion of point of view, meanwhile, treats narrative perspective not as a grammatical decision but as a commitment of attention. First person gives you immediacy and limitation. Third-person limited gives you intimacy with a degree of flexibility. Omniscience gives you range, but it comes with a different burden: control, steadiness, an earned authority. Novakovich is particularly alert to the way point of view distributes sympathy and knowledge. Who is allowed interiority? Who is seen from the outside? Who is granted complexity and who is reduced? The book does not announce this as an ethics lesson, but it lives there, in the insistence that perspective is not neutral.
The setting chapters are some of the book’s most convincing precisely because they resist the common beginner’s impulse to treat setting as background. Landscape and cityscape are pressure systems, not scenic postcards. Weather changes behavior. Distance changes decision-making. Crowds alter privacy; noise alters thought; surveillance alters speech. When Novakovich moves into interiors, he becomes more intimate and more incisive. Rooms are not neutral. Objects are not inert. A room is an arrangement of values and fears, a map of what is used and what is avoided, what is displayed and what is hidden. If a character lives in a space, the space is already a kind of confession.
In “Beginning and Developing,” Novakovich’s voice tightens into something like a warning. Beginnings are commitments. A beginning is not a warm-up lap; it is the engine’s first spark. He discourages throat-clearing exposition and encourages writers to begin where pressure already exists: where something is at stake, where something can change, where consequence is felt even if it has not yet arrived. Development, in his view, is not repetition but escalation. The story should not hover; it should deepen, complicate, narrow. This insistence can feel stern to writers who love drift and atmosphere, but it has the virtue of diagnosing a frequent failure: stories that spend pages establishing a mood without ever applying a force that requires response.
The chapter on scene continues the same discipline. A scene is a unit of change. Enter late. Leave early. Make something shift – knowledge, power, desire, allegiance, circumstance. The book’s insistence on turning points does not require melodrama; it requires consequence. Even a quiet scene must alter the balance, if only by tightening a dilemma or forcing a small admission. Novakovich’s best craft advice often comes in this form: less a trick than a demand for accountability. What changed? If nothing changed, why did the reader need this scene?
Dialogue is treated, rightly, as action. Novakovich is suspicious of dialogue that exists merely to transmit information or to mimic real speech. Real speech is full of filler, repetition, politeness rituals. Fictional dialogue, he argues, must be shaped. It should reveal desire and resistance. It should carry subtext: what is said around what is meant, the evasions and interruptions that show power dynamics at work. He prefers implication over explanation, and he urges writers to use speech to press conflict rather than to summarize it. The chapter’s implied instruction is not “be witty.” It is “make speech consequential.”
When the book reaches voice, description, image and metaphor, and style, it risks drifting into the kind of craft talk that becomes cloudy and self-referential. Novakovich mostly avoids that trap because he remains practical. Voice is a stance toward the world, a consistent attitude that must be earned. Description is selection under pressure, filtered through perception, controlling pace as much as it supplies imagery. Metaphor is not decoration; it is concentration, a way to compress emotional truth into a precise connection. Style, finally, is discipline – sentence rhythm, clarity, economy – rather than adornment. The book’s underlying faith is that clarity is not the enemy of complexity; it is the condition that allows complexity to be perceived.
All of this makes the book easy to admire, and easy, too, to critique without cruelty. “Writing Fiction Step by Step” is not a seductive read. Its prose is functional rather than lush, and it does not aspire to the essayistic pleasures of a more autobiographical craft book. The point is not to charm you into writing; it is to move you into writing by giving you something to do. For some readers, that will feel liberating. For others, it will feel dry. The book is more workshop than salon.
The exercises, which are the book’s beating heart, are also its most intimidating feature. There are many of them, and they range widely in subject matter and intensity. The abundance is a strength: the book can sustain years of practice if you return to it the way you return to a set of scales. But abundance also creates a danger: the writer who treats completion as virtue can confuse activity with progress. You can generate page after page without internalizing what each exercise was meant to train. Novakovich does encourage recombination and selectivity, but the responsibility for self-curation remains with the reader. This is, arguably, part of the book’s seriousness. It does not infantilize the writer. It assumes agency. Still, agency can feel like weight when you are already exhausted.
Another limitation is temperament. The book tends to privilege what might be called muscular narrative: pressure, conflict, consequence, turn. For many writers, that is medicine. It cures the story that stagnates in mood. Yet there are modes of fiction that thrive on accumulation, ambiguity, and the slow deepening of perception – stories whose power is not in a visible hinge but in an incremental change of consciousness. Novakovich gestures toward impressionistic and pointillist forms, and he does not forbid drift, but the book’s central drive remains kinetic. It wants stories to move. When your artistic ambitions lean toward the quieter and more associative, you may need to translate some of his imperatives into your own idiom, finding “change” not only in event but in attention.
And yet: the longer one sits with “Writing Fiction Step by Step,” the more its deeper virtue becomes apparent. It treats fiction as a living system rather than as isolated categories. A flat scene is often a character problem. A dead dialogue exchange is often a desire problem. A cluttered descriptive passage is often a pacing problem, a way of hiding from narrative consequence. A confusing voice is often a point-of-view problem. Novakovich trains the writer to diagnose in this holistic way. The book’s final synthesis and its guide to the exercises function as a kind of diagnostic chart: if your story is failing, do not merely polish the sentences; change the conditions that produce the failure.
There is also, under the briskness, an unexpected tenderness. It is not the tenderness of praise; it is the tenderness of assumption. The book assumes you can learn. It assumes the mind can be trained. It assumes stories can be made by people who are willing to practice. In a culture that treats talent as destiny, this is a quietly democratic proposition. It suggests that the writer is not an anointed figure waiting for the muse, but a worker who can return to the bench, pick up a tool, and try again.
Perhaps that is the most “literary” thing about this book: its insistence that fiction is not merely self-expression but a way of thinking. It is a way of turning wonder into consequence, a way of making the inner life visible without exhausting it in explanation. You finish the book not with a single secret but with a repertoire of questions and a set of drills that make those questions actionable. You finish with a sharper sense of how stories are built, and how they fail, and how to intervene when they fail. That is what serious instruction should do. It should not replace your judgment; it should sharpen it.
“Writing Fiction Step by Step” earns admiration for its clarity, its practical intelligence, and its refusal to romanticize the work. It also earns a certain reservation for its dryness as prose and for the way its exercise abundance can overwhelm the undisciplined reader. But taken on its own terms – as a manual designed to be used, not merely read – it succeeds. It is a toolkit that keeps its promises, and a teacher who does not flatter you, only equips you. My rating: 78/100.
January 26, 2019
I wish I had more time; to complete the exercises; to write the stories; to respect the work that this author has put into this fine book. Next time.
August 12, 2025
It’s been said that writing is a fundamentally an optimistic act, and it’s to Novakovich's great credit that his book of advice and exercise evinces that dictum throughout. There’s no reason, he says, why we shouldn’t try nearly all forms of writing in our career.
I picked this one up for a buck off the rack out front at Westsider Rare and Used Books and really enjoyed the author’s descriptions and examples of the elements and devices of fiction that he uses to introduce each section—Character, Plot, Setting, Style, and so forth—before offering some writing exercises on each topic. Which exercises I did not do : )
Dazzling yourself, he reminds us, is even more important than dazzling the reader. ‘Get the sensation of magic, feel the strange and wonderful sounds and sights are taking place in your fiction.’
You needn’t be brilliant and fascinating throughout, he observes. It’s the story’s opening and the climax where brilliance is most often required.
Read aloud, he enthuses, ‘to feel your words in your throat and see if they taste right.’
Strive for strong, arresting imagery. For one well struck image may bring together a whole story, Novakovich offers. And to that end, his innate writerly positivity again shines through when he adds, ‘collecting images is a great investment of your time, perception, and imagination.’
Most stirring and bizarre and spot on is the trance-like state that the author alludes to when you are writing free and in full swing, when you can surprise yourself and ‘tell yourself something you haven’t heard or known.’
‘You don’t have to be in possessed, though there may be something akin to possession here.’
Amen, brother.
I picked this one up for a buck off the rack out front at Westsider Rare and Used Books and really enjoyed the author’s descriptions and examples of the elements and devices of fiction that he uses to introduce each section—Character, Plot, Setting, Style, and so forth—before offering some writing exercises on each topic. Which exercises I did not do : )
Dazzling yourself, he reminds us, is even more important than dazzling the reader. ‘Get the sensation of magic, feel the strange and wonderful sounds and sights are taking place in your fiction.’
You needn’t be brilliant and fascinating throughout, he observes. It’s the story’s opening and the climax where brilliance is most often required.
Read aloud, he enthuses, ‘to feel your words in your throat and see if they taste right.’
Strive for strong, arresting imagery. For one well struck image may bring together a whole story, Novakovich offers. And to that end, his innate writerly positivity again shines through when he adds, ‘collecting images is a great investment of your time, perception, and imagination.’
Most stirring and bizarre and spot on is the trance-like state that the author alludes to when you are writing free and in full swing, when you can surprise yourself and ‘tell yourself something you haven’t heard or known.’
‘You don’t have to be in possessed, though there may be something akin to possession here.’
Amen, brother.
January 8, 2026
I really can’t imagine this book not getting five stars from every single reader. I had a lot of fun with the exercises and there is so much versatility to work with. I know it’s an older one published in 1998, but it’s one of those classics. I’ll keep on my shelf. And the author offers 200 exercises but it’s really even more than that because he follows through with us through the entire book. The only thing I would suggest to make it any better is to have simple examples for the exercises. That’s always fun. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this book. Thank you.
October 5, 2019
Very good textbook-type of book, not only suitable for college creative writing programs but also for high school AP classes as well. If you feel that you would like to be a writer, by the time that you have worked your way through the 200+ included exercises you will certainly be prepared.
November 7, 2022
Based on the ideas I'd come across while reading this book, I wrote a post "19 questions to read books more mindfully":
https://bookloverfromparis.blogspot.c...
https://bookloverfromparis.blogspot.c...
January 13, 2016
I'm always suspicious of books that 'teach' you how to write fiction, but I think it is worthwhile to have your attention drawn to the elements of fiction - to learn to pay attention to your use of place, imagery, the way you built characters etc. - and this book succeeds in doing so. It also has many many exercises, which allow you to explore and practice these elements, or give you something to work on that might inspire a larger project.
December 12, 2014
This and its companion Fiction Writer's Workshop basically contain a lifetime worth of exercises and inspiration. On par with Gardner's The Art of Fiction, these two books could be the foundation textbooks for a series of creative writing courses: beginner to intermediate to advanced.
August 1, 2009
He has so much to teach that he needs more than one book.
January 31, 2010
A very useful collection of exercises for fiction writers.
June 20, 2011
I like how the book organzines itself into helpful excersise but I really couldnt get into it. I flipped through some pages hoping that I could read it like a normal book but it couldnt.
July 7, 2011
excellent
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