The Art of the Novel

by Nicholas Royle (Editor), Jenn Ashworth (Contributor), Tom Bromley (Contributor)

How do you write a novel?

Practising novelists and teachers of creative writing reveal their working methods and offer practical advice. Subjects covered range from magic realism to characterisation, surrealism to historical fiction, via perspective, plot twists and avoiding being boring, among many others.

This book is for

creative writing students

writers and readers of novels

teachers of creative writing

With contributions from Leone Ross, Tom Bromley, Jenn Ashworth, AJ Dalton, Nikesh Shukla, Stella Duffy, Mark Morris, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, Alice Thompson, Kerry Hudson, Toby Litt, Livi Michael, Joe Stretch, James Miller, Sarah Butler, Will Wiles, Graeme Shimmin

Featuring

Eighteen specially commissioned essays

Creative writing exercises

Top tips

Lists of recommended novels

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

165 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 15, 2015

About the author

Nicholas Royle is an English writer. He is the author of seven novels, two novellas and a short story collection. He has edited sixteen anthologies of short stories. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks. He works as a fiction reviewer for The Independent and the Warwick Review and as an editor for Salt Publishing.

Reviews

[Emily]

Really interesting. I quite hope someone in Australia does one of these type of books with Australian authors because I feel this had a very British focus.

[Prathap]

Brilliantly insightful collection of essays by established novelists that break down the process of novel writing, tackling the subject further by genre, plot, narratives, publishing and every other single nitty-gritty detail and includes helpful exercises, tips and reading recommendation. Hugely helpful and motivational.

[James Hynes]

One of the better books I've read on Creative Writing

[Adam]

Meh.

I think I was looking for something a little more academic and technical. More stuff about what exactly constitutes a novel, what it has that short stories don't, stuff on how character developments and subplots differ in this particular type of literature. Instead it was a series of informal essays about how exactly to write a novel: time management, editing, a few chapters on the characteristics of particular genres (interesting enough, though I disagreed entirely with one author's description of surrealism).
The writings exercises at the end of each chapter were fun and overall the tone of it makes it a perfectly nice read, but nothing in it is particularly insightful. In a time when pretty much any information can be found for free on the internet, a book of this nature really has to have something special, though I suppose it's partially my fault for not giving it more than a cursory glance before buying it.