Mastering Fiction Writing

by Kit Reed

Offers guidelines for creating believable and compelling fiction with emphasis on crucial elements such as dialogue, plot, and building realistic characters

Genres: Writing

142 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Kit Reed was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.

Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kit Reed, who’s a woman I think – she talks about her in-house critic in a way that implies he’s her husband. She’s good on not laying down rules, especially about plotting, and even about telling and showing and such. She’s wise enough to let the writer make mistakes, and work through them. In fact, probably her best chapter, which comes early in the book, rather than later, as is so often the case, is on rewriting, though she’s a writer who tends to rewrite from the word go, rather than setting down a whole draft and then rewriting. Still she doesn’t care which way you do it, as long as you do it. She feels that you learn what the story is as you write and rewrite, and as more depth is added to the layers in the story. She says that when a book is finished you can see how things plotted out, but often that’s not something that can be seen in advance. She hasn’t got anything against outlines, as long as realise they’re not the story set down in concrete, and may have to be adjusted frequently.
From my notes about this book, it looks as though I skimmed it a bit, but it had some value in terms of the things I did pick up from it.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been writing off and on (mostly on) since I was a teenager, began giving it a serious effort in my early twenties, and have been selling fiction now for almost two decades. I still don’t have the secret—don’t understand why some stories work (or at least sell) while others get rejected by practically everybody.
That’s okay, though, because apparently I’m not alone. Kit Reed, a very good, underrated writer, also apparently doesn’t have the secret. And in her book, “Mastering Fiction Writing,” she does a good job of telling you what she doesn’t know, what you can’t know, what you must merely experience by enduring the mystery of creation.
Stories, she claims, are created from the inside-out, not the outside-in. To use formula or to attack a work in a analytical way is to stifle the creative drive, she argues. This is not to say that the writer should not have a plan, and she talks about all the sensible and practical things one can do to create a conducive environment and effective habits for engaging daily with the chaotic and impractical world of make-believe. In order to succeed, a writer has to have a weird mix of seemingly contradictory traits; they must be practical and persistent, yet flighty and in some basic way unable to deal with the reality everyone else seems to have no trouble enduring or accepting. Some sickos who actually thrive out there in the real world actually enjoy it.
This book, published in 1991, presages Stephen King’s famed and acclaimed memoir of the craft “On Writing,” by roughly a decade, and does a good job of scooping the Old Master’s admonitions and bits of advice. Ms. Reed’s chapter on writing dialog basically says everything about this facet of the craft that King would later go on to say, only in an even more helpful and direct manner. Her belief about (not) writing to an audience goes against the current trend to write for an “ideal reader” or always keep the reader in mind, but, I couldn’t help but find myself agreeing with Ms. Reed. And I was glad to hear such a contrary take on what most writers and writing teachers take as a given.
I don’t write for an audience, but rather into some kind of void that only begins to assume shape, take on form and meaning, after enough black printed words replace the emptiness of the Word document. I do think about the reader, however, when it comes time to edit and revise, which is also Ms. Reed’s strategy. Sometimes we have an image in our mind and take it for granted that the reader will see the same thing as us.
Not only will they never see quite the same thing as the writer, but they won’t even get a good approximation if enough care isn’t taken in setting the scene, crafting the characters, working out the story’s logic from the inside-out.
The book only gets stronger as it progresses. The section near the end on discipline reads more like a pep talk or manifesto than some words of advice, but is all the better for its combative tone. One sentence, in particular, deserves to be chiseled in stone somewhere, in memoriam of all artists, both successful and failed (there’s less difference between the two than you think):
“If you are going to persist, understand that there are people in hobnailed boots standing in line for the privilege of trampling the white flowers of your imagination.”
That’s okay, though. Let them wreck the aesthetically pleasing petals as long as they don’t get down to the roots. Or, as the cantankerous Charles Bukowski once said, Keep the spark lit; you can start a forest fire with it.
Recommended, though the book’s general overview of writing rather than a more granular engagement with the basics may turn some people off. This is a book for people who are stuck being writers, who have no choice but to write, letting them know what they have in store for them, but why it’s (maybe) worth it to keep going. This is the ditch that Ms. Reed died in; I hope to lie in it someday, too. Just cover my corpse with lye so it doesn’t stink so bad.