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.