Turning Life into Fiction - Softcover

Hemley, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974449 ISBN 13: 9781555974442

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2006

Synopsis

A highly entertaining and indispensable manual on how to write good fiction

If you want to write at all, whether from real life or not, you must be willing and able to use your imagination. That means you must be willing to take risks and sometimes look the fool. You must be willing to transform experience, not simply record it. If you were a good liar, daydreamer, or troublemaker as a child, you'll probably make a good fiction writer. Daydreams, lies, and trouble. That's the stuff of fiction.

In Turning Life into Fiction, Robin Hemley offers a highly entertaining and in-depth manual―with writing exercises on how to convert real life into good storytelling. He covers a wide range of subjects, including how to record and generate ideas from daily life and how to write effectively using true anecdotes, real places, and real people. A self-proclaimed liar and thief, Hemley also addresses the legal and ethical concerns of "borrowing" experience from the lives of strangers and loved ones.

Lively, informative, and inspirational, Turning Life into Fiction is an invaluable text for any fiction writer. First published in 1994, this new edition is updated and expanded to include nearly a dozen short stories that Hemley refers to throughout
the book.

About this title

Review

If you've got friends who are fiction writers, watch out: "Writers are spies, liars, and thieves," writes Robin Hemley in Turning Life into Fiction, and your words, deeds, and character--benevolent and malevolent alike--could be immortalized in print some day. If you write fiction, listen up, look around, and take note. Why strain your brain making things up when you can transform real life into stories worth telling? Hemley recommends keeping a journal ("It's akin to an artist's sketchbook"), writing down your dreams (the unconscious is a great source of free material), and mining all those crazy stories your grandmother used to tell. Then combine bits and pieces from these sources, take one great mind leap (and many drafts) and--voila--you've got fiction. Warning: even though it really happened, it might not be believable. Second warning: while it's hard to know when something you write will offend the person it's based on, says Hemley, "above all, don't mess with male pattern baldness."

From the Back Cover

With lively style, good humor and insight, Robin Hemley helps you turn all that you experience into fresh and powerful fiction. By learning to "reimagine", you'll focus on translating real-world people and events into characters and scenes that happen on paper for the first time. You'll think "what if" instead of "what is" in order to take control of your material and cut loose the inhibitions of real life. In these pages, you'll learn how to hone your observation skills and fill your journal with rich and vivid details. (Because, as Hemley writes, "Life is in the details, and so is good fiction".) You'll see how to decide which ideas to bring to fiction and which ones to let go. And you'll learn how to: find the right form - novel, short story, vignette, memoir - for the story you want to tell; use "triggers" to start your reader's imagination rolling; keep your fiction emotionally honest by making the right choices between "the way it happened" and what the story dictates (ask "Is it believable?", not "Did it happen?"); create composites of real people and places that fit the unique needs of your story and empower your imagination; focus your fiction. Make sure everything, every character counts - and eliminate "people who sit at the end of the bar without a role to play"; fictionalize - ethically and legally - other people's stories. Learn your rights as a writer versus their rights to privacy. (Can you use actual names? When do you need to get permission?). To illustrate how writers feed their fiction with reality, Hemley uses examples from his own work and from fiction masters of yesterday and today. At the end of each chapter, challenging exercises help you apply the basictheories and push them even further. An adventurous read, Turning Life Into Fiction will help you create fiction that's just as strange and wonderful and "real" as the life that inspires it.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1555974449
• ISBN 13: 9781555974442
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 256