Andrew Cowan is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of six novels, including Pig (Sceptre, 2002) and, most recently, Your Fault (Salt, 2019), and the winner of numerous literary awards. He is also the author of the monograph Against Creative Writing (Routledge, 2023), a defence of the art of writing.

An elegant insight into the personal and practical processes of writing, Andrew Cowan's The Art of Writing Fiction draws on his experience as a prize-winning novelist and his work with emerging writers at the University of East Anglia. Includes over 80 writing exercises and examples taken from dozens of novels and short stories,

Introduction

1 Writers' routines

2 Write about what you know: observational journals

3 Write about what you don't know you know: automatic writing

4 Don't tell me...

5 Write about what you used to know: remembering and place

6 Write about who you know: character

7 Voices

8 Viewpoints

9 Middles, ends, beginnings: structure

10 Making strange: defamiliarisation

11 Making clear: revision, grammar and punctuation

12 Workshopping

Appendix: Approaching agents & publishers

BibliographyIndex