The Craft of Fiction
The Craft of Fiction is a Medium publication dedicated to the technical side — the crafting — of fiction.
Here, we want to pass along the things we’ve learned in our studies.
We want to make you a better fiction writer.
We’ll tackle everything from comma vs semicolon to when and how to get into — and out of — your character’s heads to whether or not Scrivner is a better program than Word for stories longer than 15 pages.
We won’t publish articles on the latest trends in formatting or SEO because, frankly, we’re pretty baffled by all that (there are experts out there who do understand it and you should definitely pay attention to them…we do).
We know that internalizing what we have to teach will improve your writing and we hope it can make you a bit of money, but there is no guarantee or shortcut. It’s hard work, plain and simple.
In the end, quality writing sells itself.
A Bit About Me
My name is Barry Donaldson and I’m one semester away from graduating with a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing. I’ll have earned a graduate-level writing degree with an emphasis on fiction.
This will qualify me to teach creative writing at the university level, but does this make me a ‘good’ writer? Hell no.
Does it mean that I’m more qualified to teach creative writing than most people? Certainly.
I started my program at the University of Alaska three years ago and I didn’t know a damn thing, a textbook example of not even knowing what I didn’t know. I started with grand plans for a sci-fi novel, an epic space opera. Then I started to learn the craft of fiction and my grand ideas quickly took a backseat to learning things like not overusing adverbs and not changing psychic distance accidentally.
I’ve spent the last three years studying under professional educators and published authors, attended dozens of workshops, and had heated arguments with my peers over whether or not to use a period or a semicolon in one sentence of one story.
On their own, none of these claims means anything. I must prove that I mean what I say, that I have learned valuable things and that I am able to pass on that information. If I don’t, give me none of your precious time.
I will.
Experienced Writer, Medium Newbie
I only learned about Medium last week. Jim Latham told me about it. He and I have been workshopping each other’s stories for a year or so and it’s paid off with a few publishing credits, post workshop.
Jim said he thought Medium looked like a good way to get another foot in the door of the writing world, to publish more work and get feedback from a wide audience. He started a week before I did and he seems to be getting the hang of it. So, I took his advice and I started poking around.
I found a number of quality publications devoted to writing — those like The Writing Cooperative and The Partnered Pen. I found almost nothing devoted to the craft of fiction and that so shocked me that I signed up and created this publication two days after the light bulb started to glow.
In Closing
The goal at The Craft of Fiction is to share information about the technical aspects of writing, specifically fiction.
We don’t mean to exclude non-fiction or poetry, but our training and interests aren’t focused there. That doesn’t mean that these same concepts and techniques won’t also apply, just that they might not apply quite as well. Neither does it mean that we won’t focus there in the future; we only await a skilled poet or essayist to join our ranks.
So, interested reader/writers, I hope you will dig in and learn from what we have to teach. Learn about the advantages and disadvantages of different points of view.
Learn how to edit your manuscript or that of your peers.
Learn about subtext.
Learn about what John Gardner calls the ‘vivid and continuous dream’ and how important, how vital, it is to keep your readers under that spell. That is, if you want to write fiction worth a damn.
Mostly, just learn.
