Book Review

The ABCs of Writing Fiction

by Ann Copeland
Story Press, Cincinnati, Ohio
$18.99 (U.S.)

Reviewed by Ann Fothergill-Brown

Don’t open The ABC’s of Writing Fiction with the expectation of finding page after page of pointed advice on particular aspects of story-writing. While several useful nuggets of technical gold can be mined from the pages of this book, the author spends most of her time extending a hand to the committed writer and saying, "Avoidance is easy; stick with it. I’ve been there, and I know that you can eventually resolve the problems with your project. Even if you have to throw it out and start over."

As the title indicates, The ABC’s of Writing Fiction is structured alphabetically. The book consists of a series of articles—from a single paragraph to several pages in length—whose titles determine their place in the "writing alphabet". Many of the articles are cross-referenced.

But be prepared! An article’s title may not always lead you in the direction you think. Grammar, for example, spends just two sentences warning you to watch your characters’ competence with language; it then refers you to Competence if you have questions about your own language skills. Competence, in turn, is a short paragraph that urges you to take steps to improve your grammar and spelling if you feel the lack.

On the other hand, the articles Metaphor and Simile provide explicit descriptions of these devices, with examples and suggestions of how they can be used to enliven and deepen your writing. And Dialogue is a long, inspiring discussion of the usefulness of dialogue in replacing narration, the different types of dialogue, and pitfalls to avoid in scenes of dialogue.

Some of the articles are double-barrelled, such as Background, which leads with a discussion of your background as a writer of fiction. The article eventually speaks about how to deliver background in stories, but a reader who wants this latter information may give up before reaching it. Background and its cousins would have benefited from subheadings to mark the division in thought and slant.

Finally, many of the articles illuminate their ideas with copious references to literary works, both established and modern. Direct quotations typically stand well on their own: they may even encourage you to reach for the entire work during your leisure time. General discussions of particular works fall flat, though, if you are not intimate with the book. For example, I could understand the references to George Elliot’s Middlemarch, having just read this novel; but the references to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina left me in the dark because that book hasn’t yet been on my reading menu.

But the vast majority of the articles speak to the writer’s inner world: how to unblock; how to keep writing during hard times, both in the world and in your fiction; where to look for inspiration. Certain ideas recur frequently: keep a diary or journal; read widely; project yourself into your reader’s mind; project yourself into your characters’ minds; maintain a creative tension between technical competence and rule-breaking for effect, between detail and spare prose, between narration and exposition.

Few of these ideas will be foreign to the experienced writer who picks up this book. Nevertheless, the points hit home. The book might function as another method of "taking a break" when slogging through a difficult pass in your writing. The format allows you to pick up the volume, select a phrase that appeals to your current circumstances (whether with the flow or against), and to soak up some encouragement and inspiration for several minutes or quarter-hours. While I felt that some of the ABC’s were included simply to fill up space or alphabetical positions (see ZZZZZZZZZ, for example), I also found many inspirational passages and reminders of things I’ve long known, but frequently forgotten.

In short, I would not consider The ABC’s of Writing Fiction a book of daily, indispensable use. (I would rather invest in a fourth thesaurus.) However, in its function as a pick-me-up during the dry times, it could well justify its purchase price to the committed fiction writer.