A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft

by Andrea Barrett (Editor), Peter Turchi (Editor)

Overview

A Kite in the Wind is an anthology of essays by 20 veteran writers and master teachers. While the contributors offer specific, practical advice on such fundamental aspects of craft as characterization, character names, the first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, they also give extended, thoughtful consideration to more sophisticated topics, including “imminence,” or the power of a sense of beginning; creating and maintaining tension; “lushness”; and the deliberate manipulation of information to create particular effects.

The essays in A Kite in the Wind begin as personal investigations — attempts to understand why a decision in a particular story or novel seemed unsuccessful; to define a quality or problem that seemed either unrecognized or unsatisfactorily defined; to understand what, despite years of experience as a fiction writer, resisted comprehension; and to pursue haunting, even unanswerable questions.

Unlike a how-to book, the anthology is less an instruction manual than it is an intimate visit with twenty very different writers as they explore topics that excite, intrigue, and even puzzle them. Each discussion uses specific examples and illustrations, including both canonical stories and novels and writing less frequently discussed, from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, by both American and international authors.

The contributors share their hard-earned insights for beginning and advanced writers with humility, wit, and compassion. The first section of the book focuses on narration, with particular attention paid to various kinds of narrators; the second, on strategic creation and presentation of character; the third, on some of the roles of the visual, beginning with establishing setting; and the fourth, on structural and organizational issues, from movement through time to the manipulation of information to create mystery and suspense. Contributors include Wilton Barnhardt, Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, Karen Brennan, Maud Casey, Lan Samantha Chang, Robert Cohen, Stacey D’Erasmo, Judy Doenges, Anthony Doerr, C. J. Hribal, Michael Martone, Kevin McIlvoy, Alexander Parsons, Frederick Reiken, Steven Schwartz, Dominic Smith, Debra Spark, Megan Staffel, Sarah Stone, and Peter Turchi.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595341075
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	540 KB

About the Author

Andrea Barrett is the author of the story collection Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award, and Servants of the Map, as well as six novels, most recently The Air We Breathe. She coedited, with Peter Turchi, The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work. She teaches at Williams College and lives in western Massachusetts.
Called "one of the country's foremost thinkers on the art of writing" by the Houston Chronicle, Peter Turchi's books include A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; and a collection of stories, Magician. Turchi's short story "Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning," listed as one of 100 Notable Stories of 2002 by the editors of Best American Short Stories and one of 15 Recommended Stories by the jury for the O. Henry Prize Stories, has been published in Arabic and, in English, combined with images by Charles Ritchie, in a limited edition artist's book. He has also coedited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work; and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. Turchi's stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Colorado Review. He has received Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 1993 to 2008 he directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Turchi recently taught at Arizona State University, where he was director of the creative writing program, and he's currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.
Called "one of the country's foremost thinkers on the art of writing" by the Houston Chronicle, Peter Turchi's books include Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; and a collection of stories, Magician. Turchi's short story "Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning," listed as one of 100 Notable Stories of 2002 by the editors of Best American Short Stories and one of 15 Recommended Stories by the jury for the O. Henry Prize Stories, has been published in Arabic and, in English, combined with images by Charles Ritchie, in a limited edition artist's book. He has also coedited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work; and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. Turchi's stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Colorado Review. He has received Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 1993 to 2008 he directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Turchi recently taught at Arizona State University, where he was director of the creative writing program, and he's currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.

Hometown:

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

November 16, 1954

Place of Birth:

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Union College

Website:

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/004348.htm

Table of Contents

Introduction Peter Turchi Andrea Barrett ix

part 1 Narrative Distance and Narrative Voice

The Author-Narrator-Character Merge: Why Many First-Time Novelists Wind Up with Flat, Uninteresting Protagonists Frederick Reiken 3

Self-Awareness and Self-Deception: Beyond the Unreliable Narrator Sarah Stone 25

The Truthless Narrator Judy Doenges 42

First Person: Finding the Right Address Wilton Barnhardt 55

Comic and Cosmic Distance C. J. Hribal 70

part 2 Revealing Character

In the Garden: Revealing a Character at a Moment of Change Megan Staffel 89

The Space Between Stacey D'Erasmo 103

The Literature of Delusion: Approaches to Madness and Mania in Fiction Dominic Smith 119

The Absence of Their Presence: Mythic Character in Fiction Steven Schwartz 136

Emblem, Essence Robert Cohen 156

part 3 Seeing and Setting

"It's a Wooden Leg First": On the Nature of Seeing in Fiction Maud Casey 173

Matrix for Meaning: Physical Setting in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian Alexander Parsons 188

Some Reflections on the Concept of Place in Fiction Karen Brennan 207

The Heart One Knows by Heart: Operating Instructions for Operating Instructions Michael Martone 224

part 4 Pattern and Shape

Size Matters Debra Spark 237

Puzzles, Mysteries, and Other Problems; or, The Seven Bridges of Königsberg Peter Turchi 252

The Breakout Element: Unpredictability and the Novel Lan Samantha Chang 271

Lush Life Charles Baxter 289

On Suspense, Shower Murders, the Sword of Damocles, and Shooting People on the Beach Anthony Doerr 303

The About-to-Be Moment: Imminence in the Grimm Fairy Tales Kevin McIlvoy 324

Contributors 337

Credits 343

Editorial Reviews

Some of our very best fiction writers tackle many of the thorniest and most fascinating aspects of storytelling. Thoughtful and serious and wise, this is much more than a how-to book.”— Richard Russo

“Rule number one is when you get a chance to study with a master, you take it. Rule number two is when you get a chance to study a master studying another master, you push Grandma out of the way to take it. This is a rule number two book. Get it, read it, shelve it—along with its companion volumes—next to Nabokov’s ‘Lectures on Literature’ and O’Connor’s ‘Mystery and Manners.’”— David Wroblewski

From the Publisher