The Art of Fiction (1984) by John Gardner
In The Art of Fiction’s preface, Gardner writes: “About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it.”
Tag: C.G.F.
Master Class in Fiction Writing (2006) by Adam Sexton
Master Class in Fiction Writing (2006) by Adam Sexton is a useful tool and guide along the way of crafting memorable fiction.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez is a brilliant book by a true master, storyteller and magician. While on a family vacation in Acapulco, Gabriel García Márquez became struck with a vision of a story that, in two years, would become the sensational novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee
Not only has Coetzee brought David’s character to life and allowed to live his own life the way the character desires, the reader is simultaneously not repulsed but compelled to keep reading, keep digging, keep hoping like David that punishment will not go on forever.
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Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
”The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.”
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Cormac McCarthy’s Never-Ending, Questionary Road (2014) by American Novelist CG FEWSTON
In most of Cormac McCarthy’s books there is usually a male character on some sort of quest.
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) by Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson illustrate the child-ego’s attempt to mature and understand its own mortality in a world often found morally strange and ridiculous, a world that adults eventually learn to accept as normal.
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The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell is the book that awakened in writers and storytellers in publishing and in screenwriting to the larger scope of mythology as metaphor and to the underlining structure of stories.
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What is Art? (1899) by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy writes: ”But what is this beauty which forms the subject-matter of art? How is it defined? What is it?
”As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception conveyed by a word, with the more aplomb and self-assurance do people use that word, pretending that what is understood by it is so simple and clear that it is not worth while even to discuss what it actually means.”
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The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell
The Masks of God: Vol. II, Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell is again one of those marathons of the mind.
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The Writer’s Journey (1998) by Christopher Vogler
A guide for writers based on the work of Joseph Campbell and the years of research and contribution to storytelling Vogler spent in Hollywood.
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The Masks of God, Vol. I: Primitive Mythology (1959) by Joseph Campbell
One of the last sections is “The Functioning of Myth” and Campbell goes into great deal to extrapolate the introductory section. “The ends for which men strive in the world,” writes Campbell, “are three — no more, no less; namely: love and pleasure (kāma), power and success (artha: pronounced ‘art-ha’), and lawful order and moral virtue (dharma).”
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King Solomon’s Mines (1885) by Sir H. Rider Haggard
King Solomon’s Mines is a fun adventure story that takes the reader into a mysterious land.
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To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
Much of the book is loosely based on experiences of racism in Monroeville, Alabama.
