Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers [Mass Market Paperback]

David Madden (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Plume (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452264146
• ISBN-13: 978-0452264144
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #813,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

, earned an M.A. at San Francisco State, and attended Yale Drama School on a John Golden Fellowship. Writer-in-residence at LSU from 1968 to 1992, Director of the Creative Writing Program 1992-1994, Founding Director of the United States Civil War Center 1992-1999, he is now LSU
Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing., Emeritus.

In l961, Random House published his first novel, The Beautiful Greed, based on his Merchant seaman experiences. For Warner Brothers, he adapted his second novel, Cassandra Singing, to the screen (not yet produced). The Shadow Knows, a book of stories, won a National Council on the Arts Award, judged by Hortense Calisher and Walker Percy. His second collection, The New Orleans of Possibilities, appeared in 1982. His stories have been reprinted in numerous college textbooks and twice in Best American Short Stories. A Rockefeller Grant, recommended by Robert Penn Warren and Saul Bellow, enabled him to work in Venice and Yugoslavia on his third novel, Bijou, a 1974 Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection. His best-known novel, The Suicide's Wife, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and made into a CBS movie. Pleasure-Dome, On the Big Wind, and Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War are his most recent novels. He has finished a short novel, Abducted By Circumstance, and is finishing the third novel in30 a trilogy London Bridge in Plague and Fire.

His poems and short stories have appeared in a wide variety of publications, from Redbook and Playboy to The Southern Review and Botteghe Oscure. His plays have won many state and national contests; several have been published.

Among his works of literary criticism are: Wright Morris, A Primer of the Novel [major revision published in 2006], Harlequin's Stick, Charlie's Cane, James M. Cain, Revising Fiction, and two collections of his literary essays, The Poetic Image in Six Genres and Touching the Web of Southern Novelists (summer 2006).

He has published essays on Albert Camus, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Mansfield, Michel Tournier, William Gaddis, Jules Romains, Emily Bronte, Edward Albee, Graham Greene, Richard Wilbur, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Joseph Conrad, Eugene O'Neill, Ross Macdonald, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe, James Dickey, Ingmar Bergman, Ikira Kurasawa. Best-known of the many books of original critical essays he has edited are Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, Remembering James Agee, Nathanael West: The Cheaters and the Cheated, Rediscoveries [I and II], Classics of Civil War Fiction, Thomas Wolfe's Civil War, and Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of the Survivors.

He has also edited several innovative textbooks: The Poplar Culture Explosion, Creative Choices, The World of Fiction, A Pocketful of Prose, eight other titles in the Pocketful series from Harcourt Brace, and Studies in the Short Story. He is a former assistant editor of The Kenyon Review and has served on the Advisory Board of several other literary magazines, including Journal of Narrative Theory.

He has given lectures at many conferences and dramatic readings from his fiction at over 100 colleges and universities. Writer-in-Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill, Clark University, Lynchburg College, among others, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Delaware, he held the Chair of Excellence at Austin Peay State University. David Madden: A Writer for All Genres consists of original essays by scholars and creative writers on Madden's writings.

NEW ADDRESS: 118 Black Mountain, NC 28711 [e-mail] // web:davidmadden.net

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revising is commplicated, December 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers (Mass Market Paperback)

Revising is complicated enough; however, if one is unable to identify the problem, revising becomes impossible. Many writing problems have to do with structural errors. Madden's book elegantly and clearly defines a myriad of structural elements that might be at the root of such errors and poses each element as a question, such as: "Does the protagonist fail to affect the other characters?" or, "Have you in some way diffused the impact of the climax?" or, "Do passages that reflect your own biases or judgments intrude?" Each question is followed by a detailed answer that includes examples from the writing of Faulkner, James Dickey, Ray Carver, Fitzgerald, V. Woolf, James Joyce, to name but a few. Madden sometimes gives, by way of example, an earlier version of a famous writer's text and compares it to the writer's revised version. For example, Madden discusses the "device of implication" in "...the five versions of the opening of Mrs. Dalloway." I found this book to be invaluable, not only for its practical advice, but for its inherent encouragment. There is nothing like being able to see that one's favorite writers struggled constantly with issues of revision, sometimes even after the publication of a book, such as Fitzgerald's post-publication restructuring of Tender is the Night.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's good but..., August 24, 2003

By 

TheCafeWriter (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers (Mass Market Paperback)

The book is VERY good as a checklist for revising your fiction, but I would ONLY recommend it for confident writers who already have some experience. Of the nearly 200 self-examination questions in it, nearly ALL of them are written in the negative. ("Is your story too this? Not enough that? Does it lack this? Have you failed to do that?")

I wanted to share it with a group of beginning writers, but after reviewing the checklist questions, I found that for most new writers, the overwhelming number of potential negatives would be too daunting and might even discourage them from writing altogether.

A good book but I don't recommend it for beginning writers.

5.0 out of 5 stars A little daunting, but essential., October 21, 2011

By 

JHill - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers (Mass Market Paperback)

I am trying to maintain a balance between analysis and just putting words on the page. I think both processes are essential. This book is very helpful in that it provides a list of topics, along with applicable examples, that one can wrestle with, then decide to incorporate or simply set aside.