Turning Life into Fiction: Finding Character, Plot, Setting and Other Elements of Novel and Short Story Writing in the Everyday World [Paperback]

Robin Hemley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1997 | ISBN-10: 1884910378 | ISBN-13: 978-1884910371

With lively style, good humor and insight, Robin Hemley helps you turn all that you experience into fresh and powerful fiction. By learning to "reimagine, " you'll focus on translating real-world people and events into characters and scenes that happen on paper for the first time. You'll think "what if" instead of "what is" in order to take control of your material and cut loose the inhibitions of real life. In these pages, you'll learn how to hone your observation skills and fill your journal with rich and vivid details. (Because, as Hemley writes, "Life is in the details, and so is good fiction.") You'll see how to decide which ideas to bring to fiction and which ones to let go. And you'll learn how to: find the right form - novel, short story, vignette, memoir - for the story you want to tell; use "triggers" to start your reader's imagination rolling; keep your fiction emotionally honest by making the right choices between "the way it happened" and what the story dictates (ask "Is it believable?," not "Did it happen?"); create composites of real people and places that fit the unique needs of your story and empower your imagination; focus your fiction. Make sure everything, every character counts - and eliminate "people who sit at the end of the bar without a role to play"; fictionalize - ethically and legally - other people's stories. Learn your rights as a writer versus their rights to privacy. (Can you use actual names? When do you need to get permission?). To illustrate how writers feed their fiction with reality, Hemley uses examples from his own work and from fiction masters of yesterday and today. At the end of each chapter, challenging exercises help you apply the basictheories and push them even further. An adventurous read, Turning Life Into Fiction will help you create fiction that's just as strange and wonderful and "real" as the life that inspires it.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you've got friends who are fiction writers, watch out: "Writers are spies, liars, and thieves," writes Robin Hemley in Turning Life into Fiction, and your words, deeds, and character--benevolent and malevolent alike--could be immortalized in print some day. If you write fiction, listen up, look around, and take note. Why strain your brain making things up when you can transform real life into stories worth telling? Hemley recommends keeping a journal ("It's akin to an artist's sketchbook"), writing down your dreams (the unconscious is a great source of free material), and mining all those crazy stories your grandmother used to tell. Then combine bits and pieces from these sources, take one great mind leap (and many drafts) and--voila--you've got fiction. Warning: even though it really happened, it might not be believable. Second warning: while it's hard to know when something you write will offend the person it's based on, says Hemley, "above all, don't mess with male pattern baldness."

From Booklist

Neither simplistic nor condescending but at the same time definitely for the beginning writer, this is an enlightening and even inspiring guide to utilizing elements of one's own life and of one's family history as fodder for writing novels and short stories. Hemley makes initial distinctions between autobiographical fiction and sheer autobiography, reminding the new writer of autobiographical fiction that "the trick, of course, comes in molding the factual material to the specifications of one's fictional world." Journal keeping is heavily encouraged; and the actual processes whereby truth--real people, real places, and real events--can be rendered into fiction are laid out in easy-to-follow terms. A unique book for all public library collections of how-to-write books. Brad Hooper --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Story Pr (September 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884910378
• ISBN-13: 978-1884910371
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #700,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life IS stranger than fiction..., August 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Turning Life into Fiction: Finding Character, Plot, Setting and Other Elements of Novel and Short Story Writing in the Everyday World (Paperback)

This book offers tricks and tips to teach you how to use real life situations to develop characters, plot, setting and other elements of story. The author will have you eavesdropping in restuarants and spying on the neighbors in an effort to see how easy it is to come up with believable story.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging well organized book., October 28, 1997

By 

BB [e-mail] (United States of America) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Turning Life into Fiction (Paperback)

Robin Hemley covers it all. He immediately engages the reader and his love, as well as his expertise in the craft, is evident in each page. The technical points are covered in a way that leaves you feeling as if you have just read a really good novel. The ethical questions are covered without getting too bogged down. A very inspiring and illuminating book on how to get started writing. B. Bruce, New Caney Tx.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Turn this book into your lifesaver!!, March 1, 2008

By 

NaughtiLiterati (NYC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Turning Life into Fiction (Paperback)

How many of us have shelves and shelves of writing books...yet when they found this one realized that it was one of the very few that they needed?

I wanted to chime in on the revised edition since I just discovered it yesterday and have not put it down, aside from going to sleep. I am one of those writers who draws inspiration from my own life and the lives of friends and always had an idea of how to go about it, but this book is the black and white, be all and end all.

Here you'll learn that it's OKAY to write from life (those that think it's not as imaginitive be damned), and you'll learn HOW to - best advice being to distance yourself from the story and make it believeable based on DETAIL, vivid characters and emotional honesty - not memory, which is our natural instinct at first.

I love the way each chapter is broken down into the very concerns that we take on in order as we work our way through a story, so it's *extremely* user-friendly and very humorous too! I also love the fact that it's written for an audience that knows about writing already in terms of technique and terminology, and not dumbed down like the rest of the hokey bs that we see. I would rave on and on but I've got some writing to do!

Get this book at once.