Adolphus Writer

Jon Franklin, two-time Pulitzer prize winner, wrote Writing for Story – Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction to teach authors his methods. Franklin illustrates his technique with annotated versions of his two essays: “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” and “The B

Jon Franklin, two-time Pulitzer prize winner, wrote Writing for Story – Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction to teach authors his methods. Franklin illustrates his technique with annotated versions of his two essays: “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” and “The Ballad of Old Man Peter” the first of which won the 1979 Pulitzer prize in Feature Writing. The goal of his technique is to impart knowledge and truth to readers. To paraphrase Franklin:

The secret to professional writing is a fusion of learned craftsmanship with artistic vision born of experience. The successful writer is the one who grasps the separate parts of their story and sees how those components work together to produce a compelling and dramatic tale.

Franklin’s writing process consists of three parts: outlining, roughing in the draft, and polishing. Outlining concerns the conceptual associations between the character and action which, for a short story, consists of a time sequence of five major focus narratives: the beginning complication focus, three development focuses which constitute the story body, and the ending resolution focus. Roughing in the draft (i.e., the structural level) involves the internal makeup of major focuses: sequence, emphasis, pacing, and orientation of action. Polishing entails good grammar, word usage, imagery, and principles of sentence and paragraph structure.

We heartily recommend Franklin’s method and urge you to read his book.

The book: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner is not prescriptive in the same way as is Jon Franklin’s book: Writing for Story. Gardner surveys contemporary literature in general, pointing out its structure, methods,

The book: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner is not prescriptive in the same way as is Jon Franklin’s book: Writing for Story. Gardner surveys contemporary literature in general, pointing out its structure, methods, and morality. Morality in literature, for Gardner, is whether a story portrays what is real and eternally true about human life, as opposed to what is false or philosophically trendy.

His New York Times obituary quoted him saying:

“The value of great fiction is not just that it entertains or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our failures and limitations.”

The quote is from The Art of Fiction. Though he won the 1976 National Book Critic’s Circle Award for October Light, he deeply offended the literary powers-that-be at the time, especially with his book: On Moral Fiction.

In The Art of Fiction, Gardner describes — the work of fiction; its value; the overall method to create it; pitfalls in its creation; and, finally, the real work that the fiction writer does.

John Gardner describes, in far more detail, not only these things, but the current state of fiction writing and his thoughts on it all. A worthy read; The Art of Fiction is highly motivational and recommended.