Fiction Club A Concise Guide to Writing Good Fiction

For the aspiring short-story writer or novelist, this engaging and informal guide of 10,000 words covers all the essentials you need to know. For experienced fiction writers, it will remind you of basic truths of storytelling you might have lost sight of. Topics covered include "The Rules of Fiction Club"; "The Importance of the Small Details: Creating Fiction Brush Stroke by Brush Stroke"; showing vs telling; writing dialogue; balancing narration, dialogue, and description; structure, plot, and pace; point of view; flashbacks; grammar; punctuation; common usage and style errors; word count; writers groups; "Why We Write." Mark Spencer is the author of several books, including the nonfiction novel A Haunted Love Story; the novels The Weary Motel, Love and Reruns in Adams County, The Masked Demon; and the story collections Wedlock and Trespassers. His short fiction has appeared in over 100 national and international journals. His work has received the Faulkner Society Faulkner Award for the Short Novel, The Omaha Prize for the Novel, The Patrick T. Bradshaw Book Award, the Cairn Short Story Prize, and four Special Mentions in Pushcart Prize. He is the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He and his family live in the famously haunted Allen House, the subject of his book A Haunted Love Story and of episodes of the TV shows Ghost Hunters, My Ghost Story, Paranormal Witness, and A Haunting.