1. Fiction writing 3 November 2016
Pippa Goldschmidt, STIS

2. Series of five workshops:
26 Oct – planning for your thesis
3 Nov – fiction writing
23 Nov – writing sentences and paragraphs
1 Feb – first draft vs editing
15 March – critiquing your own work

3. Who am I? Currently writer-in-residence at STIS
Writer of fiction, poetry, reviews, articles
I used to be:
an astronomer
a policy advisor in Govt.
One of my favourite books:
‘Cat’s Eye’ by Margaret Atwood

4. Today’s workshop
Commonalities between fiction and non-fiction
A game of cricket
Looking at some extracts – how do writers do it?
Some tools for good writing
‘don’t mention the war’
Where to get inspiration – the what
Writing resources

5. Why write fiction when you’re a post-grad student?
Fiction and non-fiction both rely on
conscious and precise choice of words
understanding of style
desire/ability to convince your reader of your argument
Writing fiction can help you write better non-fiction – practice helps you understand:
the importance of different components of writing
your own strengths and weaknesses

6. Why write fiction when you’re a post-grad student?
Fiction helps readers and writers become more empathetic to different worlds and voices, e.g.:
‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
‘Kepler’ by John Banville

7. The use of fiction in academic writing:
Galileo: ‘Dialogues concerning two chief world systems’
Einstein’s thought experiments
Fiction mixed with non-fiction:
‘Red Plenty’ by Francis Spufford

8. An exercise! The cricket game…
The Man in the Moon has an enormous right eye.

9. Looking at some extracts
How do writers do it?
Looking at some extracts
Who’s telling the story? A fictional character or a narrator?
Do we get inside their heads?
Do we get inside anyone else’s heads?
How biased or impartial does it feel?
How much external detail do we see of these made-up worlds?
Are we told obvious facts or do we have to infer anything?

10. Tools for good writing Telling vs showing:
It was winter of the year A large man stepped out of a doorway into a snowstorm.
Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
Henry hated snowstorms.
God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

11. Point of view – who is telling this story?
Internal vs external narrators
1st person ‘I’ vs 3rd person ‘He/She’
Psychic distance – how close are we to the action?

12. What tense – past, present or future?
Mary puts the vase on the table as her husband shoots himself
Mary was putting the vase on the table as her husband shot himself
Mary put the vase on the table as her husband was shooting himself
Mary had put the vase on the table before her husband shot himself
Mary will put the vase on the table when her husband shoots himself
What style –
realist
poetic
magical realism

13. What drives a story forward?
Conflict – external
Constraints – external
Need – internal
Desire - internal

14. Next exercise:
Describe a landscape as seen by a man or woman whose son or daughter has just been killed while fighting in a war.
Don’t mention:
The son or daughter
The war
The death

15. We’ve talked about the ‘how’, now for the ‘what’:

16. Writing resources
‘Writing Down The Bones’ Natalie Goldberg
‘The Art of Writing’ John Gardner
This Itch of Writing – Emma Darwin’s blog and toolkit at

17. Go to:
for links to useful info – the password is SSPS2016