Inventing the World: The Fiction Writer's Guidebook to Craft and Process

Jack Smith's essays on "the craft and process" of writing fiction have appeared since 2010 in either The Writer or in the Novel and Short Story Writers Market annuals. Here they are collected and arranged into a thought-provoking guide, which while primarily addressed to "early stage writers" is also valuable to the advanced. The book is organized into six sections: The Creative Process, Fictional Elements, Some Story Challenges (such as "Avoiding Cliches" and "Beating out the Stiff Com-petition in Fiction Writing"), Fiction Long and Short, Two Genres, and Interviews of Writers, including Elizabeth Strout, Tim O'Brien, and T.C. Boyle.