(Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before: and Other Essays on Writing Fiction

by Peter Turchi

Overview

In (Don’t) Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before, Peter Turchi combines personal narrative and close reading of a wide range of stories and novels to reveal how writers create the fiction that matters to us. Building on his much-loved Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Turchi leads readers and writers to an understanding of how the intricate mechanics of storytelling—including shifts in characters’ authority, the subtle manipulation of images, careful attention to point of view, the strategic release of information, and even digressing from the (apparent) story—can create powerful effects.

Using examples from Dickens, Chekhov, and Salinger, and Twain to more contemporary writers including Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, E. L. Doctorow, Jenny Erpenbeck, Adam Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, Jai Chakrabarti, Yoko Ogawa, Richard Powers, Deborah Eisenberg, Olga Tokarczuk, Rachel Cusk, and Colson Whitehead, Turchi offers illuminating insights into the inner workings of fiction as well as practical advice for writers looking to explore their craft from a fresh angle beyond the fundamentals of character and setting, plot, and scene.

While these essays draw from decades of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, they also speak to writers working on their own. In “Out of the Workshop, into the Laboratory,” Turchi discusses how anyone can make the most of discussions of stories or novels in progress, and in “Reading Like a Writer” he provides guidelines for learning from writing you admire. Perhaps best of all, these essays by a writer the Houston Chronicle has called “one of the country’s foremost thinkers on the art of writing” are as entertaining as they are edifying, always reminding us of the power and pleasure of storytelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595349774
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Peter Turchi has written and coedited several books on writing fiction, including Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, and (Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before and Other Essays on Writing Fiction. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Colorado Review, among other journals. He has received numerous accolades, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.

Peter Turchi has written and coedited several books on writing fiction, including Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, and (Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before and Other Essays on Writing Fiction. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Colorado Review, among other journals. He has received numerous accolades, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.

Read an Excerpt

This book is a product of nearly four decades of teaching fiction writing. More specifically, what follows are discussions of topics that arose in my conversations with developing writers, from undergraduates to MFA students to doctoral candidates, topics that aren’t basic components of fiction and that either my students or I felt weren’t (yet) sufficiently addressed in the various handbooks and books on craft available to them. 

For instance: the discussion of what I call power plays arose from ongoing conversations about the old notion that every story arises from conflict. Students felt that was reductive, and I agree (I resist nearly every assertion that “every” story does or should do anything). Even so, it can be useful to think about the ways stories arise from imbalances or shifts in power or authority. The discussions of first and third person narrators were the result of years of conversations about point of view and narrative distance. The essay on the strategic release of information is a direct response to certain students’ resistance to exposition (in their own work; some of the same students happily read enormous fantasy novels with dozens of pages of expository world building); the discussion of motifs was one I had to write out so as to be able to explain them to students who suggested that if they didn’t notice images as they read, the images must not be significant.

An exception is the discussion of asides and digressions, which arose from something I recognized in a lot of the writing I enjoy, and from a conversation with one of my old teachers (and later colleague), the wonderful poet Steve Orlen. For fifteen years, my job involved a lot of public speaking, and over time I indulged in elaborate, comic digression. Steve simply asked me, “Have you ever written a story like that?” I hadn’t, and his question sent me off in a new direction. As is often the case, the advice that he offered was advice he had received, resulting in his movement away from short lyric poems to the longer, seemingly conversational ones that allowed him to express himself uniquely. (If you don’t know Steve’s poems, look for The Elephant’s Child.)

While I refer to my experience in classes and workshops, and these essays are in conversation with others on craft that students are likely to come across, my hope is that this book will also be useful to writers working on their own, or exchanging manuscripts with one or two fellow writers. With that in mind, the appendix includes a discussion of workshop practices that can be put to use by a group of friends as well as by a student or teacher in a degree program, and a discussion of annotations, a tool developed by the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College that can be put to use by any writers intent on developing their work. I’ve used them everywhere I’ve taught. Students are almost always unhappy about having to write them, and they’re almost always surprised to discover how helpful they are. 

Finally: I’ve used a variety of fiction to illustrate various points, and I discuss a few of the stories and novels from multiple perspectives: the richest work benefits from that sort of attention. The writers referenced range from old men of what used to be called the canon (Charles Dickens, Chekhov, Mark Twain) to notable voices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, J.D. Salinger, E.L. Doctorow), to more contemporary writers (Jenny Erpenbeck, Adam Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, Jai Chakrabarti, Yoko Ogawa, Deborah Eisenberg, Olga Tokarczuk, Colson Whitehead). These are not the only writers whose work could illustrate these points. An interesting version of this book would have blank pages, so you could choose stories and novels you admire and look at them through these same lenses, and detail your own analyses. That’s a book I encourage you to write, if only for yourself.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  
• Power Plays: Toward More Dynamic Scenes
  
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Information Dump: The Strategic Release of Information
• I See What You’re Saying: Images and Motifs
• The Roast Beef is The Story: Digressions, Misdirection, and Asides
  
• Don’t Stand so Close to Me: Narrative Distance in First Person Fiction          
  
• Don’t Stand so Close to Him, or Her, or Them, Either: Narrative Distance in Third Person Fiction
• (Don’t) Stop Me if You’ve Heard this Before: Storytelling Characters           
• Archimedes’ Lever: Setting a Narrative World in Motion         
  
• Appendix
  
• Out of the Workshop, Into the Laboratory          
  
• Reading Like a Writer        
  
• Resources for Fiction Writers          
  
• Acknowledgements          
  

Editorial Reviews

10/10/2022

Writing wisdom is in no short supply in this rich collection from novelist Turchi (The Girls Next Door). Combining anecdotes about his teaching career with sharp criticism, Turchi gracefully explores the craft’s ins and outs, covering point of view, narrative strategy, and the use of imagery. In “Don’t Stand So Close to Me: Narrative Distance in First-Person Fiction,” Turchi breaks down “primitive first person” narration, in which there’s no “apparent difference between the author’s view of the story and the narrator’s view of the story,” and uses nuanced readings of Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn to demonstrate how to create distance. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Information Dump: The Strategic Release of Information” describes how tension can be created by withholding of information from readers, as seen in Adam Johnson’s story “Hurricanes Anonymous,” which “sustains momentum by keeping information coming to us in different directions, on different levels.” A useful appendix, meanwhile, suggests notes on workshops (“a combination of seriousness, respect, humility, and generosity” is key). Turchi’s analyses are themselves terrific examples of reading like a writer, a skill he touts as being crucial to the art. Candid and graceful, this deserves a spot on aspiring novelists’ shelves. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Peter Turchi illuminates the craft of fiction writing with stories and metaphors that inspire the spirit and light up the imagination. I love his books and have stolen a ton from them.” — Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist

"As I read through (Don’t) Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before, I found myself questioning not only the novels I’ve written, but the stories I’ve told—to myself and to others—wondering where the truth ended and the fiction began. — Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians for Bomb Magazine

Praise for Maps of the Imagination

"Readers, after all, love to get lost in a good book. It is a wise writer who will not only deposit them there but lead them out again, whole and thoroughly satisfied.”— ForeWord

“It’s not uncommon to compare the writing of a story to the mapping of a world, but no one has so fully, or so seductively and rewardingly, performed as extended a meditation on this illuminating metaphor as Turchi. . . . Brilliant and pleasurable, Turchi’s musing on our innate need to know where we are, where we might go, and why alters our perceptions of not only maps and fiction but also the nature of the mind’s terra incognita.”— Booklist

“For Turchi, the map is more than metaphor: it is an organizing principle of narrative. Language is like a land, paragraphs are districts, sentences are streets, and words are only lines and curves constructed the way maps are made of lines and shapes. Letters are like wild canyons and chaotic seas that the writer maps into words and then into sentences and then into scenes.” — The New Yorker

“I wish I had written Maps of the Imagination.” — Rebecca Solnit

“A gorgeous book in every way… engaging, intelligent, and never jargon laden; this book wears its vast learning lightly.” — CHOICE

“Maps of the Imagination ranges widely across a many disciplines and art forms, from mathematics and formal geometry to Marx Brothers movies and the works of such writers as Borges and Calvino. Sometimes with off-the-cuff analogies, sometimes with pages of analysis, Turchi charts a lively course through a labyrinthine field of varying ways of looking at the world and, most important, the blank page.” — Publishers Weekly

“[Turchi’s] study of maps has inspired writers, artists, and designers for more than a decade, about what maps can teach us when it comes to the creative process.” — Fast Company

“A genre-defying gem that straddles art book, writer’s manual and cultural critique in an utterly captivating way that makes you look at both old maps and familiar fiction with new eyes.” — Brain Pickings

Praise for A Muse and A Maze

"Turchi invites us to think about books as mysteries unfolding in time, giving us clues that we piece together." — Washington Post

“One of the country’s foremost thinkers on the art of writing.…Turchi argues that writers are like magicians who aim to lead us to a state of wonder." — Houston Chronicle

“Altogether stimulating." — Brain Pickings

"Consistently engaging, lively, and thought provoking. The interactive element is also a delight, as there are actual puzzles scattered throughout (answers are provided in the back) to demonstrate the challenges and rewards offered by puzzles—and by good writing.…Readers and puzzle lovers should find much of value." — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

12/01/2022

Short-story writer Turchi (creative writing, Univ. of Houston) pens an insightful new essay collection, his third book on the craft of fiction (after A Muse & a Maze and Maps of the Imagination). Here Turchi goes beyond the basics to discuss more challenging facets of fiction writing that have arisen in his work with students. These include: power dynamics among characters, exposition, images and motifs, digression, narrative distance, characters that tell stories, and setting a story in motion. A working knowledge of these concepts is extremely beneficial, and Turchi mines a wealth of literary examples to make his points. Well-known short story writers such as Anton Chekhov, Andre Dubus, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Anne Porter, and J.D. Salinger are represented, as well as contemporary fiction authors Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and (perhaps less familiar) Jai Chakrabarti, Olga Tokarczuk, and Yoko Ogawa. Turchi also has a knack for weaving engaging personal stories, mythology, plays, politics, and pop culture references into his essays. VERDICT Academic libraries that support creative writing programs and those looking for new perspectives and resources on fiction writing and analysis will appreciate this volume.—Denise Miller

Library Journal