By Cunning & Craft
By Cunning & Craft
by Peter Selgin
ISBN: 978-1-58297-491-0
$19.99 hardcover; 272 pages
Available March 2007
Read an Excerpt!
Discover how to build realistic characters by successfully revealing motivation through action. Click here to view or download the table of contents, as well as an excerpt from Chapter I: People.
Bonus Online Exclusive!
Read Peter Selgin’s “El Malecón,” the short story analyzed in Chapter III: Plot and Structure.
About the Book
Writing successful fiction is a balance between trusting one’s own instincts and making the right conscious choices. In By Cunning & Craft, award-winning novelist and short-story writer Peter Selgin shows you how to combine the instinctive process of creation with sound technical ingenuity.
With precise instruction and examples from classic and best-selling works, this authoritative guide helps you master the ten essential fiction-writing elements: inspiration; character; point of view; structure and plot; theme; dialogue; description; scenes, summary, and flashback; voice and style; and revision.
Whether you’re facing the blank pages of a first draft or trying to revise a completed manuscript, By Cunning & Craft provides you with the guidance you need to outfox common writing pitfalls and make sure your work isn’t wanting in wit—or perfection.
About the Author
Peter Selgin’s stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines, including Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Boulevard, The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Descant, Northwest Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. They also appear in the anthologies Our Roots Are Deep With Passion (Other Press, 2006), Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide From New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School (Bloomsbury, 2003), and The Best American Essays 2006. His novel, Life Goes to the Movies, was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and his short story collection, Bodies of Water, was short-listed for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. His children’s book, S.S. Gigantic Across the Atlantic (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1999), was a Scholastic Book Club selection and won the Lemme Book Award for best children’s book in 2000.
Mr. Selgin has won the Mill Mountain New Play Competition and the Charlotte Repertory New Play Festival Competition. His drama A God in the House, based on Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his suicide device, was staged at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. His paintings have been featured in the New Yorker, Gourmet, and The Wall Street Journal, and on Good Day NY. He also has been a guest on NPR’s Weekend Edition. He teaches writing at Gotham Writers’ Workshop and at the MFA writing program at Western Connecticut State University, and leads his own annual writing workshop in Vitorchiano, Italy. He holds an MFA from the New School and lives in the Bronx, New York, where he is co-editor of the journal Alimentum: The Literature of Food. Visit his Web site at www.peterselgin.com.
Praise for By Cunning & Craft
Writing fiction is a matter of choices, decisions that shape the imagination. No one clarifies those choices more effectively than Peter Selgin in By Cunning & Craft. He demystifies the alternatives through straightforward explanations and illustrations. By showing the options, by suggesting which are most effective for specific situations, and by demonstrating through examples, Selgin gives writers the resources to structure their creativity.
—Walter Cummins, Editor, The Literary Review
Cunning and craft, indeed: Within these pages Peter Selgin quotes Chekov to the effect that, “The writer’s task is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” What I admire most about By Cunning & Craft is its rare and inspired modesty—an ultimately stylish resistance to pledging more than Selgin (really anyone) can deliver. May many learn from this book.
—Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography Of Jim Thompson, and Director of the New School Graduate Writing Program
There is craft and there is cunning. There is the struggle to get published at all. But there is also the chance that you will do something extraordinary. Peter Selgin illustrates the tricks, both basic and sophisticated. But greatness is what he’s really interested in. He thrusts the readers into the company of those who wrote magnificently. Salinger is quoted, Hemingway, Thomas Mann, E.M. Forster, John Gardner. “This book is for serious writers of all levels,” he writes in the beginning, and he’s talking about intentions. If you mean to shoot for the stars, then this book is for you.
—Benjamin Cheever, author of The Plagiarist, The Partisan (both New York Times Best Books), Famous After Death, and The Good Nanny
Peter Selgin has written an excellent guide—witty, lucid, well-written—for beginning writers of fiction. In fact, any writer can learn from it.
—Vivian Gornick, author of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative and Approaching Eye Level
By Cunning & Craft is a masterpiece of writing about writing. If, like Scheherazade, you had to spin out a story under threat of death, this is the how-to book to read. It’s filled with thoughtful, nuanced advice from a teacher/writer who actually writes—and writes beautifully and with great humor. The list of rejected stories is worth the price of the whole book.
—Nora Gallagher, author of Things Seen and Unseen, Practicing Resurrection, and the forthcoming Changing Light
A wonderfully helpful, thorough, and honest book on writing, By Cunning & Craft is filled with good sense, good advice, and many excellent examples of good writing. A book to read and read again with profit by the beginning, the middle, and the writer of many years.
—Sheila Kohler, author of Cracks, Crossways, and The Children of Pithiviers
Along with the great advice, Selgin is pure pleasure to read.
—Alexander Steele, Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers’ Workshop