A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft

A Kite in the Wind: Twenty Fiction Writers on Their Craft is an anthology of essays by twenty veteran writers and master teachers. While the contributors offer specific, practical advice on such fundamental aspects of craft as characterization, character names, the first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, they also give extended, thoughtful consideration to more sophisticated topics, including “imminence,” or the power of a sense of beginning; creating and maintaining tension; “lushness”; and the deliberate manipulation of information to create particular effects.

The essays in A Kite in the Wind begin as personal investigations—attempts to understand why a decision in a particular story or novel seemed unsuccessful; to define a quality or problem that seemed either unrecognized or unsatisfactorily defined; to understand what, despite years of experience as a fiction writer, resisted comprehension; and to pursue haunting, even unanswerable questions.

Unlike a how-to book, the anthology is less an instruction manual than it is an intimate visit with twenty very different writers as they explore topics that excite, intrigue, and even puzzle them. Each discussion uses specific examples and illustrations, including both canonical stories and novels and writing less frequently discussed, from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, by both American and international authors.

The contributors share their hard-earned insights for beginning and advanced writers with humility, wit, and compassion. The first section of the book focuses on narration, with particular attention paid to various kinds of narrators; the second, on strategic creation and presentation of character; the third, on some of the roles of the visual, beginning with establishing setting; and the fourth, on structural and organizational issues, from movement through time to the manipulation of information to create mystery and suspense.

The contributors have all been on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, widely considered the finest creative writing graduate program of its type in the world. They have nearly all been fellows of the National Endowment for the Arts, and many have received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The anthology includes directors of some of the country’s finest MFA creative writing programs, including those at the University of Iowa, Arizona State University, and the University of Alabama.