A Passion for Narrative: A Guide for Writing Fiction

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This guide for writing fiction comes from a master storyteller, and is
itself a series of tales about problems, and how some of the best
writers in English have solved them.

B.C.’s Jack Hodgins, author of such comic and mythological fictions
as Spit Delaney’s Island and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, has
been teaching writing for 30 years at high schools, universities, and
workshops. His fiction runs to comic exuberance, but the chapter titles
here display an orderly mind: “Getting Started”; “Plot: A Causal
Chain”; “Structure: The Architecture of Fiction”; “Point of View
and Voice: ‘Where I’m Calling From’”; and “Making Connections:
Metaphors, Symbols and Allusions.”

Hodgins enlists helpers along the way, in the form of choice quotations
from famous storytellers. Vladimir Nabokov reminds us that “a major
writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it
is the enchanter in him that predominates. ...” The style of this
unusual guide combines the very elements Nabokov finds essential. Here,
as in his other books, Hodgins is storyteller, teacher, and enchanter.