The Art of Detail and Texture of a Story

About the lecture

In this module, we think about the importance of details when it comes to creative writing, focusing in particular on: (i) the lack of hard and fast rules for what makes good writing; (ii) John Gardner's advice from The Art of Fiction (1983) – "In any piece of writing, the writer's first job is to convince the reader that the events he recounts in the story really happened"; (iii) Colm Tóibín's view that "a novel is a thousand details" and the idea of creative writing as an accumulation of small details; (iv) the idea that it is always better to show the reader something than to simply tell them, with an example from Gwendoline Riley's 'My Phantoms' (2021); and (v) the idea that creative writing involves a balance of the left and right halves of your brain.

About the lecturer

Edmund Gordon is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King's College, London. His first book, The Invention of Angela Carter (2016) received the Somerset Maugham Award, the Biographers’ Club/Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.