Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was one of the bestselling authors of all time. In Confessions of a Young Novelist, he shares some unique advice for writin

How to Write Creative Fiction: Umberto Eco’s Four Rules

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2021-05-31 13:30:10

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was one of the bestselling authors of all time. In Confessions of a Young Novelist, he shares some unique advice for writing fiction.

Umberto Eco wrote Confessions of a Young Novelist in his late seventies. But having published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, only twenty-eight years earlier, he considered himself a newcomer to fiction writing. Looking back on his career so far, Eco reveals some valuable insights into his writing process. In this post, we’ve extracted four of the key lessons for fiction writers from Confessions of a Young Novelist.

“I have never understood why Homer is viewed as a creative writer and Plato isn’t. Why is a bad poet a creative writer, while a good scientific essayist is not?”

Some languages draw a distinction between the kind of writer who creates texts out of their imagination and the kind who simply records information, such as a poet versus a court stenographer. Eco disagrees with the notion that we can make this distinction based on the function a writer’s work serves in society. Nor can we define as creative solely writing that does not pretend to state the truth:

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