Short fiction writing in English by Chinese university students: An integrated F-A-I-T-H approach

Abstract

When delivering a speech at a meeting of the Writers’ Congress, Ernest Hemingway said as a fiction writer: A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it. (1937) Does this statement still ring true today? If it does, what approach should and can be taken for Chinese university students to write ‘truly’ during their fiction writing workshops in English when they know what they try to accomplish is indeed something fictional or self-evidently ‘untrue’? What characterises the main thematic and stylistic elements of Chinese students’ short stories written in English as creative outcomes?