title: Fixing Fiction: A Practical Guide
author: John W Allie
description: John W. Allie has had lots of experience with terrible fiction and has written quite a bit of it himself. He has since sworn off the stuff and hopes that you will, too. His website, johnwallie.com, contains many exciting things including comics, essays, and ebooks.
zlib_text: Clive James, in a review of one of my war books, quoted it as ‘an unreliable
  history of the war’. Wel , this makes him a thoroughly unreliable critic,
  because I spend more time on getting my dates and facts right than I did in
  actually writing. I admit the way I present it may seem as though my type of
  war was impossible and all a figment of a hyperthyroid imagination, but that’s
  the way I write. But al that I wrote _did_ happen, it happened on the days I
  mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real. So I
  wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies,
  it all _really happened_. I even got down to actually finding out what the
  weather was like, for every day of the campaign. I’ve spent a fortune on beer
  and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those
  members overseas ran into over a hundred pounds. Likewise I included a large
  number of photographs actually taken _in situ_ , don’t tell me I faked them
  all, so n