ABSTRACT
Andrew Cowan (1960–) is a novelist originally from Corby, Northamptonshire in England. His novels include Your Fault (2019), Common Ground (1997), Crustaceans (2001), Worthless Men (2013) and Pig (1994), which won numerous awards. He has also written about creative writing and the creative process, for instance in The Art of Writing Fiction (2011). The notion that there should be a beginning, middle and end is both ubiquitous and ancient and derives from Aristotle’s Poetics, which precedes the emergence of the literary novel by two millennia, and is concerned primarily with the structure of Athenian tragedy as ‘performed by actors, not through narration’. In other words, the Poetics is more about storytelling on the stage than on the page, though much remains applicable beyond the bounds of ancient Greek theatre.
