How Fiction Works ★★★☆☆

It was a little too academic for casual reading. Also, it focused on the works of classic literature most of which I've heard of but not read in it original. It was like being in a graduate English Lit class. It still held my interest enough to finish it. At times, it was just nice to hear exquisite prose narrated without context and explained why it is better.

Edition Read

• Edition Type: Paperback
• Number of Pages: 265 pages
• Date First Published: February 7, 2008
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• ISBN10: 1607516101
• ASIN: 1607516101
• Language: English

Description

REFERENCE

Source: GoodReads

Notable Highlights

“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”

“Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.”

“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.”

“fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.”

“The sentence pulsates, moves in and out, toward the character and away from her

“This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven

“Convention is everywhere, and triumphs like old age: once you have reached a certain seniority, you either die of it, or with it.”

“But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continuously about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. Chekhov's challenge--'Ibsen just doesn't know life. In life it simply isn't like that'--is as radical now as it was a century ago, because forms must continually be broken. The true writer that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.”

“But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running

“Fiction-making seems labored and obstructive because our age has a powerful “reality hunger,” to borrow the title of a manifesto by David Shields1, published in the same year as Heti’s novel. Shields argues against conventional fictional artifice in favor of what he calls “reality-based” art. “I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless,” he writes. He has no time for characters’ names, plot developments, blocks of dialogue,”

“In the same way, it often seems that James’s characters are not especially convincing as independently vivid authorial creations. But what makes them vivid is the force of James’s interest in them, his manner of pressing into their clay with his examining fingers: they are sites of human energy; they vibrate with James’s anxious concern for them. Take The Portrait of a Lady. It is very hard to say what Isabel Archer is like, exactly, and she seems to lack the definition, the depth if you like, of a heroine like Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch.”

“Iris Murdoch is the most poignant member of this second category, precisely because she spent her life trying to get into the first. In her literary and philosophical criticism, she again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of the great novelist; yet her own characters never have this freedom. She knew it, too: “How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one’s failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.”

“He reflects fondly on the story of the ninety-seven-year-old John D. Rockefeller, who has a specially doctored version of The New York Times delivered every day, altered to contain only good news. “The world’s threats are universal, like the sun, but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow.”

“I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.”

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