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    The Writing of Fiction
    The Writing of Fiction
    The Writing of Fiction
    Ebook123 pages2 hours

    The Writing of Fiction

    By Edith Wharton

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    A rare work of nonfiction from Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction contains timeless advice on writing and reading well from the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize—now with a new introduction by Brandon Taylor.

    In 1921, Edith Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize for her first novel, The Age of Innocence. Over the course of her career, she would continue to produce beloved, bestselling work—from The House of Mirth to The Custom of the Country—and gained a reputation for her incisive critiques of her upper-class social circle. To each new generation of readers, her work remains fresh, formally remarkable, and endlessly entertaining.

    The Writing of Fiction is a window into Wharton’s mind as she ponders the intertwined arts of writing and reading. Wharton provides invaluable insight on the subjects of character, the challenge of finely-tuned short stories, the construction of a novel, and more. Beyond a treatise on craft, The Writing of Fiction is a sweeping meditation by a masterful practitioner and a rare chance to experience the inimitable voice of one of America’s most influential novelists.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMay 6, 2014
    ISBN9781476790565
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton was born in 1862 to a prominent and wealthy New York family. In 1885 she married Boston socialite 'Teddy' Wharton but the marriage was unhappy and they divorced in 1913. The couple travelled frequently to Europe and settled in France, where Wharton stayed until her death in 1937. Her first major novel was The House of Mirth (1905); many short stories, travel books, memoirs and novels followed, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Reef (1912). She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with The Age of Innocence (1920) and she was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also decorated for her humanitarian work during the First World War.

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    • 5/5
      The Writing of Fiction is a series of essays about the author's craft. She begins with a general discussion on the writing of fiction and then moves to several essays on short stories, more essays on constructing a novel, a good discussion on character and situation and concludes with a section on Marcel Proust.I'm not going to cover all of the points in these essays. Rather I'd like to share some of the highlights I found interesting, plus share some quotes from the book so you will have a little taste for her writing.I found her discussion of the difference between the short story and novels to be most interesting. According to Ms. Wharton, a novel, because of its length, allows for the development of characters and can better show the passing of time. The writer of the short story should emphasize what she calls, the situation or predicament."The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form, or presentation."Short stories must be vivid and grab the reader from the very beginning. Good novels do the same but they have the luxury of length to develop the various aspects of the story to a great depth.". . . the typical novel usually deals with the gradual unfolding of a succession of events divided by intervals of time, and in which many people, in addition to the principal characters, play more or less subordinate parts. No need now to take in sail and clear the decks; the novelist must carry as much canvas and as many passengers as his subject requires and his seamanship permits."I could keep going in my comments and quotes of this slim little volume. It served my original objective of learning how this particular writer viewed her craft. It took me quite a few pages before I got into the rhythm and style of her writing. It was worth hanging in there until I understood her writing. One thing Ms. Wharton did was to fill me with a desire to read more short stories.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Since Balzac and Stendhal, fiction has reached out in many new directions, and made all sorts of experiments; but it has never ceased to cultivate the ground they cleared for it, or gone back to the realm of abstractions. It is still, however, an art in the making, fluent and dirigible, and combining a past full enough for the deduction of certain general principles with a future rich in untried possibilities. – from The Writing of Fiction, page 10 -Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her very first novel – The Age of Innocence. The Writing of Fiction is a glimpse into her view of the craft of writing…an expose which looks at the history of the novel and the authors who most influenced Wharton, as well as her theories on writing. In this slim book, Wharton examines the art of the short story and how it differs from writing a novel, the development of character, the difference between the novel of situation and that of the novel of character, and finishes with a short chapter on the brilliance of Proust.I was impressed by how current Wharton’s theories and observations are more than 80 years after she penned them. It is not unusual to have writers voice the fear that what they are writing may have already been done before. And it is this common fear which Wharton first addresses in her guide:Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it. - from The Writing of Fiction, page 17 -She then goes on to define her concept of originality:True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. – from The Writing of Fiction, page 17 -I found many of Wharton’s observations to be truths I have experienced not only as a writer, but as a reader, as evidenced by the following quotes:The moment the reader loses faith in the author’s sureness of foot the chasm of improbability gapes. – from The Writing of Fiction, page 31 -Quiet iteration is far more racking than diversified assaults; the expected is more frightful than the unforeseen. - from The Writing of Fiction, page 32 -The use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about which a fairly definite rule may be laid down. It should be reserved for the culminating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore. - from The Writing of Fiction, page 55 -It is obvious that a mediocre book is always too long, and that a great one usually seems too short. – from The Writing of Fiction, page 74 -A novelist who does not know when his story is finished, but goes on stringing episode to episode after it is over, not only weakens the effect of the conclusion, but robs of significance all that has gone before. – from The Writing of Fiction, page 78 -I especially enjoyed Wharton’s advice regarding point of view: ‘One thing more is needful for the ultimate effect of probability; and that is, never to let the character who serves as reflector record anything not naturally within his register.‘ She goes on to caution the writer against shifting point of view too often, and when using multiple points of view to take care that each character provides a piece of the whole history in order to provide a unity of impression. Wharton’s philosophy was that the novel writer should tell his or her story from not more than two or three different perspectives.Wharton also address the plot driven novel vs. the character driven novel – and notes that ‘the novel of character and manners may seem superior in richness, variety and play of light and shade‘ and ‘…so far the greatest novels have undoubtedly dealt with character and manners rather than with mere situation.‘ Lest one think Wharton is being self-serving in this observation, she quickly points out the danger of too much focus on character:In the inevitable reaction against the arbitrary “plot” many novelists have gone too far in the other direction, either swamping themselves in the tedious “stream of consciousness,” or else – another frequent error – giving an exaggerated importance to trivial incidents when the tale is concerned with trivial lives. – from The Writing of Fiction, page 102 -If there is a weakness in Wharton’s book about writing fiction, it is her abrupt last chapter which extols the brilliance of Proust. Since up to this point, The Writing of Fiction focused almost entirely on the history and craft of the art of writing, her switch to discussing Proust and his work felt out of place. Perhaps she desired to profile an author who exhibited what she felt were the best attributes of a writer. Indeed, in reference to Proust, she states:Out of all the flux of judgments and theories which have darkened counsel in respect of novel-writing, one stable fact seems always to emerge; the quality the greatest novelist have always had in common is that of making their people live. - from The Writing of Fiction, page 111 -In this quote, Wharton could almost have been writing of herself.The Writing of Fiction is a gem of a book, allowing readers to glimpse the brilliance of a great female writer whose work still resonates with truth in today’s world. Writers in all stages of their development would do themselves a favor to pick up Wharton’s acutely observed guide to writing.

    Book preview

    The Writing of Fiction - Edith Wharton

    I

    In General

    I

    In General

    I

    To treat of the practice of fiction is to deal with the newest, most fluid and least formulated of the arts. The exploration of origins is always fascinating; but the attempt to relate the modern novel to the tale of Joseph and his Brethren is of purely historic interest.

    Modern fiction really began when the action of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul; and this step was probably first taken when Madame de La Fayette, in the seventeenth century, wrote a little story called La Princesse de Clèves, a story of hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies succeeding each other below the surface.

    The next advance was made when the protagonists of this new inner drama were transformed from conventionalized puppets—the hero, the heroine, the villain, the heavy father and so on—into breathing and recognizable human beings. Here again a French novelist—the Abbé Prévost—led the way with Manon Lescaut; but his drawing of character seems summary and schematic when his people are compared with the first great figure in modern fiction—the appalling Neveu de Rameau. It was not till long after Diderot’s death that the author of so many brilliant tales peopled with eighteenth century puppets was found, in the creation of that one sordid, cynical and desolately human figure, to have anticipated not only Balzac but Dostoievsky.

    But even from Manon Lescaut and the Neveu de Rameau, even from Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Scott, modern fiction is differentiated by the great dividing geniuses of Balzac and Stendhal. Save for that one amazing accident of Diderot’s, Balzac was the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies and infirmities, and make the reader see them, but to draw his dramatic action as much from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns, professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous contacts with each other.

    Balzac himself ascribed the priority in this kind of realism to Scott, from whom the younger novelist avowedly derived his chief inspiration. But, as Balzac observed, Scott, so keen and direct in surveying the rest of his field of vision, became conventional and hypocritical when he touched on love and women. In deference to the wave of prudery which overswept England after the vulgar excesses of the Hanoverian court he substituted sentimentality for passion, and reduced his heroines to Keepsake insipidities; whereas in the firm surface of Balzac’s realism there is hardly a flaw, and his women, the young as well as the old, are living people, as much compact of human contradictions and torn with human passions as his misers, his financiers, his priests or his doctors.

    Stendhal, though as indifferent as any eighteenth century writer to atmosphere and local colour, is intensely modern and realistic in the individualizing of his characters, who were never types (to the extent even of some of Balzac’s) but always sharply differentiated and particular human beings. More distinctively still does he represent the new fiction by his insight into the springs of social action. No modern novelist has ever gone nearer than Racine did in his tragedies to the sources of personal, of individual feeling; and some of the French novelists of the eighteenth century are still unsurpassed (save by Racine) in the last refinements of individual soul-analysis. What was new in both Balzac and Stendhal was the fact of their viewing each character first of all as a product of particular material and social conditions, as being thus or thus because of the calling he pursued or the house he lived in (Balzac), or the society he wanted to get into (Stendhal), or the acre of ground he coveted, or the powerful or fashionable personage he aped or envied (both Balzac and Stendhal). These novelists (with the solitary exception of Defoe, when he wrote Moll Flanders) are the first to seem continuously aware that the bounds of a personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.

    The characterization of all the novelists who preceded these two masters seems, in comparison, incomplete or immature. Even Richardson’s seems so, in the most penetrating pages of Clarissa Harlowe, even Goethe’s in that uncannily modern novel, the Elective Affinities—because, in the case of these writers, the people so elaborately dissected are hung in the void, unvisualized and unconditioned (or almost) by the special outward circumstances of their lives. They are subtly analyzed abstractions of humanity, to whom only such things happen as might happen to almost any one in any walk of life—the inevitable eternal human happenings.

    Since Balzac and Stendhal, fiction has reached out in many new directions, and made all sorts of experiments; but it has never ceased to cultivate the ground they cleared for it, or gone back to the realm of abstractions. It is still, however, an art in the making, fluent and dirigible, and combining a past full enough for the deduction of certain general principles with a future rich in untried possibilities.

    II

    On the threshold of any theory of art its exponent is sure to be asked: On what first assumption does your theory rest? And in fiction, as in every other art, the only answer seems to be that any theory must begin by assuming the need of selection. It seems curious that even now—and perhaps more than ever—one should have to explain and defend what is no more than the rule underlying the most artless verbal statement. No matter how restricted an incident one is trying to give an account of, it cannot but be fringed with details more and more remotely relevant, and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts which may crowd on the narrator simply because of some accidental propinquity in time or space. To choose between all this material is the first step toward coherent expression.

    A generation ago this was so generally taken for granted that to state it would have seemed pedantic. In every-day intercourse the principle survives in the injunction to stick to the point; but the novelist who applies—or owns up to applying—this rule to his art, is nowadays accused of being absorbed in technique to the exclusion of the supposedly contrary element of human interest.

    Even now, the charge would hardly be worth taking up had it not lately helped to refurbish the old trick of the early French realists, that group of brilliant writers who invented the once-famous tranche de vie, the exact photographic reproduction of a situation or an episode, with all its sounds, smells, aspects realistically rendered, but with its deeper relevance and its suggestions of a larger whole either unconsciously missed or purposely left out. Now that half a century has elapsed, one sees that those among this group of writers who survive are still readable in spite of their constricting theory, or in proportion as they forgot about it once they closed with their subject. Such are Maupassant, who packed into his brief masterpieces so deep a psychological significance and so sure a sense of larger relations; Zola, whose slices became the stuff of great romantic allegories in which the forces of Nature and Industry are the huge cloudy protagonists, as in a Pilgrim’s Progress of man’s material activities; and the Goncourts, whose French instinct for psychological analysis always made them seize on the more significant morsel of the famous slices. As for the pupils, the mere conscientious appliers of the system, they have all blown away with the theory, after a briefer popularity than writers of equal talent might have enjoyed had they not thus narrowed their scope. An instance in proof is Feydeau’s Fanny, one of the few psychological novels of that generation, and a slight enough adventure in soul-searching compared with the great Madame Bovary (which it was supposed at the time to surpass), but still readable enough to have kept the author’s name alive, while most of his minor contemporaries are buried under the unappetizing débris of their slices.

    It seemed necessary to revert to the slice of life because it has lately reappeared, marked by certain unimportant differences, and relabelled the stream of consciousness; and, curiously enough, without its new exponents’ appearing aware that they are not also its originators. This time the theory seems

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