About this title: What makes a story a story? What is style? What's the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions Wood answers in "How Fiction Works," a book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: VINTAGE Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781845950934ISBN:1845950933
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 208 pages. A study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. it takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions: what do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? what constitutes a 'telling' detail? and, when is a metaphor successful? (Paperback) read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781845950934ISBN:1845950933
Description: New. A study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. It takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fiction... read more
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: St Martins Pr
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780312428471ISBN:0312428472
Description: New. Wood takes aim at E.M. Forster's longtime standard-bearer "Aspects of the Novel, " in this eminently readable and thought-provoking treatise on the ways, whys, and hows of writing and reading fiction. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 7-22-08
ISBN-13:9780374173401ISBN:0374173400
Description: FINE. Crisp, clean, unread hardcover with some light shelfwear to the dust jacket and a publisher's mark to one edge-Nice! 0.75 lbs. read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail International Priority mail. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
Description: New. Please note that deliveries to addresses in the UK and Europe will be in 4-14 business days. Other countries should refer to Alibris standard times. ISBN10: 1845950933. read more
"Superb exposition and defense of realist fiction that is quite accessible. Although I have never agreed with a James Wood essay on a specific work, especially those of John Updike, this book-length essay gave me a lot to think about and agree with. Wood explicates the typical narrative technique of modern fiction, which he calls free indirect style, as a version of third person narrative that mediates between author and character.
He has revealing chapters on detail in fiction, style, character, and consciousness (based on who is seeing the character). Along the way he lightly sketches a history of the 20th century novel and its forebears and, above all, deflects those critics (Barthes and Shklovsky)who say that literature is non-referential, only referring to its own language, or 'signs'. Wood concludes by saying that conventions in fiction may become lifeless, but that being conventional does not obviate truthfulness. Fiction asks us to imagine rather than believe, so it has to be internally consistent and convincing even when describing something unlikely. He calls the realistic quality of fiction "lifeness".
Walter Kirn, in the New York Times around August, 2008, published a shameful criticism of this book that was only semi-coherent. Kirn must wish that he had written this book."
"Woods gives you, the writer, very valuable insight into your craft. This book may take several readings to fully appreciate. It follows in the footsteps of E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel."
Let's say you are concerned with expressing the thought of your character. Wood takes you through the evolution of this process from the Bible to present.
His approach is to cite specific authors and their technique.
As a result of reading Wood, I looked at a major POV in a novel I thought I had completed. I realized that the character spoke in my voice and not his own. This provoked thought as to what voice would this character have? What would concern him? How would he form his thoughts and speech?
I can not promise you similar results because I do not know how deeply you are prepared to interact with Wood. But, if you are willing, the results are very worthwhile indeed."
"The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.
In How Fiction Works, the critic James Wood tries "to be mindful of the common reader" and reduce was Joyce calls, "true scholastic stink" to bearable levels. Like an art critic would break down the elements of artistic style, from drawing to painting, to penciling in the appropriate amount of shade, Wood reveals aspects about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character, etc? Old questions indeed but like he says in this book, he means to answer them differently, by asking a critic's questions and offering a writer's answers.
This being one of the only books I've ever read of this type, I found it short and readable, yet supremely condescending at the same time. I imagined Wood more than once in a tweed jacket with a pipe tucked supremely in the corner of his mouth, whilst sitting in the orange upholstered wingchair amongst his vast library of Chekhov, Joyce, Nabokov, just to name a few. Like the guy who used to do those Mobile Masterpiece introductions. I felt snobby and wanted to adopt an English accent while reading it.
But still, he made me take a deeper look, at words themselves, at characters, at the art of the effective metaphor. I learned the how's and why's of why New York garbage men call maggots, "disco rice," why Marilynne Robison called a grave a "weedy little mortality patch," and why Katherine Manfield's "grandmother said her prayers like someone rummaging through tissue paper."
He is particularly obsessed of a certain kind of visual simile and metaphor that describes fire, calling them "tremendously successful."
Lawrence, seeing a fire in a grate, writes of it as "that rushing bouquet of new flames in the chimney" (Sea and Sardinia). Hardy describes a "scarlet handful of fire" in Gabriel Oaks cottage in Far from the Madding Crowd. Bellow has this sentence in his story A Silver Dish: "The blue flames fluttered like a school of fish in the coal fire." It's not hard to tell, this is obviously a man in love with words, and an attentive lover he is. He made me question what I'm looking for in a book. Why am I reading? I want to escape. I want answers to life's questions. I want to learn something new. I am like he, a woman in search of "that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit's house to it's foundation."
Did this book "shake habit's house" for me? Absolutely. If you're looking to be intellectually dazzled and increase your knowledge even a tiny bit, I highly recommend reading this. Now if only a movie would've been included like on Mobile Masterpiece. Then it would've been perfect."
Lots of times I'm able to hold onto this as a source of pride, in that I "believe in" realism and what it can accomplish-what it has accomplished for me as a lifelong reader. But lots of other times I understand it as a limitation. I do the best I can, and I can't write anything other that realism. Not with much confidence. When I step up to the plate, so to speak, it's a swing and miss. Given the chance, I'd have a young man wake up one morning and find he'd metamorphosed into a shoebox, or envision a future where Quebecois separatists wheel around on unicycles.
James Wood's book, then, was very good for me to read. Not that he has anything disparaging to say about nonrealist fiction-to the contrary, any fiction that does the work of creating life, in all its known and unknown manifestations, is what he's trying to uncover here-but he's very good at showing how difficult and how rewarding is the attempt of building a character and getting a reader to feel herself inside that character's consciousness.
Wood is smart to bury his chapters on language and dialogue in the middle of his book, because such are the things it's the easiest to get right. It's easy in a fiction workshop to go to work on what's been written with a toolbox of techniques. Writing prettily takes only a good ear, which might be the first writer-body-part that develops in full (consider Orwell's stages of self-development as a writer; after sheer ego, wanting to craft perfected prose was his most rudimentary desire).
But what do you do when all the techniques are in place in a story and the prose is crafted and the story is simply boring, or the characters pose and perform more than they live and breathe? Such stories seem to evince a lack of psychology, or maybe philosophy. There's a often palpable sense in great novels that their writers know not just characters but people, humans, so well that throughout our reading we're forced constantly to go "Ah" and "Oh" like we do when fireworks explode.
The best chapters in this regard might be "A Brief History of Consciousness", where Wood traces the Bible's complete refusal of its readers' engagement in characters' minds, through Shakespeare's clunky soliloquies, to the novel (Flaubert, mostly) where we get full accounts of the way people think; and "Sympathy and Complexity", where he tries to uncover the ways authors get us to extend our sympathies to people who don't even exist, and how this practice enables us to do the same to those who do. And then this final paragraph, which I'll quote in full:
"Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind-lifeness-is the origin. It teaches everyone else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. It is nothing like as naive as its opponents charge; almost all the great twentieth-century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice. All the greatest realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists. But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn in mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. 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" (italics mine).
We've all read realist fiction that is dead on every page, and then we extend this deadness to the genre as a whole. The hard part, Wood says, is to accomplish all that realism can in a way that seems fresh and new, and it's such a hard task that it's very tempting to toss realism out altogether, and allow surrealism or lyricism to stand in for novels' pursuit of novelty."
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