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    The Writing of Fiction: The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel
    The Writing of Fiction: The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel
    The Writing of Fiction: The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel
    Ebook120 pages2 hours

    The Writing of Fiction: The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel

    By Edith Wharton

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    About this ebook

    Essays on the craft of fiction writing from the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, for her novel The Age of Innocence.

    In The Writing of Fiction,Edith Wharton, a prolific writer and one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors, shares her thoughts on fiction writing, devoting individual chapters to short stories and novels. She stresses the importance of writers putting thought into how they build their story, from selecting subject matter and fashioning characters to crafting situations and settings. She explores the history of modern fiction and the contributions of Honoré de Balzac and Stendhal. She even examines the difference between literary and commercial fiction, as well as the work of Marcel Proust.

    Although Wharton passed away in 1937, her advice here endures and is bound to inspire writers for ages to come.

    “In The Writing of Fiction Edith Wharton gives us not only a period-appropriate glimpse into the mind of an exceptionally creative writer but also an appreciation for the thoughtfulness and discipline she brought to her craft. We are fortunate she was willing to share her observations.” —Ralph White, author of Litchfield
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJan 5, 2021
    ISBN9781504066112
    The Writing of Fiction: The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

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      The Writing of Fiction - Edith Wharton

      The Writing of Fiction

      The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel

      Edith Wharton

      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

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