How Fiction Works Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition Paperback – 2010

There are a lot of books out there about how not to write badly but there are very few about how to write well. James Wood's How Fiction Works is one of the best. The first chapter, titled Narrating, contains critically important information for the fiction writer. The essence of the lesson, and it is hard to do it justice in a few sentences, is that excellent contemporary fiction differs from its predecessors in that it the author's presence is entirely absent. The reader becomes the character, inhabiting the character's consciousness. The reader, employing all of the character's senses, becomes the designated perceiver. And the reader is free to interpret these perceptions independently. This style of writing goes by several names but Wood likes "free indirect style."The second chapter tracks the birth and development of free indirect style in modern literature, citing Flaubert as its originator and James as its master. These two chapters, circa 60 pages, comprise the essence of the lesson, with the rest of the book essentially a PhD thesis on the birth of modernity in literary fiction. Interesting to be sure, but not remotely as informative as the first 60 pages, especially for beginners.

...sorry about that title, though having typed it, it causes me to think that James Wood would never come up with such word-play and good, I suppose, for him.He does take Barthes to serious task in quoting Barthes' 1966 observation that narrative represents nothing and that a novel is, in terms of narrative, "language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming." Even if Barthes is wrong, he almost proves his point in writing so beautifully about language itself.Here's Wood himself, almost as good: "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." I'm not sure that "reality level" would be less clumsy if it were just "world," by maybe Wood is trying to caress, or castigate, some part of David Shields here.Wood is well read and reads well. He's helped enormously by having a fine ear and eye for the fine analysis by others, from Virginia Woolf to Brigid Lowe (on the very notion of whether fiction is responsible for providing some kind of proof about the world).His own writing is never less than competent; even if he doesn't know where to put "only," as a modifier, as in "it only needs to ask the right questions," or hears a "hiss" in this (well, there is a hiss in "this" but not in this, which is what he quotes: ""What, quite unmanned in folly?").He also quotes the same George Eliot words twice. Nice words, but mostly a reminder that this book was no doubt put together from separate essays and neither Wood nor his editors read the book itself carefully enough to avoid such repetition (of this: "Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.")."How Fiction Works" doesn't "read like a novel." It's not supposed to. But it's more involving than most fiction, which may not be saying much, but it's saying something. Something that would be depressing if this book weren't so celebratory, in its way, of what is often good in our fiction and why fiction is important (the novel being "the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered," D. H. Lawrence, not quoted by Wood).

"How Fiction Works" is a provocative and accessible musing for writers and readers of prose--and it offers excellent insights whether the interest is fiction or nonfiction. Woods cites passages from the Western Canon, including Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Saramago, and Woolf, among many others, to get to the essence of narration, character, plot, detail, and dialogue.Woods's references to other master novelists and critics, and even painters and police chiefs, make for engaging reading on a topic that transforms the casual reader to the well informed one. Among the best moments from the author himself are these: * The writer's job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring (33). * Rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out (196). * The writer's--or critic's, or reader's--task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style--in any style--which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced (233). * 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 (247).If these summative points resonate for you, then "How Fiction Works" is worth your time.

I've been reading a series of books about the art of fiction recently. Some are designed to encourage the aspiring writer; never mind if there's a talent for it, never mind if you've ever read a book in your life, just write. Other books seek to explain how to write in broad terms--create tension--or suggest one formula or another to draw readers in. Other books present examples from successful, sometimes great, writers and explain how and why what they write works. Wood's book is one that shows through example. He has his opinion of course about what makes great writing and his examples are chosen to support that perspective, but the fiction he selects is great writing and it's nice to have Wood's plant some signs pointing the way. Take what you need from Woods. If you want some other perspectives look at some other what I call great example teachers: Francine Prose and Janet Burroway are a couple authors I've recently read who've also taught me by example.