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Book
James Wood · 2008
A practical guide to the techniques and aesthetics of fiction writing that examines how narrative works through detailed analysis of literary craft, from point of view and character to realism and dialogue, drawing extensively on examples from canonical literature.
Sequence ladder
Narrative Intelligence sources live outside the figurative image sequence ladder. Adaptive placement applies to image sequences, not this reading library.
What this book knows
Fiction works by teaching us to read its own conventions—detail, character, style, and free indirect thought enact what criticism can only describe.
mind-and-cognition
What happens when a novelist wants us to inhabit a character's confusion, but will not 'correct' that confusion, refuses to make clear what a state of nonconfusion would look like?
HFW-RC-007The novel becomes the great analyst of unconscious motive, since the character is released from having to voice his motives: the reader becomes the hermeneut.
HFW-RC-069self-and-identity
Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves?
HFW-RC-052Characters are assemblages of words—this tells us absolutely nothing, and is like elaborately informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined 'world.'
HFW-RC-049education-and-formation
Novels tend to fail not when characters are not vivid enough, but when the novel has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions.
HFW-RC-056The millionaires of style—difficult, lavish stylists like Melville, Ruskin, Lawrence, James, Woolf—are very prosperous, but they use the same banknotes as everyone else.
HFW-RC-085Illuminates
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
Reader resonance signals for text sources are not wired to this view yet.