On Writing Fiction: Rethinking conventional wisdom about the craft
David Jauss
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1599632624
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The pieces of a satisfying novel or story seem to fit together so effortlessly, so seamlessly, that it's easy to find yourself wondering, "How on earth did the author do this?" The answer is simple: He sat alone at his desk, considered an array of options, and made smart, careful choices.
In On Writing Fiction, award-winning author and respected creative writing professor David Jauss offers practical information and advice that will help you make smart creative and technical decisions about such topics as:
- Writing prose with syntax and rhythm to create a "soundtrack" for the narrative
- Choosing the right point of view to create the appropriate degree of "distance" between your characters and the reader
- Harnessing the power of contradiction in the creative process
In one thought-provoking essay after another, Jauss sorts through unique fiction-writing conundrums, including how to create those exquisite intersections between truth and fabrication that make all great works of fiction so much more resonant than fiction that follows the "write what you know" approach that's so often used.
Chekhov reduces the moral distance between Nikolai and us, and a potentially “trifling” story becomes a serious and complex one. As these two examples suggest, perhaps the most important purpose of point of view is to manipulate the degree of distance between the characters and the reader in order to achieve the emotional, intellectual, and moral responses the author desires. Outside of Wayne C. Booth, who makes this argument persuasively in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction, few writers have
he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him. The prose here is admirably straightforward and clear, but its syntax is by no means simple. All three of these sentences are compound-complex, and no two share the same structure. The number and placement of dependent and independent clauses in each varies significantly; the sentences have two, five, and three independent clauses, respectively, and one, four, and three
one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood.” Whatever the source of the preverbal rhythm Woolf, Dybek, and others talk about, it is important for us to listen to it. And we should listen to the postverbal rhythm of our prose as well, of course. As Benedict says, if we read our prose out loud, listening attentively to its music, we will hear “that too many sentences of the same length create a monotonous beat; that forced transitions are like the wrong
one continuous shot. To date, there is only one feature-length film that has been filmed in this manner—Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark—and despite this fact, it does not convey the experience of real time, nor does it even attempt to do so. Ironically, this ninety-five-minute nonstop slice of present time has as its subject the past. The film follows an off-camera contemporary Russian film director and a nineteenth-century French marquis famous for his scathing criticism of Russia as they tour
earlier: Instead of two stories serving as inverted reflections of each other, in this kind of configuration the two halves of a collection mirror each other. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is the only collection I’m aware of that uses this particular structure, although Mitchell doesn’t use the mirror analogy to describe it. (His analogy is much more elaborate and arresting: As he told his editor, the collection is structured like a series of nesting Russian dolls, and the reader is “on the tip of