The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers
Ayn Rand
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0452281547
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1958, Ayn Rand, already the world-famous author of such bestselling books as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, gave a private series of extemporaneous lectures in her own living room on the art of fiction. Tore Boeckmann and Leonard Peikoff for the first time now bring readers the edited transcript of these exciting personal statements. The Art of Fiction offers invaluable lessons, in which Rand analyzes the four essential elements of fiction: theme, plot, characterization, and style. She demonstrates her ideas by dissecting her best-known works, as well as those of other famous authors, such as Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, and Victor Hugo. An historic accomplishment, this compendium will be a unique and fascinating resource for both writers and readers of fiction.
great deal of knowledge which has become so automatic that your conscious mind need not pause on it. Language is a tool which you had to learn; you did not know it at birth. When you first learned that a certain object is a table, the word table did not come to your mind automatically; you repeated it many times to get used to it. If you now attempt to learn a foreign language, the English word still leaps into your mind. It takes many repetitions before the foreign word occurs without your
its characters are “like the folks next door.” The people who consider such characters “real” are usually those who do not consider abstract characters real. They are the ones who tell me that I write about men who do not exist. On the other hand, people who can think in terms of essentials tell me that I write about the kind of men they see all over the place. A number of people have told me the names of architects I never heard of, swearing that I copied Peter Keating from them. You can see
that theme. That which you know clearly you can find the words for and you will express exactly. If someone then challenges you and asks, “Why did you describe the sunrise in this way?” you will be able to answer. You will be able to give a conscious reason for every word in your description; but you did not have to know the reasons while writing. I can give the reason for every word and every punctuation mark in Atlas Shrugged—and there are 645,000 words in it by the printer’s count. I did not
... Child! torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity, young girl! have pity on me! Hugo’s assignment here is to convey the priest’s intense passion and conflict. He conveys it by means of concretes—the priest does not merely say, “I suffered and I thought of you,” he gives concretes—and the concretes are not irrelevant details; they underscore the essence of the priest’s feelings. So Hugo and I have this in common: we deal in concretes and in essences. For instance: “I
basic elements of the book’s theme, plot, and main characters so firmly in one’s mind that they become automatic and almost “instinctual.” Then, as one approaches the actual writing of any given scene or paragraph, one has a sense or “feel” of what it has to be by the logic of the context—and one’s subconscious makes the right selections to express it. Later, one checks and improves the result by means of conscious editing. From One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane Nobody ever walked across