The Craft of Fiction

But then again--that is not exactly the question in this book. Obviously the emphasis is not upon the commonplace little events of Emma's career. They might, no doubt, be the st...

But of course it takes time, and it chanced that this deliberation made a special difficulty in the case of Anna's story. As for Levin, it was easy to give him ample play; he co...

No longer a figure that leans and looks out of a window, scanning a stretch of memory--that is not the image suggested by Henry James's book. It is rather as though the reader h...

The reader of a novel--by which I mean the critical reader--is himself a novelist; he is the maker of a book which may or may not please his taste when it is finished, but of a...

To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure--that is the effort of a critic of books, and it is perpetually defe...

These difficulties, these hopes and fears that have been buried in silence, are all included in the sphere of experience which the author has rounded; and by leaving them where...

Time is all-important in War and Peace, but that does not necessarily mean that it will cover a great many years; they are in fact no more than the years between youth and middl...

So this is another resource upon which the author may draw according to his need; sometimes it will be indispensable, and generally, I suppose, it will be useful. It means that...

But Thackeray--in _his_ story we need him all the time and can never forget him. He it is who must assemble and arrange his large chronicle, piecing it together out of his exper...

For suppose him to begin sharing the knowledge that he alone possesses, as the author and inventor of Strether; suppose that instead of representing only the momentary appearanc...

But now let me take the case of another big novel, where again there is a picture outspread, with episodes of drama that are subordinate to the sweep of the expanse. It is Mered...

For a nearer sight of it I go back to Vanity Fair. The chapters that are concerned with Becky's determined siege of London--"How to live well on nothing a year"--are exactly to...

Balzac, it cannot be denied, had frequent cause to look about him for whatever means there might be of extenuating, and so of confirming, an incredible story. His passion for tr...

The long, slow, steady sweep of the story--the _first_ story, as I call it--setting through the personal lives of a few young people, bringing them together, separating them, di...

But as for this book, it not only ends one argument, it is also a turning-point that begins another. For when we have seen how fiction gradually aspires to the weight and author...

These are the familiar resources of a story-teller, which everybody uses as a matter of course. It is so natural to take advantage of them that unless we purposely keep an eye u...

He extends his account of it so far, nevertheless, that he has written two thirds of the book by the time the young man is finally despatched to the Indies. It means that the du...