On Reading Wood's How Fiction Works
I recently read How Fiction Works, by James Wood (Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 265 pages). It was a surprisingly rewarding book to have read, so I wanted to tell you about it and quote a few passages.
Like, I suspect, many writers of fiction do, I occasionally succumb to reading yet another book about writing, usually to suffer disappointment and a feeling of having wasted my time. Time and again I find writers on writing who are really taxonomists, intent on making fine distinctions about all the types of third person voice one can conceive, or summarizing ever more slowly the "parts of speech", etc. I sigh and take the books back to the library. I don't want to catalog nails and sandpaper; I want to talk about carpentry
Well, Wood is a master carpenter and he understands what he's talking about and he shares remarkable insights with equally remarkable clarity. He uses short excerpts from various authors and they're actually relevant and interesting, if you can imagine–he uses them to make a point! He analyzes what goes on in fiction in a way that is enlightening and that I can use to understand and improve my own writing, why this or that choice of words in this or that sequence can serve my purpose better or worse.
He does talk about third person writing, most about "free indirect narrative", what we might call "close third person", or narrative that is observed and told through a character's eyes, filtered by their intellect and emotions. There is also a third-person narrative ("omniscient") where the writer is the observer and narrator. The basic tension for the author to resolve is this: is it the writer noticing things or the fictional character noticing things?
On the one hand, the author wants to have his or her own words, wants to be the master of a personal style; on the other hand, narrative bends towards its characters and their habits of speech. [p. 29]
This tension is all tied up in what I think of as "voice", the viewpoint, narrative flow, and word choice that is appropriate to whomever is telling the story at any given time, since it can slide around from viewpoint to viewpoint. Getting that voice right is often the key to success for me, since it impinges on plot and narrative and character, and keeping it well located avoids distracting the reader–it maintains the vivid, uninterrupted dream.
So there is a tension basic to stories and novels: Can we reconcile the author's perceptions and language with the character's perception and language? If the author and character are absolutely merged, as in the passage from Wallace above, we get, as it were, "the whole of boredom"–the author's corrupted language just mimics an actually existing corrupted language we all know too well, and are in fact quite desperate to escape. But if author and character get too separated, as in the Updike passage, we feel the cold breath of an alienation over the text, and begin to resent the over-"literary" efforts of the stylist. The Updike is an example of aestheticism (the author gets in the way); the Wallace is an example of anti-aestheticism (the character is all); but both examples are really species of the same aestheticism, which is at bottom the strenuous display of style. [p. 34]
In other chapters he wrote about other useful topics; the ones I noted as most interesting were his discussion of "thisness" in details,* and the idea of "time signatures" in narrative, how the pace of the narrative is determined and the effect it has on the reader.
Advice on details (after comparing the amount of detail endemic to each author):
But [Henry] James is certainly not a Nabokovian writer; his notion of what constitutes a detail is more various, more impalpable, and finally more metaphysical than Nabokov's. James would probably argue that while we should indeed try to be the kind of writer on whom nothing is lost, we have no need to be the kind of writer on whom everything is found. [p. 80]
It's such a rare treat to find an entertaining and useful book about writing fiction.
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* "By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretation." [p.67]