How Fiction Works

“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

You might not agree with everything James Wood has to say about a particular author or work of literature, but you have to admit there isn’t another booklover more passionately dedicated to careful reading, finely honed criticism and upholding high standards. How Fiction Works is case in point: very much like an expert mechanic examining the assorted parts of the show more engine in an Italian or German sports car, James Wood rolls up his sleeves and scrutinizes various aspects of what goes into the writing of fiction, especially the novel.

His particular method is to undergird his analysis and reasoning with numerous examples – this is a fairly short book but there are over 100 individual literary novels quoted or referenced, from Don Quixote, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, What Maisie Knew, Sister Carrie and Ulysses to Invisible Man, Lolita, Seize the Day, Blood Meridian, Atonement and Gilead. And this is not exactly an easy book to read; I myself had to break an intellectual sweat, rereading passages again and again to grasp more completely Mr. Wood’s thinking. To share some of the many insights a reader will find in its pages, below are specific James Wood quotes coupled with my comments:

“In reality, we are stuck with third- and first-person narration. The common idea is that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscient) and unreliable narrator (the unreliable first-person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does). On one side Tolstoy, say; and on the other, Humbert Humbert or Italo Sveno’s narrator, Zeno Cosini, or Bertie Wooster.” ---------- The author spends a good number of his opening pages explaining the dynamics of voice, that is, the manner in which a story is told. At one point he notes: “Actually, the first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable; and third-person “omniscient” narration is generally more partial than omniscient.” I’m reminded of a personal favorite, the way Colin Harrison opens his Bodies Electric using a first-person narrator who is both completely reliable and painfully honest: “My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her. I shouldn’t have indulged myself – my loneliness, my attraction to her – not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But I’m as weak hearted for love and as greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy for the sex – of course that was part of it.” These opening four sentences, set off like a string of explosions, give us a clear indication of what fireworks we can expect as we turn the pages.

“It is useful to watch good writers make mistakes. Plenty of excellent ones stumble at free indirect style.” ---------- Free indirect style being a blending of objective third-person narration with the thoughts and words of a character. James Wood shares the example of how John Updike in his novel Terrorist, in order to propel the story, puts impossible thoughts in the head of his eighteen-year old main character, impossible in the sense that an eighteen-year old could never have such thoughts and could never express such thoughts in the novelist’s sophisticated language. Major blunder! By the way, years ago when Updike’s novel S was first published, I recall reviewers claiming that the main character in the novel, a young woman by the name of Sarah Worth, wrote letters as if she had the literary talent of a John Updike. Again, major blunder!

“Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.” --------- In order to fully dissect how fiction works and why fiction works, Mr. Wood delves into the history of the novel, particularly innovations made within the nineteenth century.

James Wood details why no novelist ever had a more profound influence on the novel than Gustave Flaubert.

“Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers in life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers.” ---------- I can speak to the truth of Wood’s claim by my own first-hand experience: after reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward in my early 20s, I was better prepared to deal with my own father's confinement to a hospital bed for an extended time.

“There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs.” ---------- Ha! First-rate fiction writers like Richard Russo and Elmore Leonard make the creation of their interesting, lifelike characters look so easy. It’s a kind of magic – it ain’t easy, as anyone who has ever tried their hand at fiction writing realizes very quickly.

“There is something deeply philosophical about Dostoevsky’s analysis of human behavior, and Nietzsche and Freud were attracted to his work (One chapter of Dostoevsky’s novella The Eternal Husband is entitled “Analysis.”). Proust, who said that all of Dostoevsky’s novels might have the one title, Crime and Punishment, studied him with perhaps more care than he would admit to.” ---------- One great characteristic of a truly great novelist: they expand and deepen what it means to write a novel. Certainly the case with Dostoevsky.

“This new approach to character meant a new approach to form. When character is stable, form is stable and linear – the novelist begins at the beginning, telling us about his hero’s childhood and education, moving decisively forward into the hero’s marriage, and then toward the dramatic crux of the book (something is wrong with the marriage). But if character is changeable, then why begin at the beginning? Surely it would be more effective to begin in the middle, and then move backward, and then move forward, and then move backward again? This is just the kind of form Conrad would use in Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, and Ford in The Good Soldier.” ---------- Along with voice, novelists must make clear decisions on how their novel will be structured in time. I vividly recall Charles Baxter’s First Light, a novel beginning with the main character, a middle-age Michigan car salesman by the name of Hugh Welsh, confronting a crisis involving his younger sister Dorsey, a university physicist. Each chapter moves further back in time, until we reach the last chapter when Hugh is a four-year-old boy at the hospital holding his newborn baby sister for the first time. Such authorial creativity made for unique reading.


"Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls "getting the character in." -- Ample are the reasons given in Mr. Wood's book as to why Ford's words sparkle.

“We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.” ---------- Let me share what has helped me develop my own musical ear for reading fiction: I make it a point to occasionally read aloud. Respecting the musicality of fiction, the ear has it all over the eye.

“All the great realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists. But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel has yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.” ----------- When it comes to fiction, a writer can have all the technical skills in the world but what will really, really set them apart is . . . drum roll with capitals: IMAGINATION.


A great realist; a great formalist - Canadian author Alice Munro show less

This is sort of a horrible little book, irritating and baffling, but, at least, slightly less sexist than I was afraid it was going to be. James Wood has the vocabulary and the academic background to get away with writing a book like this, despite his patchy record as an actual writer of fiction, but it comes across as a bizarre exercise that can't decide if it's literary criticism or metaphysics or both.

Wood, who is obviously very well read in both fiction and criticism, is nonetheless chasing his tail, verbally, for the first hundred pages of the book, asking such useless questions as whether you can talk about characters like they're actual people, traveling over and over the origins and progression of realism as an ideology without show more making much of a point beyond "some people thought it was great, and other people didn't really, and sometimes those people were the same people, and also Flaubert Barthes Flaubert Nabokov Barthes Proust." About halfway through, Wood seems to actually have caught his own tail, narratively speaking, but he doesn't ever seem to realize that the tail he's caught is attached to his own hind end.

The result is a frustrating book; a few really sharp insights are buried in a navel-gazing critical babble that never seems as if it's going to end, quotations from the masters interspersed with passages that Wood has penned himself to function as illustrations of the concepts he discusses. These are objectively terrible.

I've come away without any clear idea of how Wood actually thinks fiction works, without a clear understanding of the history of the novel that Wood has tried to lay out, and without any respect for the esoteric question of whether what happens in books is real or not. This is more of a critical misadventure than a discussion intended to aid individuals who actually craft fiction, though I think Wood's bibliography is quite good, and one could do much worse than to read and study the authors he cites. show less

Hiding behind the dreadfully self-helpish title of this little book(*) is a thoughtful examination of the main elements of prose fiction, explicitly cast as a 21st century reworking of E.M. Forster's famous lecture-course Aspects of the novel. Wood looks at the usual suspects — style, form, dialogue, characters, and so on — and gives us a quick resumé of where the big names of world literature stand on those points and how (selected) contemporary writers are dealing with them. Wood evidently isn't setting out to be either polemical or prescriptive, he seems to feel that the writers he appreciates most are those who work within a given framework whilst pushing out its boundaries, rather than those who slavishly adhere either to past show more convention or to new theoretical doctrines. The great writer is one who does something unexpected, that no-one else would have done at that point, but that with hindsight is the obvious right thing to do.

I don't think this is likely to be a very useful book for someone setting out to be a creative writer, especially if you want to write genre fiction, a topic that is clearly of no interest to Wood. But it would be an excellent preparation for a reader setting out to (re-)read Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Henry James.

---
(*) Wood jokingly comments that he really wanted to call it He knew he was right show less

I previously read “The Nearest Thing”, a collection of several lectures on literature, from 2013, by British-American literary expert James Wood (° 1965). The book under review (How Fiction Works) is both older and newer: it was originally published in 2007, but was updated in a second edition to 2018. Here Wood explains, somewhat more systematically than in the first book, how literature actually works. Of course, this concerns technical aspects of writing (the narrator's point of view, the difference between plot and form, the use of indirect style and authorial irony, etc.), but a great many more substantive aspects are also discussed.
In particular the question whether fiction is realistic is central: at first glance this seems show more like a 'contradictio in terminis', but Wood perfectly illustrates how authors can approach reality very closely through fiction. He cleverly sidesteps the ‘question of truth’ by emphasizing liveliness: “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” Again, Wood appeals to ‘imagination’ as the ultimate technique of good literature: not life as it is, but as we can imagine it. And just as in his previous book, that is actually a religious finality: “So fiction – here I’m extrapolating from Walter Benjamin – ideally offers us a power we tend to lack in our own lives: to reflect on the form and direction of our existence; to see the birth, development and end of a completed life. The novel provides us with the religious power to see beginnings and endings.” As mentioned, this edition has been updated to include (next to classics like Tolstoy and Flaubert) authors such as Karl-Ove Knausgard, Elena Ferrante and Teju Cole. Wood really helps you to pay attention to the details, and thus to appreciate literature (even more). show less

I confess, I came into this expecting to dislike it. But the first chapters were perfectly readable if derivative, and had enough small moments of insight that I was really keen to keep reading. Reviews such as Walter Kirn's in the NYT pushed me even further towards wanting to like Wood, since citing Huck Finn, On the Road and Jesus' Son as three 'masterpieces'* that Wood can't account for is a bit like suggesting that a book about fashion can't account for fashion masterpieces such as happy pants, pith helmets and edible underwear: maybe it can't, but that's probably for the best. And, pace Kirn, Wood can write--the fact that he doesn't feel the need to dip his penis in LSD prior to yawping about his own genius is, I think, a virtue. show more

And then it all falls to pieces, because Wood is not only propagandizing for his own view of what good fiction is--as any critic should do. He also pretends that all good literature is what he thinks good literature is. I'm fine with someone writing a book about how 'realism' is the central impulse behind writing fiction, and saying that that realism consists in 'visual noticing,' detail (visual and or intellectual), sympathy with others, and revealing to us the motives of characters without spelling it out to us. I disagree, but this is a decent statement of a reasonable position.

When you end up saying things like: "Shakespeare is essentially being a novelist" when Lady Macbeth and Macbeth have an argument onstage, or that Pope's 'Rape of the Lock' is "an early form of free indirect style," you can only do damage to those works or our understanding of them. The fact that Pope's work and Shakespeare's works are great *despite* not being realism suggests that fiction can be great without being what Wood considers realism. Claiming them for your argument is underhanded, like saying Karl Malone is a Laker great because he played one season for the Lakers; any sensible understanding of his career sees him as a Jazz great.

And it goes downhill from there. Wood considers plot to be essentially juvenile (his words, 149), he has nothing interesting to say about dialogue, and concludes that fiction is concerned mainly to accurately see "the way things are", that is, to be true to life. Therefore, any literature that tries mainly to do something else (e.g., tries to make you laugh, tries to make you cry, tries to suggest how things *should* be, complains about the way things are) falls outside his understanding of fiction, unless it's so great (Shakespeare; Pope; Kafka is about how it would feel to be an insect) that it just can't be doing anything other than what a few nineteenth and twentieth century novelists are trying to do.

Wood has written a polemic against the likes of Roland Barthes, without understanding the force of their argument--an argument that is, I agree, foolish and misguided. He quotes Barthes:

"The function of narrative is not to 'represent,' it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order... 'what takes place' in narrative is, from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; 'what happens' is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming."

Wood argues against

i) the obviously true claim that literature doesn't refer to anything. But, to take one of Wood's own examples: Isabel Archer does not exist, therefore the name Isabel Archer is not referring to some actually existing thing. Something else is going on. How is that anything other than a statement of fact?
ii) Barthes's opposition to conventionality. Despite the fact that there is no mention here of conventionality, Wood assumes that the argument must be something like 'because fiction uses conventions, it can't refer to reality.' And that that is an attack on conventions in literature.

His response is to say that everything is conventional, therefore Barthes is talking nonsense. But the the really obnoxious bit here is the completely unfounded claim that literature is just the celebration of the 'coming' of language, a human tool that Barthes (and many others) more or less deify. If that was true, there'd be no reason to read one thing rather than another. My review of this book would be just as celebratory of language's coming down from the heavens as would, say, Gulliver's Travels.

Barthes makes language a god, and Wood claims that there is one thing that authors are trying to do. They're both wrong. Authors try to do different things at different times, many of them try to do those things well, and you need to use different standards for different works. Barthes' work was an okay explanation and spirited defense of one thing that a couple of authors did in the sixties. Wood's book is a great explanation and defense of *one* thing that authors have done for the last 200 years. But to claim anything more for 'realism' than that is to do a tremendous disservice to the wonderful range of literature out there, everything from invective to epic, from Jane Austen to Javier Marias. You should read this book, so you'll know about the two extreme positions; and then you should read The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, to remind yourself that both Barthes and Wood are dead wrong.

*************************************************************************

* I find it hard to think of any book the citation of which is more likely to make me viscerally disagree with or even hate you, than those three. One is a children's book, one is slumming drug-lit drivel by an otherwise talented author, and one is Americo-libertarian drivel that should come with a #firstworldproblems warning. And all of are considered masterpieces. It's too bizarre. show less

“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

You might not agree with everything James Wood has to say about a particular author or work of literature, but you have to admit there isn’t another booklover more passionately dedicated to careful reading, finely honed criticism and upholding high standards. How Fiction Works is case in point: very much like an expert mechanic examining the assorted parts of the show more engine in an Italian or German sports car, James Wood rolls up his sleeves and scrutinizes various aspects of what goes into the writing of fiction, especially the novel.

His particular method is to undergird his analysis and reasoning with numerous examples – this is a fairly short book but there are over 100 individual literary novels quoted or referenced, from Don Quixote, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, What Maisie Knew, Sister Carrie and Ulysses to Invisible Man, Lolita, Seize the Day, Blood Meridian, Atonement and Gilead. And this is not exactly an easy book to read; I myself had to break an intellectual sweat, rereading passages again and again to grasp more completely Mr. Wood’s thinking. To share some of the many insights a reader will find in its pages, below are specific James Wood quotes coupled with my comments:

“In reality, we are stuck with third- and first-person narration. The common idea is that there is a contrast between reliable narration (third-person omniscient) and unreliable narrator (the unreliable first-person narrator, who knows less about himself than the reader eventually does). On one side Tolstoy, say; and on the other, Humbert Humbert or Italo Sveno’s narrator, Zeno Cosini, or Bertie Wooster.” ---------- The author spends a good number of his opening pages explaining the dynamics of voice, that is, the manner in which a story is told. At one point he notes: “Actually, the first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable; and third-person “omniscient” narration is generally more partial than omniscient.” I’m reminded of a personal favorite, the way Colin Harrison opens his Bodies Electric using a first-person narrator who is both completely reliable and painfully honest: “My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her. I shouldn’t have indulged myself – my loneliness, my attraction to her – not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But I’m as weak hearted for love and as greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy for the sex – of course that was part of it.” These opening four sentences, set off like a string of explosions, give us a clear indication of what fireworks we can expect as we turn the pages.

“It is useful to watch good writers make mistakes. Plenty of excellent ones stumble at free indirect style.” ---------- Free indirect style being a blending of objective third-person narration with the thoughts and words of a character. James Wood shares the example of how John Updike in his novel Terrorist, in order to propel the story, puts impossible thoughts in the head of his eighteen-year old main character, impossible in the sense that an eighteen-year old could never have such thoughts and could never express such thoughts in the novelist’s sophisticated language. Major blunder! By the way, years ago when Updike’s novel S was first published, I recall reviewers claiming that the main character in the novel, a young woman by the name of Sarah Worth, wrote letters as if she had the literary talent of a John Updike. Again, major blunder!

“Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.” --------- In order to fully dissect how fiction works and why fiction works, the author delves into the history of the novel, particularly innovations made within the nineteenth century.

James Wood details why no novelist ever had a more profound influence on the novel than Gustave Flaubert.

“Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers in life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers.” ---------- I can speak to the truth of Wood’s claim by my own first-hand experience: after reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward in my early 20s, I was better prepared to deal with my own father's confinement to a hospital bed for an extended time.

“There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs.” ---------- Ha! First-rate fiction writers like Richard Russo and Elmore Leonard make the creation of their interesting, lifelike characters look so easy. It’s a kind of magic – it ain’t easy, as anyone who has ever tried their hand at fiction writing realizes very quickly.

“There is something deeply philosophical about Dostoevsky’s analysis of human behavior, and Nietzsche and Freud were attracted to his work (One chapter of Dostoevsky’s novella The Eternal Husband is entitled “Analysis.”). Proust, who said that all of Dostoevsky’s novels might have the one title, Crime and Punishment, studied him with perhaps more care than he would admit to.” ---------- One great characteristic of a truly great novelist: they expand and deepen what it means to write a novel. Certainly the case with Dostoevsky.

“This new approach to character meant a new approach to form. When character is stable, form is stable and linear – the novelist begins at the beginning, telling us about his hero’s childhood and education, moving decisively forward into the hero’s marriage, and then toward the dramatic crux of the book (something is wrong with the marriage). But if character is changeable, then why begin at the beginning? Surely it would be more effective to begin in the middle, and then move backward, and then move forward, and then move backward again? This is just the kind of form Conrad would use in Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, and Ford in The Good Soldier.” ---------- Along with voice, novelists must make clear decisions on how their novel will be structured in time. I vividly recall Charles Baxter’s First Light, a novel beginning with the main character, a middle-age Michigan car salesman by the name of Hugh Welsh, confronting a crisis involving his younger sister Dorsey, a university physicist. Each chapter moves further back in time, until we reach the last chapter when Hugh is a four-year-old boy at the hospital holding his newborn baby sister for the first time. Such authorial creativity made for unique reading.


"Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls "getting the character in." -- Ample are the reasons given in Mr. Wood's book as to why Ford's words sparkle.

“We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.” ---------- Let me share what has helped me develop my own musical ear for reading fiction: I make it a point to occasionally read aloud. Respecting the musicality of fiction, the ear has it all over the eye.

“All the great realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists. But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel has yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.” ----------- When it comes to fiction, a writer can have all the technical skills in the world but what will really, really set them apart is . . . drum roll with capitals: IMAGINATION.


A great realist; a great formalist - Canadian author Alice Munro show less

Wood has strong ideas about the blend and interaction between the voices of authors and those of their fictional characters. He admires most the authors who can write fiction that follows its own conventions faithfully by signaling the different voices without breaking a self-imposed aesthetic. And aesthetics may be the most important factor in Wood's evaluation. We should be able to take written fiction as we find it and evaluate it on its own terms, but authors who fail to grasp and commit to a consistent aesthetic within a work make it difficult for readers to do that.

Readers whose chief interactions with a book are to determine whether they are "entertained," whether they "like the characters," and whether "the plot is believable" show more may see Wood as just another snobbish aesthete that revels in a lack of what they might call "clarity" ("Why should the meaning of the story be indeterminate or encoded? Why not just come out and say what happened?"). But those interested in plumbing the depths of language and all its most artful employments should find enlightenment, or at least enjoyment, with Wood and How Fiction Works. For the others, do try—it may tarnish your love for what Wood calls "commercial realism," but it will add more potential dimensions to your enjoyment of a text than perhaps you thought possible. show less