James Wood's "How Fiction Works"

For about two years, I've been trying to figure out whether to recommend James Wood's How Fiction Works to OTP readers. I just finished reading it for the fourth time, so you'd think this decision would be easy. My problem is, I want to help beginning to intermediate writers improve their fiction writing skills and their ability to sell short stories, and I'm not convinced Wood's book does that. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. But then I remember I've read it four times now and will probably read it four more times in the future, so there's got to be something valuable in there.

In How Fiction Works, Wood dissects fiction at a theoretical level to discuss why a bunch of words can evoke such thoughts and feelings in readers, and how subtly those words can work on our psyche. He spends most of the book talking about what he calls the "free indirect" style of narration in which how objects and events are described relate to the way characters in a story view the world. To me, that's obvious, but since I'm not a literature major, I didn't realize the extent to which older fiction was designed differently.

When you read extremely old fiction, such as Homer and stories from the Bible, the differences become obvious. These stories were written in a style that never once attempts to show the fictional world through the eyes of any character. The stories are most definitely told to the reader, and the reader is entirely outside of them. As Wood says, detail is never "gratuitous" and meant to convey a realistic sense of place, and the oldest storytellers "seem to feel no pressure to evoke a life-like passing of [time]" (p. 87). Here's an example Wood uses, which is taken from the Bible:

"And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off." (Genesis 22:3)

First, we would today call this kind of writing "summary," as opposed to its opposite, "scene." (We'd also wonder why Abraham "rose off" twice. Wasn't he already up after the first time?) Second, you don't feel like you're right there with Abraham while he's rising up and rising up again. You feel like you're being told about something that happened a long time ago that had nothing to do with you. Compare that to any modern writing, which generally attempts to make you feel the way the characters feel, and to get you right inside their heads. Modern fiction is designed to make you feel wind rush over your skin, as opposed to just telling you "And on that day the wind blew mightily" or something.

Most of all, though, Wood talks about the tension between authorial narration and characters' viewpoints. Many times I've wondered if it's possible to write a story from a child's perspective realistically. Have you ever heard a five-year-old try to tell a story? "Yesterday, I was at school, and someone brought a bunny. A bunny, it was a bunny. There was a bunny and it was white and brown and it knocked over the juice." Do you really want to read a whole story told that way? I've seen some pretty good attempts, but five-year-olds aren't known for their wise editorial decisions about what details to put where, and when to let key information enter the picture. Yet serious fiction writers need to think about such things.

Wood's book intrigues me because he spends a lot of time talking about the problems inherent in trying to write both realistically, and through the eyes and style of characters who would make lousy writers. When is it okay for an authors to insert their own opinions into the prose? Or as Wood asks, "Can we reconcile the author's perceptions and language with the character's perception and language?" Wood's answer is "yes," and he spends most of the book talking about how great writers have done it, especially the French writer Gustave Flaubert, who pretty much invented our modern answer to that question and who influenced virtually every fiction writer after him from James Kafka to Stephanie Meyer, whether the writers realize it or not.

So if you're interested in a deep analysis of the mechanics of writing, I think How Fiction Works is for you. If you'd rather figure out why your plots or dialogue never come out the way you want, or why editors keep telling you your stories are too long/too short/too something else, you need a different book.

Book Review: Steering the Craft

Today, I'm going to review one of the books on fiction writing I've collected over the years. This one is Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my favorite authors. The book has a long subtitle stating that it contains writing exercises either for "the lone navigator" or "the mutinous crew." I bought it because (1) Le Guin wrote it, and (2) I was intrigued by the thought of writing exercises you could do as a "lone navigator" (that is, by oneself).

In many ways, Steering is a typical "how to" book on fiction writing, in that it has chapters devoted to specific aspects of writing, each of which contains sample prose from other authors that Le Guin uses to make her points. I think there's a ton of good material in this book, so much that if you don't own any books on fiction writing, I think Steering would make a fine starting place. My problem was, I own quite a few books on fiction writing and I'm not sure this one showed me much that wasn't in at least one of the others.

My larger problem with Steering is that I think it's much more valuable for a group of writers than for any individual. I'm not convinced the exercises (which remind me of our own mini-contests, sometimes) are all that valuable if you don't have a more experienced or capable writer going over your work.

Writing isn't like bowling, where there's an objective scoring system that tells you if you're any good at the game. But to continue the analogy, how is a gutter ball-throwing beginner going to improve unless someone with more experience and skill shows the beginner a more effective way to bowl? Writing presents the same problem, except that with writing, it's easy to think you're knocking all the pins down when you're really only knocking down one or two of them. That's because many beginning writers have difficulty evaluating the words they put on a page separately from the story they carry around in their heads. They look at the words they wrote down, those words remind them of the great story in their heads, they say "what a great story I've got in my head," and then conclude they wrote great words down. We all do that to some degree, but beginners do it more.

So I question the "lone navigator" part of Steering's subtitle. I'm not sure the exercises are valuable unless you can get useful feedback on your results from another person. 

On the OTP yes/maybe/no/favorite rating scale, I give Steering a "maybe." I think it's a good book to start with if you don't have any others, but I don't think it's the best book out there. Furthermore, I think the exercises would be terrific if you could get useful feedback on your attempts at performing them, but I question whether anyone can evaluate their own writing well enough to improve meaningfully by doing them alone.

Two of My Favorite Books on Writing and Editing

Our first post!

What better way to start a blog dedicated to the writing and editing of fiction than to suggest two of my favorite books on the subject? If you want to improve your fiction writing technique and you aren't already getting published in the top literary magazines, then I think you could do a lot worse than to treat these two books like textbooks. 

By that I mean, don't just read them, put them away, and never think about them again. I mean re-read them like they're a manual on how to live a better life. 

The first is one I've been recommending for years: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, 2nd. edition, by Renni Browne and Dave King. I haven't read every book on editing every written, but I've read quite a few and this is the one I keep coming back to. Before I studied this book, I got lots of personalized rejection letters from paying markets. After studying it, I sold five short stories to paying markets within 15 months. If that's not a recommendation, I don't know what one is. It's less than $10 on Amazon as I type this. You will never get better writing advice for $10.


Want to dig even deeper, and think about fiction in a way you might never have before? Then try How Fiction Works by James Wood. Right now it's only six dollars on Amazon. This one's a tougher read because it's not a how-to manual like the other book; it's a series of thought-provoking essays and an exploration of the mechanics of fiction through example and discussion. I would say it's not for beginners, but I would still recommend it to any and all serious students of fiction writing.


Since I want this blog to be a series of dialogues, not lectures, I ask for your input: What books on fiction writing have you found most useful? And if you're familiar with the two books I've mentioned, do you agree with my recommendations?