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The Writing of Fiction
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Character & Situation: The Tuning-Fork of Truth

The Writing of Fiction Edith Wharton
character situation tuning-fork dialogue fusion

Key Principle

The "novel of situation" and the "novel of character and manners" are not rival materials but two directions of causation. In the situation-novel "the persons imagined by the author almost always spring out of a vision of the situation, and are inevitably conditioned by it." In the character-novel "the author's characters are first born, and then mysteriously proceed to work out their own destinies." This is a choice, not a property of the subject — "most subjects lend themselves to being treated from either point of view."

The chapter's one actionable rule — the tuning-fork of truth: "His business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of his characters, but what his characters, being what they are, would make of the situation."

Why This Matters

The direction of causation decides whether characters generate events or events deform characters. Apply the tuning-fork hardest in dialogue at culminating scenes. The instant characters speak "not as they naturally would, but as the situation requires" — lending the author "a helping hand in the more rapid elucidation of his drama" — "his effect has been produced at the expense of reality, and he will find them turning to sawdust on his hands." Violate the rule and characters become "Laocoöns" who "die in the merciless coils of their adventure"; the situation-novel "seizes the characters in its steely grip, and jiu-jitsus them into the required attitude."

Good Examples

  • Character-first done right. Austen's Emma, where "character shapes events quietly but irresistibly, as a stream nibbles away its banks."
  • The fusion of the two methods — the mark of the greatest. "Above a certain height of creative capacity the different methods ... are merged in the artist's comprehensive vision." Anna Karenina and Vanity Fair are character/manners novels containing situations more dramatic than any deliberate "theatre of situation" — though such fusion is achieved "only once or twice in their career."
  • Selection in dialogue. Characters must "talk as they would in reality, and yet everything not relevant to his tale must be eliminated. The secret of success lies in his instinct of selection." Dialogue's job is "to gather up the loose strands of passion and emotion running through the tale."

Counterpoints

  • Situation crushing character. Goethe's Elective Affinities and Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata risk reducing protagonists to "marionette wires."
  • Why protagonists feel least real. Heroes and heroines descend from figures "whose business it was not to be real but to be sublime" — "mere projections of [the author's] own personality" — and "the story is about them, and forces them into the shape which its events impose." Minor characters, "moving at ease in the interstices of the tale ... remain real," because the author "views [them] coolly and objectively."
  • Faked realism in dialogue. Padding crucial dialogue with "small-talk ... about the weather or the village pump" "proves only that the narrator has not known how to do the necessary work of selection." (Balzac: there is "a reality in nature which is not one in art.")

Key Quotes

"His business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of his characters, but what his characters, being what they are, would make of the situation." — Edith Wharton, Chapter IV: Character and Situation in the Novel

"He will find them turning to sawdust on his hands." — Edith Wharton, Chapter IV: Character and Situation in the Novel

Rules of Thumb

  • At every turn, ask what these characters would make of the situation — never what the situation needs them to do.
  • Watch dialogue at the climax: the moment a line serves the plot instead of the speaker, the character turns to sawdust.
  • Select within dialogue — real speech minus all irrelevance; never pad with small-talk to fake realism.
  • Give minor characters the cool, objective attention that makes them live; resist projecting yourself onto the protagonist.

Related References