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The Writing of Fiction
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Selection & Order: The Master Principle

The Writing of Fiction Edith Wharton
selection order form craft-foundations

Key Principle

The beauty of fiction does not come from its raw material — it comes from the order the artist imposes on that material. The volume opens under Traherne's line, "Order the beauty even of Beauty is," and the master tool of order is selection.

Any incident, Wharton observes, is "fringed with details more and more remotely relevant, and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts." Choosing among them "is the first step toward coherent expression." Selection is not one technique among many — it is the precondition for art existing at all. Without a standard of choice "there seems to be no way of estimating æsthetically anything." The novelist's whole job reduces to "the disengaging of crucial moments from the welter of existence."

Every other rule in the book — economy of horror, the single reflector, length-from-subject, the illuminating incident, the tuning-fork of truth — is selection applied to a particular problem.

Why This Matters

Remove selection and you get the modern error in which "formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of form" — anarchy mistaken for honesty. The whole appeal of unselective realism is that it feels truthful (it leaves nothing out), but leaving nothing out is precisely what destroys art: it surrenders the artist's only means of producing meaning. The question every reader unconsciously asks — what am I being told this for? — cannot be answered by a writer who has refused to choose.

Good Examples

  • The slice-of-life realists themselves are the proof. Maupassant, Zola, and the Goncourts survived "in proportion as they forgot about" their unselective theory and selected anyway; their doctrinaire pupils "have all blown away with the theory."
  • Wharton's working definitions show order operating on two planes at once: Form = "the order, in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped"; Style = how they are "grasped and coloured by their medium, the narrator's mind."

Counterpoints

  • Stream of consciousness / tranche de vie is the direct negative proof: it sets down mental reactions "just as they come, with a deliberate disregard of their relevance," pretending "their very unsorted abundance constitutes in itself the author's subject." It is legitimate only as a means to an end — rendering "a mind in one of those moments of acute mental stress" — never as a substitute for choosing.
  • Wholeness without steadiness is just a different formlessness: "it is even more necessary to see life steadily than to recount it whole" (Ch. III).

Key Quotes

"Any theory must begin by assuming the need of selection." — Edith Wharton, Chapter I: In General

"The whole question of method may be said to resolve itself ... into the disengaging of crucial moments from the welter of existence." — Edith Wharton, Chapter I: In General

Rules of Thumb

  • Before any other craft decision, ask: what may I leave out? Relevance is created by exclusion.
  • Distrust the impulse to prove honesty by including everything — unselectivity reads as truth and works as noise.
  • Let scale, form, and style "spring naturally out of the particular theme chosen" rather than being imposed from outside.

Diagram

Diagram

Related References