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The Writing of Fiction
writing HIGH

Form, Style & True Originality

The Writing of Fiction Edith Wharton
form style originality vision stream-of-consciousness

Key Principle

Form is "the order, in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped." Style is the way they are "grasped and coloured by their medium, the narrator's mind, and given back in his words" — "the most personal ingredient." Both "ought to spring naturally out of the particular theme chosen."

And true originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. Vision "is attained only by looking long enough at the object ... to make it the writer's own" — nourished by accumulated knowledge. (Arnold: one must know "a great deal more of one's immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes." Kipling: "What should they know of England who only England know?")

Why This Matters

Writers chase a new manner because it is faster than earning a new vision — and the speed is the trap. Chasing novelty of technique is "a symptom of a certain lack of creative abundance," and "quick production tends to keep him in a state of perpetual immaturity." The writer never looks long enough to see the object truly, so he counterfeits depth with surface novelty. Wharton's verdict: "Notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms."

Re-presenting life in words is uniquely hard because "the novelist works in the very material out of which the object he is trying to render is made. He must use, to express soul, the signs which soul uses to express itself." That difficulty cannot be dodged by a clever manner — only met by deeper seeing.

Good Examples

  • The birth of modern fiction is itself a change of vision, not manner: drama moved "from the street to the soul" (Mme de La Fayette), so crucial moments "need not involve action in the sense of external events." Balzac and Stendhal completed it by "viewing each character first of all as a product of particular material and social conditions."
  • The realists who endured did so by seeing, not by their slogans — surface theory blew away, vision remained.

Counterpoints

  • The slice-of-life / stream-of-consciousness fallacy — the negative proof of selection. Tranche de vie photographs a situation while omitting "its deeper relevance"; stream of consciousness adds raw mental reactions "with a deliberate disregard of their relevance." Both are legitimate only as a means to render "a mind in one of those moments of acute mental stress" (as Balzac and Thackeray used it "whenever — but only when — such a state of mental flux fitted into the whole picture"). The subconscious "cannot furnish the materials for art" because real life "is conducted, at least in its decisive moments, on fairly coherent and selective lines."
  • Mistaking a new manner for originality — the doctrinaire pupils of realism "have all blown away with the theory."

Key Quotes

"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision." — Edith Wharton, Chapter I: In General

"The 'action' of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul." — Edith Wharton, Chapter I: In General

Rules of Thumb

  • Let form and style grow out of the subject; never impose a manner the theme did not ask for.
  • If a technique feels new, ask whether it serves a new vision or merely disguises the lack of one.
  • Look at your object longer than feels necessary — vision is earned by attention, not invention.

Related References