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A basic characteristic of all good art, then—all man-made works that are aesthetically interesting and lasting—is a concord of ends and means, or form and function. The sine qua non of narrative, so far as form is concerned, is that it takes time. We cannot read a whole novel in an instant, so to b…

Two central tenets, for the traditional point of view, are, first, the Coleridgian notion that true literary art is “the repetition in the finite mind of the infinite ‘I AM’”—the idea, that is, that, like God opening his fist, the writer creates everything at once, his characters, their actions, an…

[...] If the assembly of made-up materials in a fiction creates a portrait of the artist, the importance of the portrait is not that it tells us what the artist looks like but that it provides us with a focus, an aperture, a medium (as in a séance) for seeing things beyond and more important than t…

Thus it appears that to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel—to draw us into the characters’ world as if we were born to it—the writer must do more than simply make up characters and then somehow explain and authenticate them (giving them the right kinds of motorcycles and …

If it is true that no two writers get aesthetic interest from exactly the same materials, yet true that all writers, given adequate technique, can stir our interest in their special subject matter—since all human beings have the same root experience (we’re born, we suffer, we die, to put it grimly)…