Activity

[...] However dazzling and vivid the characters, however startling the action, no piece of fiction can be of lasting interest if its thought is confused, simple-minded, or plain wrong. On the other hand, reading fiction or poetry without regard for the delight it can give—its immediate interest—can…

[...] Does fiction, in fact, have anything whatever to do with truth? Is it possible that this complicated instrument, fiction, studies nothing but itself—its own processes?

A common answer at the present time is that that is the question the serious writer spends his whole life trying to work o…

[...] Good description is symbolic not because the writer plants symbols in it but because, by working in the proper way, he forces symbols still largely mysterious to him up into his conscious mind where, little by little as his fiction progresses, he can work with them and finally understand them…

The reason the approach seems to me not ideal is that, except in the extraordinary case, it wastes the writer’s time. It instructs him to do something he cannot realistically be expected to do well—and here I mean “well” in the always urgent artist’s sense, not the more casual, more gentlemanly way…

Some writers—John Barth, for instance—make a point of interrupting the fictional dream from time to time, or even denying the reader the chance to enter the fictional dream that his experience of fiction has led him to expect. We will briefly examine the purpose and value of such fiction later. For…