Why do I write? Subjects Bowen, Elizabeth, -- -- Correspondence. Greene, Graham, -- -- Correspondence. Pritchett, V. View all subjects More like this Similar Items. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private.
Save Cancel. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Be the first. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Tags Add tags for "Why do I write? Authors, English -- 20th century -- Correspondence. Bowen, Elizabeth, -- Greene, Graham, -- Authors, English.
Authors Literature. All rights reserved. Please sign in to WorldCat Don't have an account? Remember me on this computer. Cancel Forgot your password? Sannie Hald rated it it was amazing Apr 22, Marcel rated it liked it Aug 20, Andrew Smith rated it really liked it Dec 01, Shelley rated it it was amazing Feb 18, Gillian rated it really liked it Sep 30, Josh rated it really liked it Dec 02, David rated it really liked it Apr 25, Paulette Switzer-Tatum rated it really liked it Aug 01, BookDB marked it as to-read Sep 15, Karen marked it as to-read Jan 25, Moira Russell added it Feb 04, Inna marked it as to-read Feb 10, Cliff Mitchell added it Jan 06, Lexi marked it as to-read Feb 18, Ellen marked it as to-read Jul 12, Curtis marked it as to-read Mar 28, InfinitexLibrary marked it as to-read Apr 23, Ye Li marked it as to-read May 03, Nihal Naga added it Mar 12, Carolyn marked it as to-read Aug 24, Nicole Donze marked it as to-read Feb 04, Justine marked it as to-read Mar 22, Stefania Porcelli marked it as to-read Apr 28, Renan Virginio marked it as to-read Oct 23, Leni Intranquilla marked it as to-read Dec 15, Malak Latif is currently reading it Jan 24, Robert marked it as to-read Aug 10, Eliza marked it as to-read Sep 10, Pauline Taylor marked it as to-read Apr 25, Kaite marked it as to-read May 26, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
The weak novelist is always, compensatorily, scene-minded. Scene is only justified in the novel where it can be shown, or at least felt, to act upon action or character. In fact, where it has dramatic use. Where not intended for dramatic use, scene is a sheer slower-down. Its staticness is a dead weight. Thunderstorms, the sea, landscape flying past car or railway-carriage windows are not scene but happenings. Scene must be evoked.
For its details relevance See relevance is essential. Scene must, like the characters, not fail to materialize. In this it follows the same law—instantaneous for the novelist, gradual for the reader.
Or, at least, not at all far along the way. Should not on any account be a vehicle for ideas for their own sake. Ideas only permissible where they provide a key to the character who expresses them.
Dialogue requires more art than does any other constituent of the novel. Art in the celare artem sense. Art in the trickery, self-justifying distortion sense. Because dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. What are the realistic qualities to be imitated or faked in novel dialogue? Artless or hit-or-miss arrival at words used. Ambiguity speaker not sure, himself, what he means. Effect of choking as in engine : more to be said than can come through.
Erraticness: unpredictable course. What must novel dialogue, behind mask of these faked realistic qualities, really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion.
Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique. Since the last confrontation, something has changed, advanced. What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will in turn, leave its effect.
Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, so be effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary. Short of a small range of physical acts—a fight, murder, love-making—dialogue is the most vigorous and visible interaction of which characters in a novel are capable.
Speech is what the characters do to each other. Dialogue provides means for the psychological materialization of the characters. It should short-circuit description of mental traits. Every sentence in dialogue should be descriptive of the character who is speaking. Idiom, tempo, and shape of each spoken sentence should be calculated by novelist, towards this descriptive end. All the above, from class to acumen, may already have been established, with regard to each character, by a direct statement by the novelist to the reader.
It is still, however, the business of dialogue to show these factors, or qualities, in play. There must be present in dialogue— i. Illustrativeness can be stretched too far. Like straight description, it then becomes static, a dead weight—halting the movement of the plot. So should infatuation with any idiom.
Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out. Dialogue is the thin bridge which must, from time to time, carry the entire weight of the novel. Two things to be kept in mind— a the bridge is there to permit advance, b the bridge must be strong enough for the weight. Failure in any one piece of dialogue is a loss, at once to the continuity and the comprehensibility of the novel. Characters should, on the whole, be under rather than over articulate.
What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking because of its greater inner importance to the plot than what they arrive at saying. The question of angle comes up twice over in the novel. Angle has two senses— a visual, b moral.
Where is the camera-eye to be located? This is, of course, simplifying and integrating. Also, with regard to any matter that the specific character does not cannot know, it involves the novelist in long cumbrous passages of cogitation, speculation and guesses. This is better. It must, if used, involve very careful, considered division of the characters, by the novelist, in the seeing and the seen.
Certain characters gain in importance and magnetism by being only seen: this makes them more romantic, fatal-seeming, sinister. In fact, no character in which these qualities are, for the plot, essential should be allowed to enter the seeing class.
The novelist should retain right of entry, at will, into any of the characters: their memories, sensations and thought-processes should remain his, to requisition for appropriate use.
The demands of the plot. Even so, the novelist must not lost sight of point made above—the gain in necessary effect, for some characters, of their remaining seen —their remaining closed, apparently, even to the omniscience of the novelist. The cinema, with its actual camera-work, is interesting study for the novelist. Any trick is justified if it adds a statement.
With both film and novel, plot is the pre-imperative. The cinema, cinema-going has no doubt built up in novelists a great authoritarianism. This seems to me good. These may all exist, sunk at different depths, in the same novelist. Their existence cannot fail to be palpable; and their nature determines, more than anything else, the sympatheticness or antipatheticness of a given novel to a given circle of readers. Pre-assumptions are bad.
They limit the novel to a given circle of readers. They cause the novel to act immorally on that given circle. The increasingly bad smell of most pre-assumptions probably accounts for the growing prestige of the detective story: the detective story works on the single, and universally acceptable, pre-assumption that an act of violence is anti-social, and that the doer, in the name of injured society, must be traced. Great novelists write without pre-assumption. They write from outside their own nationality, class or sex.
Does this mean he must have no angle, no moral view-point? No, surely. Without these, he would be a incapable of maintaining the conviction necessary for the novel; b incapable of lighting the characters, who to be seen at all must necessarily be seen in a moral light.
From what source, then, must the conviction come? The conviction must come from certainty of the validity of the truth the novel is to present. Revelation of what? The virtuousness or non-virtuousness of the action of the character. What is virtue in action? Truth in action. Truth by what ruling, in relation to what? Truth by the ruling of, and in relation to, the inherent poetic truth that the novel states.
The direction of the action of the poetic truth provides—in fact, is —the moral angle of the novel. If he remains with that truth in view, the novelist has no option as to his angle. Almost all English humour shows social sometimes, now, backed by political pre-assumptions.
Extreme cases—that the lower, or employed, classes are quaint or funny—that aristocrats, served by butlers, are absurd. National pre-assumptions show in treatment of foreigners.
It has been said that plot must advance; that the underlying or inner speed of the advance must be even. How is this arrived at? It is to be remembered that everything put on record at all—an image, a word spoken, an interior movement of thought or feeling on the part of a character—is an event or happening.
These proceed out of one another, give birth to one another, in a continuity that must be a obvious, b unbroken. The reader must be made to feel that what has not been described or stated has, none the less, happened. By the showing of subsequent events or happenings whose source could only have been in what has not actually been stated. Tuesday is Tuesday by virtue of being the day following Monday. The stated Tuesday must be shown as a derivative of the unstated Monday.
0コメント