Where Books and Readers Come Together
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the trilogy and recent film with plans for the others to follow, illustrate how a writer can, on faith alone, understand what is necessary to write a compelling story.
As a writer there is always the temptation to be a cruel god over the imagined characters, typing down conflict after conflict without sympathy; there is also an even greater risk of loving the characters too much, coddling them as babes, and becoming benevolent creators over the fiction.
There can be no successful revelation of a reader’s mind merging with that of the author without a strong narrative voice. Without a proper voice, characters fall to one dimensional shades and plot unravels like yarn balls on the floor of the reader’s imagination.
Don’t Look Now, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Reverse psychology is a practical ploy for anyone to get an unsuspecting victim to do as he/she desires. But could this tactic work effectively in a novel?
Stephen Crane’s novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is a master example of an author choosing to simplify his sentences while maintaining an impressionistic style filled with clear images. The blend of the two craft elements, simplification used to express vividness, are what makes The Red Badge of Courage an American classic.
Oedipa stumbles upon a conspiracy in California which eventually leads her onto an amazing adventure, landing her by the end of the book in an auction room as she awaits the crying, or an auctioneer shouting out a sale, of a stamp collection once owned by her former lover, Pierce Inverarity, who is deceased.
O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato is a masterful work of art that incorporates a powerful story brought to life and vivid characters that stand out and above the norm.
In all the literature in all the world, never was there a character like Don Quixote to have predicted his own fame.
By keeping it to a much smaller scale, Voltaire is able to enforce magnetic and grandiose ideas in a line equivalent to a line in poetry.
Writers write to feed that demon-babe who cries out from the misery the world has inflicted upon it. Hemingway and Orwell wanted to use their gifts to help change the world for the better. And the world, I believe, is glad they did.
Many readers who cross the literary environs and pages of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) will close the last pages of the book and consider Victor Frankenstein as one who is tragically flawed.
Even though E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel was first written and used for lectures inside the classroom at Trinity College, Cambridge, I cannot help but to imagine sitting in a stuffy classroom, loosening my collar, briefly staring out the window onto a sunny spring day in 1927 only to be drawn back to a powerful sermon concerning the craft of writing, given by a professional who knew what he was talking about.
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy provides the reader with an overwhelming experience of cowboys roaming the range in search of scalps, either Mexican or American Indians.
In The Art of Fiction’s preface, Gardner writes: “About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it.”
Master Class in Fiction Writing (2006) by Adam Sexton is a useful tool and guide along the way of crafting memorable fiction.
