The Art of Fiction
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The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers is a nonfiction book by Ayn Rand, published posthumously. Edited by Tore Boeckmann, it was published by Plume in 2000, ISBN 0452281547. The book is based on a 1958 series of 12 four-hour lectures about fiction which Rand gave to a group of student readers and writers in her living room. A companion book is The Art of Nonfiction.
Contents |
[edit] Summary
[edit] Chapter 1: Writing and the Subconscious
- Language is a tool you had to learn
- Before you sit down to write, you cannot be conscious about the words you use.
- What is "ominous", what is "cheerful"
- You call on stored knowledge when you write
- That which you know clearly, you will find word for
- To master the art of writing, you have to be conscious why you are doing things. Do not edit yourself while you write. You cannot change themes in the middle of a sentence. When you write, you have to rely on your subconscious. You cannot doubt yourself and edit every sentence as it comes out. Write as it comes to you. Then, the next day preferably, read over it and be editor.
- The "squirms" (bad writing or "writer's block') comes when your conscious and subconscious are not in sync. The solution: think of the scene & it's relevancy to the rest of the book. Do enough thinking (over days) to integrate the elements involved.
[edit] Chapter 2: Literature as an art form
- Use words with literal clarity, like a lawyer. A non-objective artist does not know what they are saying. You must be exact & objective. Anyone who wants to communicate with others must rely on an objective reality & objective language.
- The non-objective is that which is only dependent on the individual subject, not any standard of outside reality and is there for incommunicable to others. When a man announces that he is a non-objective artist, he is saying that what he is saying cannot be communicated. Why then does he present it? And why then does he proclaim it is art? An non-objective artist is counting on the existence of objective art & using it in order to destroy it. The subjectivism of the objective artist is based on an inferiority complex which takes the form "If I don't understand it, it must be profound". Why? When communication by means of language is discarded, what is left as the definition of writing? Writing becomes inarticulate sounds printed on paper by means of little black marks. Bad premises if not eliminated will grow & destroy the good ones. Do not let your own talent, your good premises act in support of your bad premises and of the lazy or the irrational in your mind. If to any extent you do not hold the premises of non-objectivity then by your own choice you do not belong in literature or in any human activity or on this earth.
- With the exception of proper names, every word is an abstraction. In order to be completely free with words, you must know countless concretes under your abstractions. This issue [abstractions to concretes] is crucial to all creative writing; not only to the composition of a sentence nut the composition of a whole story and of its every chapter and paragraph.
- When you start with a story, you start with an abstraction then find the concretes that add up to that abstraction. For the reader, it is the reverse: they start with the concretes and move to the abstracts. I call this a circle. For instance, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is "The importance of reason" -- a wide abstraction. To leave the reader with that message, I have to show what reason is, how it operates, and why it is important. The sequence on the construction of the John Gault Line is included for that purpose, to concertize the mind's role in human life. The rest of the novel illustrates the consequences of the mind's absence. In particular, the chapter on the tunnel catastrophe shows concretely what happens in a world where men do not dare to think or to take the responsibility of judgment. If at the end of the novel you are left with the impression "yes, the mind is important & we should live by reason", these incidents are the cause. The concretes have summed up in your mind to the abstraction with which I started and which I had to break down into concretes.
- What abstractions do I want to convey and what concretes will convey it,
- Young writers often make the following mistake: if they want a strong, independent, & rational hero, they state in there narrative that he is strong, independent, & rational or they have other characters pay him these compliments in discussion. This does not convey anything: strong, independent, & rational are abstractions. In order to leave your reader with those abstractions, you have to provide the reader with concretes that will make him conclude he did x so he is strong, he is independent because he defied y, rational because he thought z. It is on your power to complete this circle that your success rests.
- The purpose of all art is the objectification of values. The fundamental motive of the writer, the activity--whether he knows it consciously or not, is to objectify his values, his views on what is important in life. A man reads a novel for the same reason: to see a presentation of reality slanted to a certain code of values with which he them may agree or disagree.
- For instance, to say "courage is good" is not to objectify a value. To present a man who acts bravely is.
- Why is it important to objective values?
- human values are abstractions. Before they can be real to or convince anyone, the concretes have to be given. In this sense, all every writer is a moral philosopher.
[edit] Chapter 3: Theme & Plot
- a novel's theme is the general abstraction in relation to which the events serve as the concretes.
- Theme of Gone with the Wind: The impact of the civil war on the South, the destruction of the Southern way of life that vanished with the wind
- Theme of Sinclair Lewis's Babbott: The characterization of the average American small business man
- A novel's theme is not the same as it's philosophical meaning.
- What is important is not the message the writer projects explicitly, but the value and view of life he projects implicitly. Every story has an implicit philosophy... by what he chooses to present, by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental metaphysical values--his view on man's relationship to reality and of what man can & should seek in life.
- In judging a novel, all one has to do is to understand the theme and judge how well the author carried it out. Other things being equal, the wider the theme is the better work of art it is.
- "Quo Vadis", by Henryk Sienkiewicz, is one of Ayn Rand's technically one of the best constructed novels ever written, though she does not agree with the glorification of the rise & glorification of Christian culture.
- Warning: be sure that your story can be summed up to some theme (ex. "I'm writing something that happened to me" -- that's not a theme)
- You must show objective reason why there should be interest in the work
- The most important element in a novel is Plot.
- Plot is a purposeful progression of events. Such events must be logically connected, must be a natural outgrowth of the preceding, & all leading up to a final climax.
- A novel is a story of human beings in action... so there must be events. If you do not represent your subject matter in terms of physical action, what you are writing is not a novel.
- Plot is a purposeful progression of events. Such events must be logically connected, must be a natural outgrowth of the preceding, & all leading up to a final climax.
[edit] Theme vs. plot
- The most important element in a novel is Plot.
- Plot is a purposeful progression of events. Such events must be logically connected, must be a natural outgrowth of the preceding, & all leading up to a final climax.
- A novel is a story of human beings in action... so there must be events. If you do not represent your subject matter in terms of physical action, what you are writing is not a novel.
- We the Living, theme: the individual against the state (the evil of stateism),
- When you work on a story of your own, make sure you define your theme clearly (it will help you judge what to include)
- The Fountainhead, theme: Individualism and Collectivism (not in politics but in man's soul)
- To go to the them to the plot line, you simply ask "by what means did the author present the them": a plot-theme - The focus is the focus of the means of presenting the theme. It is the most important element in a story. The plot-theme names an action, the central action to which all of the other events in the story are related.
- Struggle
- Conflict (within man or with another man) - conflict in a man's mind is the most powerful because it shows that he chose the solution
- Climax
- Plot is a purposeful progression of events. Such events must be logically connected, must be a natural outgrowth of the preceding, & all leading up to a final climax.
