Featured book:

Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel, San Diego, New York, and London, Harcourt, Inc., 1955. (Original publication 1927)

What this book meant to me as a writer:

Forster’s classic book, Aspects of the Novel, has been quoted in many writing guides. The first time I picked it up, I was heart weary from advice on what agents and publishers want. I needed a discussion on how to develop story, characters, and plot. My story endings seemed lacking. I craved advice on the art of writing.

Reading Aspects of the Novel gave me a new perspective. Recently, I read it again and was reminded why it meant so much to me years ago. It is deserving of the praise it receives.

What sets Forster’s book apart is the deep and thoughtful discussion of creating a work of fiction. More than a rule book or a how-to manual, it offers insight. He urges us to appreciate a novel without dropping it into the bucket of location, time period, or any artificial classification, and look instead at writers as though they each exist independent from their place and time, and in how they approach their subject and express themselves.

The book has the texture of a series of Cambridge lectures in 1927, which it is. The tone of the book fits my impression of how Forster may have sounded. You might be tempted to skip the introduction and move on to the other chapters, but you would miss the way he redraws assumptions about fiction, and most of all, you would miss a perfect opportunity to get to know Forster and his sardonic sense of humor.

The lectures cover story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. One of my favorite passages is in the lecture on plot. He says, “Nearly all novels are feeble at the end.” I love his discussion of “failure of pep.”

If you need a break from deciphering the expectations of the marketplace, pick up this compact, 174-page lecture series containing zero advice on how to find an agent or publisher or market for your work. This is about the writer and the novel. Who knows? When the novel is ready, everything else – agents, publishers, readers – may fall into place.

Forster’s works include A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, and Maurice, most of which have been made into movies, theatre productions, BBC plays, and a BBC miniseries. The novel Maurice was published in 1971, a year after Forster’s death, and sixty years after he wrote the story about a young man, rejected by his lover, who tries to come to terms with his sexuality in Edwardian society.

Kevin Kwan’s novel, Sex and Vanity, published in 2020, blends today’s humor with an obvious nod to Forster’s novel, A Room with a View, written in 1908. Even today, Forster’s stories ring true.

A closer look at the book:

An often-quoted passage is his comparison of a story and a plot. “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot…If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.”

Forster devotes two lectures to the topic of people. Characters “are real not because they are like ourselves (though they may be like us) but because they are convincing.” He compares round characters and flat. “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.  If it never surprises, it is flat.  If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round.”

I enjoyed his lecture on Pattern and Rhythm for its practical discussion of sometimes overlooked aspects of writing.

He closes with a simile. “Music…does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that?”

Aspects of the Novel is available in hard copy or e-book through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and many bookstores and libraries.