Featured book:

Lubbock, Percy, The Craft of Fiction, London, Jonathan Cape, 1921.

What this book meant to me as a writer:

My reaction to The Craft of Fiction is mixed. Lubbock’s work is a tough read, published in 1921 in a verbose analytic voice. Even so, I found timeless wisdom here and there, enough to keep me reading.  

My favorite part concerns perspective. Lubbock discusses in depth how an author utilizes rather than describes a scene. For example, he considers the reader’s point of view. Is the reader facing the author who is narrating? Or is the reader facing a character who is narrating? Is the scene revealed dramatically and the reader is facing the action? This last method he praises as the best. Here, we writers nod and repeat our critique-session mantra, “show don’t tell.” For me, his commentary on the differences among these options is helpful and worth the time spent.

If you have read E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (see my previous post), written six years after the publication of The Craft of Fiction, you may remember how Forster initially praises Lubbock because he “examines various points of view with genius and insight,” then turns on the heat – “this is a ramshackley survey and for me the ‘whole intricate question of method’ resolves itself not into formulae but into the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says – a power which Mr. Lubbock admits and admires, but locates at the edge of the problem instead of at the centre. I should put it plumb in the centre.”

The Craft of Fiction stirred controversy in its heyday of the 1920s. One-hundred years later, we read the arguments and hear the voices of those contemporaries throwing barbs at one another. Lubbock reviewed many novels of the time, including fiction by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton. But they also respected each other’s work. In his chapter on “Pattern and Rhythm,” Forster praises Lubbock’s novel Roman Pictures as an example of a well-executed story in the shape of a grand chain, a common pattern made exceptional in Lubbock’s hands.

Imagine these fascinating authors gathered in a room. I wish we could time-travel to the 1920s and listen to an evening of dialogue among them.

Lubbock reaches back from his own time to give us examples of excellent craft. In a discussion on revealing character through scene, he writes, “As for the peculiar accent and stir of life, the life behind the story, Balzac’s manner of finding and expressing it is always interesting. He seems to look for it most readily, not in the nature of the men and women whose action makes the story, or not there to begin with, but in their streets and houses and rooms.” He says Balzac describes and employs every corner of a home so thoroughly, the story flows. “The girl placed as she is, her circumstances known as they are, all but make the tale of their own accord; only the simple facts are wanting, their effect is already in the air. And accordingly the story slips away from its beginning without hesitation.”

On the downside, the verbiage in The Craft of Fiction is at times thick, but as Lubbock says in his closing, “It seems vain to expect that discourse upon novelists will contain anything new for us until we have really and clearly and accurately seen their books…Every word we say of it, every phrase I have used about a novel in these pages, is loose, approximate, a little more or a little less than the truth.”

A closer look at the book:

To read The Craft of Fiction and find your truth, check with your favorite bookstore, visit your library under Dewey Decimal 808.3, or if these prove unsuccessful, download The Craft of Fiction from Project Gutenberg.

If you are unfamiliar with Project Gutenberg, visit www.gutenberg.org. Volunteers digitize literature for which the U. S. copyright has expired, or the copyright holder has granted non-commercial use, resulting in a massive collection of free e-books. In addition to The Craft of Fiction, I have downloaded classics including Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull House, Cunningham’s The Hours, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost. I especially loved A Girl of the Limberlost, about a resilient young woman who deals with family hardships and a changing world as she tracks and collects moths in a northeastern Indiana swamp disappearing with the growth of the logging industry. Published in 1909, the scenes made me see and smell the damp beauty of the soft forest floor and the diverse community of moths as described by naturalist Gene Stratton Porter.

A century apart: 1921-2021:

I am posting this in the year of my mother’s 101^st birthday, if she were alive today. Thinking of my grandmother holding my infant mom, I imagine them in 1921. I wish I had asked more questions. How did my grandmother deal with the Spanish flu? Was anyone in our family ill? How did her sister and brother-in-law deal with it, the ones with the welcoming, strong, hugging arms? By 1921, did they realize it was over, or were they on high alert? I remember family wisdom – stay away from hospitals. People die there. Until this pandemic, I thought their wisdom was archaic. If they could guide us through 2021, what would they advise?

In our community and literary lives, it looks like the decade of the 2020s will bring as much controversy as the 1920s. Keep writing, my friends.