![]() ![]() While I think that James Wood set out with the best intentions, and there are some genuinely interesting passages, the book ultimately falls flat. ![]() (*) Wood jokingly comments that he really wanted to call it He knew he was right ( ) But it would be an excellent preparation for a reader setting out to (re-)read Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Henry James. I don't think this is likely to be a very useful book for someone setting out to be a creative writer, especially if you want to write genre fiction, a topic that is clearly of no interest to Wood. The great writer is one who does something unexpected, that no-one else would have done at that point, but that with hindsight is the obvious right thing to do. Wood evidently isn't setting out to be either polemical or prescriptive, he seems to feel that the writers he appreciates most are those who work within a given framework whilst pushing out its boundaries, rather than those who slavishly adhere either to past convention or to new theoretical doctrines. ![]() Wood looks at the usual suspects - style, form, dialogue, characters, and so on - and gives us a quick resumé of where the big names of world literature stand on those points and how (selected) contemporary writers are dealing with them. Forster's famous lecture-course Aspects of the novel. Hiding behind the dreadfully self-helpish title of this little book(*) is a thoughtful examination of the main elements of prose fiction, explicitly cast as a 21st century reworking of E.M. ![]()
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