On the art of writing fiction

ON THE ART OF WRITING FICTION WELLS GARDNER DARTON & C o LONDON & WESTMINSTER
1894
On the Art of Writing Fiction
W. E. Norris
The main thing
The art of writing fiction has of late years been made the subject of innumerable articles by persons most, if not quite all, of whom are doubtless competent and well-informed; and it seems to be pretty generally agreed upon between them, as a nice, definite sort of dogma to start with, that “the main thing is to have a story to tell.” Possibly that may be the main thing: possibly also the main thing—if, indeed, there be one where several things are indispensable—may be, not that the writer should have a story to tell, but that he should be able to tell it. To tell it, that is, after a fashion which shall move, interest or amuse the great novel-reading public, which, patient and tolerant though it may be—patient and tolerant as some of us must needs acknowledge, with a due sense of contrite gratitude, though it is—nevertheless demands something more than a bald narration of supposed events.
The beginner
The beginner, therefore (for it is only to beginners that the present dogmatiser has the effrontery to address himself), will do well to bear in mind that it is not enough to be equipped with an admirable plot, nor even to have clearly realised in his or her inner consciousness the circumstances and personages involved therein: both have to be made real to the reader; both, moreover, have to be so treated of as, in one way or another, to tickle the reader’s mental palate. This is much the same as saying that the beginner, in order to be a successful beginner, has to acquire a style. Not necessarily, it must be owned, a correct style; still at least a distinctive one. Otherwise he cannot hope to make his audience see people and things as he sees them.
Acquiring a style
But why talk about “acquiring” a style? Does not every human being already possess a style?—dormant, no doubt, yet plainly perceptible in his accustomed turns of speech and methods of expressing himself. And can he do better than utilise this when he sits down with pen and paper to write his story? Perhaps he might do rather better; but there is no need to raise the point at the outset, because the beginner who essays, without preparation or apprenticeship, to tell his story in his own way will very soon discover that that is precisely what he cannot do. The words, somehow, will not come; or, if they do, they come in a manner palpably and grotesquely inadequate; the sentences are clumsy, tautological, badly rounded and jar upon the ear; the effect produced is very far from being the effect contemplated. The tyro, in short, finds out to his sorrow that writing is not in the least the same thing as talking, and that even so modest an achievement as the production of a novel is, after all, an art, the inexorable requirements of which do not greatly differ from those claimed by other arts.