Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Thursday, February 1, 2024

Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction by William Dudley Foulke

Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction by William Dudley Foulke

 


MASTERPIECES OF THE MASTERS OF FICTION

 

BY


WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE


NEW YORK


THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
William Dudley Foulke

PREFACE

A short time ago I determined that instead of taking up any new works of fiction I would go over the masterpieces which I had read long since and see what changes time had made in my impressions of them. To do this I chose some forty of the most distinguished authors and decided to select one story from each,—the best one, if I could make up my mind which that was—at all events, one which stood in the first rank of his productions. I determined to read these in succession, one after another, in the shortest time possible, and thus get a comprehensive notion of the whole. Of course under such conditions exhaustive criticism would be out of the question, but I thought that the general perspective and the comparative merits and faults of each work would appear more vividly in this manner than in any other way.

The productions of living authors were discarded, as well as all fiction in verse.

Arranged chronologically, the selections I made were as follows:

1535Rabelais“Gargantua”
1605-1615Cervantes“Don Quixote”
1715-1735Le Sage“Gil Blas”
1719Defoe“Robinson Crusoe”
1726Swift“Gulliver’s Travels”
1733Prévost“Manon Lescaut”
1749Fielding“Tom Jones”
1759Johnson“Rasselas”
1759Voltaire“Candide”
1759-1767Sterne“Tristram Shandy”
1766Goldsmith“The Vicar of Wakefield”
1774Goethe“The Sorrows of Young Werther”
1787Saint Pierre“Paul and Virginia”
1807Chateaubriand“Atala”
1813Austen“Pride and Prejudice”
1813Fouqué“Undine”
1814Chamisso“Peter Schlemihl”
1820Irving“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
1820Scott“Ivanhoe”
1827Manzoni“The Betrothed”
1835Balzac“Eugenie Grandet”
1841Gogol“Dead Souls”
1845Dumas“The Three Guardsmen”
1847Brontë“Jane Eyre”
1847Merimée“Carmen”
1850Dickens“David Copperfield”
1850Hawthorne“The Scarlet Letter”
1852Thackeray“Henry Esmond”
1852Stowe“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
1853Gaskell“Cranford”
1856Auerbach“Barfüssele”
1857Von Scheffel“Ekkehard”
1857Feuillet“The Romance of a Poor Young Man”
1857Flaubert“Madame Bovary”
1859Meredith“The Ordeal of Richard Feverel”
1861Reade“The Cloister and the Hearth”
1862Hugo“Les Misérables”
1863Eliot“Romola”
1866Dostoyevsky“Crime and Punishment”
1868Turgenieff“Smoke”
1869Blackmore“Lorna Doone”
1878Tolstoi“Anna Karenina”
1883Stevenson“Treasure Island”


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