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

Showing posts with label Dudley Foulke. Show all posts

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction by William Dudley Foulke

MASTERPIECES OF THE MASTERS OF FICTION

WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE

NEW YORK

THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS
1912

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:

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

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Thursday, February 1, 2024

Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction by William Dudley Foulke