marycatelli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marycatelli) wrote2009-05-26 10:20 pm
marycatelli) wrote2009-05-26 10:20 pm
The Rhetoric of Fiction
The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth
This is a how-to-write book. Despite the clever disguise as a geeky academic textbook complete with bibliography and footnotes -- and the disguise is so thorough that it actually is a geeky academic textbook complete with bibliography and footnotes.
Anyway, it's about how writers actually do get readers to view the characters and circumstances the way they want them to. How we maintain interest in the story. Whether some demands about novels really don't make sense as shown by the way that many novel rely on the "faults" to work. He touches on techniques from commentary from omniscient narrators to judicious adjectives and discusses how techniques -- even the modern, popular ones -- have their limitations as well as their uses.
He even makes sense when talking about how writers write. Most literary critics who aren't fiction writers on the side talk about how writers write and reveal that they will never, ever, ever manage to write fiction.
In his afterword (to the second edition) he says he once had a lively discussion with a class of fourth graders on the rhetoric of fiction. Which is to say that he asked, "How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys?" and they were off. This treats the matter in somewhat more complex manner -- but it touches on that, too.
This is a how-to-write book. Despite the clever disguise as a geeky academic textbook complete with bibliography and footnotes -- and the disguise is so thorough that it actually is a geeky academic textbook complete with bibliography and footnotes.
Anyway, it's about how writers actually do get readers to view the characters and circumstances the way they want them to. How we maintain interest in the story. Whether some demands about novels really don't make sense as shown by the way that many novel rely on the "faults" to work. He touches on techniques from commentary from omniscient narrators to judicious adjectives and discusses how techniques -- even the modern, popular ones -- have their limitations as well as their uses.
He even makes sense when talking about how writers write. Most literary critics who aren't fiction writers on the side talk about how writers write and reveal that they will never, ever, ever manage to write fiction.
In his afterword (to the second edition) he says he once had a lively discussion with a class of fourth graders on the rhetoric of fiction. Which is to say that he asked, "How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys?" and they were off. This treats the matter in somewhat more complex manner -- but it touches on that, too.
followed you over from that *more controversial* thread...
You know many wanna-be writers, such as myself, are grappling with right now, such as; "How can a fantasy writer use slavery, for instance, in her worldbuilding and still maintain the readership of groups who are hyper-sensitive to race issues?"
I feel that much of this is a matter of craft, and this book might have some useful advice for me.
Would you recommend it?
Re: followed you over from that *more controversial* thread...
Indeed, he at different points discusses how writers can maneuver sympathies about murder and child abuse.
Re: followed you over from that *more controversial* thread...
1. Don't call them slaves. Call them thralls, or bondsmen, or some other synonym
2. Slavery doesn't have to be racially based. It has existed all over the world for a long time and has a lot of variations -- most of which are not racially based. And sometimes it's not racially based in our eyes if not those practicing it. Medieval Western Europeans may have regarded Slavs as a different race but we would call them both white. And then there's debt slavery. And prisoners of war are likely to be the same race since you're likely to fight your neighbors.
Re: followed you over from that *more controversial* thread...
*grin*
Re: followed you over from that *more controversial* thread...