The Comic Muse » The Craft of Fiction

Muriel Spark and the Uses of Omniscience

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:48:39 +0000

In talking about free indirect speech in the last couple of days, I didn’t situate it within its wider historical context. Free indirect speech is a technique that was exploited, if not invented, by modernist writers such as Joyce. David Lodge observes that free indirect speech (or style) was also a feature of some of […]

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Free Indirect Speech, Part 2

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:17:20 +0000

“Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” This opening line from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” is an example of free indirect speech, narration that indicates a character’s internal thoughts and feelings without the use of quotation marks or “he said, he thought” reporting. But how does this line take us […]

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Free Indirect Speech, Part 1

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:28:49 +0000

Let’s distinguish between what critic James Wood calls (1) direct or quoted speech; (2) indirect speech; and (3) free indirect speech. Here are samples of each: Direct or Quoted Speech (from Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now) “Of course I love you,” he said, not thinking it worth his while to kiss her. “It’s […]

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Metaphor and the Desire to Know

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:30:56 +0000

As obliterating fire lights up a vast forest along the crests of a mountain, and the flare shows far off, so as they marched, from the magnificent bronze the gleam went dazzling all about through the upper air to the heaven. Homer, Iliad, Book II, lines 455-458 (translation Lattimore) It is older even than the […]

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In Defense of a Popular Literature

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:44:47 +0000

Michael Chabon’s instinct is spot on. In his essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights–Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” from his 2008 collection, Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, he makes the case for a literature that does not despise to be entertainment, that challenges the hegemony of “literary fiction,” that […]

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Dubliners and Double Writing

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 19:05:03 +0000

For admirers of the work of James Joyce today, June 16, is celebrated as Bloomsday (as the events of Joyce’s Ulysses take place on June 16, 1904). But in thinking about Joyce today I have turned not to Ulysses but to his collection of short stories, Dubliners (published in 1914). About Joyce’s technique in Dubliners […]

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Pretty Good Writing Advice

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 19:52:17 +0000

When in the midst of a story I need to refocus on the basic principles of narrative structure, I often (perhaps not often enough) go back to what playwright-screenwriter-director David Mamet, in his book on Hollywood, Bambi vs. Godzilla, calls “The Long Lost Secret of the Incas.” The secret consists in three magic questions. “Anyone […]

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What’s Essential to Fantasy?

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 01:38:05 +0000

I have been re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” and one of the things I have wanted to take away from the essay this time around is a good, clear definition of fantasy literature. What is it that distinguishes a tale of Faerie from other kinds of tales? Tolkien himself in the essay does not […]

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Finding Faërie

Wed, 30 May 2012 21:49:46 +0000

So how does one enter the world of faërie? This site catalogs the various ways that some famous fantasy authors have imagined the transition. I’ve added to it a bit in what follows, but the list doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive even of famous fantasy worlds. But it’s a good place to start. You can […]

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More From Tolkien on Escapism and Fantasy

Sat, 26 May 2012 19:12:44 +0000

In discussing the question of fantasy and escapism on Kindle Boards, someone reminded me of this passage from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories.” Most apropos: I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the […]

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