The artistry of the novel is far easier for me to approach than morality. Take almost any term from the visual arts: truth, beauty, technique, abstract, form, style, balance. They can also be applied to the novel. 

“Artistically, novelists were do-it-yourselfers, and what they knew about ‘the novel’ they gleaned from their favorite authors. There was nothing ‘correct’ about the novel to begin with so every author was free to experiment with what might be incorrect but satisfying.” – Jane Smiley

To me, the novel is no different from any other art form where novice must learn from the master and yet there is still no one way to create a masterpiece. 

“Since no novel can simply exist, like a painting or sculpture, but must communicate something intelligible, the ways in which it can be well crafted are numerous, and since the twin challenges of time and space are always present, novelists never lose sight of technical questions, and technical questions are always rhetorical ones as well.”

And there’s not a paint-by-numbers technique to be found when it comes to writing.

“An author’s technique grows out of his temperament, his intentions, and his ideas, but it also grows out of his circumstances.”

“Dramatic action is always difficult for prose, and no novel can depict two things at once, but some novels can give the illusion of doing so by ordering vivid and various details unforgettably in the mind of the reader so that when the climax, the biggest pieces of action, happens, the reader seems to understand it all.”

When you get down to it, you have the same expectations from the novel as any other form of art: you will experience and you will feel something.

“I would assert that the highest novelist art is in the intensity of that experience, in the reader having the sensation of brilliant phrases, images, insights, observations, sentence and paragraphs cascading upon me.”


All quotes are from Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.


lara
My Story Writer
writing software
www.mywritingsoftware.com


Miss a post from the 13 Ways series? Find it here:
Kickoff: The 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel | The 13 Ways | I Hate Introductions | What is the Novel? | Who is the Novelist? | Origins: Where did the Novel Come From? | The Psychology of the Novel | Morality of the Novel