It’s generally agreed that the best, perhaps the only, way to really learn how to write and to improve your writing is to write more. Reading broadly, and reading high-quality prose and stories, helps, and you can gain insight from various writing techniques, classes, and books, but most authors agree that you can’t really teach writing itself. Sanderson’s writing lectures exemplify this; he teaches plot, character, setting, publishing, but not actual writing, the art of stringing words and sentences together in meaningful ways to craft impactful stories. Various books I’ve read on writing, as helpful as they are, are similar: Orson Scott Card’s several books (which first introduced me to the MICE quotient), Steering the Craft, Writing 21st Century Fiction. I accepted this as more or less axiomatic, and my attempts to improve my prose through studying poetry acknowledge the assumption. Then, I read Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle wrote Art of Rhetoric. He and Plato are generally credited with the genesis of literary criticism in a recognizable form in the Western world, and Art of Rhetoric remains relevant today in providing a foundation for the study of how words are assembled into meaningful communication; however, I read Art of Rhetoric as referring mainly to persuasion in various forms, though it has elements which address other forms of communication, including storytelling and narrative. As interesting as it is for various reasons – historical, philosophical, practical – I don’t know that every author would benefit from reading Art of Rhetoric. Every author should read The Rhetoric of Fiction.
Amusingly, I don’t believe Booth intended his text primarily for authors, not in the sense I consider it useful. It is a rhetorical theory book for literary criticism, focusing primarily on “literary” fiction of the “modern” type – his examples span from roughly the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, when the book’s first edition was published. Despite not holding much with the conceits of “literary” fiction, not having much experience with the genre, and considering much literary criticism overwrought, The Rhetoric of Fiction is the single most valuable writing book I’ve ever read. It digs deeply into ideas about how to implement narrative in a way that no other source I’ve found does, and it does it in both concrete and theoretical ways, with plentiful examples and bounteous elaboration. If you find Booth’s approach to any given topic unclear, don’t worry – he includes an extensive, annotated bibliography of over 700 books, essays, and other materials to supplement your reading. Yes, this proved a very dangerous book for the brevity of my reading list, which now groans under even the restrained subset of additions I made.
My greatest concern in reading The Rhetoric of Fiction was that my lack of familiarity with the novels Booth uses as exemplars would dilute the work’s meaning and rendering entire sections confusing, but I did not find this to be the case. I’ve not read Joyce or James, two of his favorite exemplars, and my experience with Faulkner, who also appears frequently, is limited. With the exception of a handful of short stories, a Faulkner book, a few Dickens references, an Austen example, and a couple of Hemingway pieces, I don’t think I’d even heard of most of the works with which Booth is concerned, but that was barely an impediment to my reading. Booth is an exceptionally thorough and detailed author, and his examples contain copious quotes, paraphrases, and summarizations, allowing even an apparent literary naïf such as myself to derive nearly as much from The Rhetoric of Fiction as would someone who has managed to read all of the examples cover to cover before beginning the text. That’s valuable, since Booth admits at one point that it would be unrealistic to assume every reader has read the same selection of texts as him. Nor am I rushing out to add all these exemplars of the literary genre to my reading list.
Precisely what “rhetoric” constitutes is a slippery topic to pin down, with variations on the definition imparting profound ramifications for implementation. To Booth, and after reading The Rhetoric of Fiction I am inclined to accept his interpretation, rhetoric is quite simply the technique of assembling language in order to communicate an idea. In other words, from an author’s perspective, rhetoric is how you go about telling a story. If prose constitutes something of the selection and ordering of individuals words into sentences and paragraphs, and “story” is the assembly of plot, setting, and character, rhetoric is the bridge between prose and story, the set of techniques, devices, and authorial decisions which you have probably been heretofore making unconsciously which compile the linguistic components into a meaningful story. It is how stories are told.
Yes, stories are told. Booth begins his text with a fantastically lucid exploration of the “show don’t tell” axiom, its significance, applications, and distortions, forming the foundation for the rest of the book, which can be interpreted as being all about how to tell stories. He throws out the conventional, static notions of viewpoint and perspective (the ones we did a series of posts about a few months back) in favor of a dynamic understanding of narrators, implied authors, and variable distance, exploring ideas in this domain like that of the “lucid reflector.” While I think there is still value in understanding the conventional ideas of viewpoint and perspective, Booth’s are more versatile and flexible, the writer’s equivalent of upgrading from a cheap Home Depot backsaw to a custom Bad Axe one. Sure, you can get most jobs done with the former, but they’ll come out better, and you can do more complex and delicate tasks, with the latter. If you prefer a culinary analogy, it’s upgrading from those store-brand nonstick pans to copper-core stainless steel and good cast iron.
I could go on and on about the insights I gained from reading The Rhetoric of Fiction, the ways I think it will improve my (and your) writing, and the ways in which it reframed my thinking (or prompted me to think consciously) about various aspects of writing, storytelling, and novels. In fact, several of the posts you’ve been seeing in recent weeks, and several in weeks to come, are prompted or inspired by the time I spent with Booth’s indispensable text. That’s not a word I select lightly. There are very few resources I consider indispensable for learning how to write stories, including many of those shared by masters of the craft like Card, Le Guin, or Sanderson. The Rhetoric of Fiction, though, earned itself a permanent place near my writing desk. I already know I will be reading it again and making frequent reference to its sections throughout my writing process – while reading it, I swear I could tell how my writing was improving. If you’re a writer, whatever stage you’re at in your career, you should go read Booth’s indispensable The Rhetoric of Fiction.
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