Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On the threshold of any theory of art its exponent is sure to be asked: "On what first assumption does your theory rest?" And in fiction, as in every other art, the only answer seems to be that any theory must begin by assuming the need of selection. It seems curious that even now-and perhaps more than ever-one should have to explain and defend what is no more than the rule underlying the most artless verbal statement. No matter how restricted an incident one is trying to give an account of, it cannot but be fringed with details more and more remotely relevant, and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts which may crowd on the narrator simply because of some accidental propinquity in time or space. To choose between all this material is the first step toward coherent expression.
A generation ago this was so generally taken for granted that to state it would have seemed pedantic. In every-day intercourse the principle survives in the injunction to stick to the point; but the novelist who applies-or owns up to applying-this rule to his art, is nowadays accused of being absorbed in technique to the exclusion of the supposedly contrary element of "human interest."