Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal-both symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundance-are in truth leading to pure anarchy in fiction, and one is almost tempted to say that in certain schools formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of form.
Not long ago I heard a man of letters declare that Dostoievsky was superior to Tolstoy because his mind was "more chaotic," and he could therefore render more "truthfully" the chaos of the Russian mind in general; though how chaos can be apprehended and defined by a mind immersed in it, the speaker did not make clear. The assertion, of course, was the result of confusing imaginative emotivity with its objective rendering. What the speaker meant was that the novelist who would create a given group of people or portray special social conditions must be able to identify himself with them; which is rather a long way of saying that an artist must have imagination.