Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The novel, in the hands of English-speaking writers, has always tended, as it rose in value, to turn to pictures of character and manners, however much blent with dramatic episodes, or entangled in what used to be vaguely known as a plot. The plot, in the traditional sense of the term, consisted in some clash of events, or, less often, of character. But it was an arbitrarily imposed and rather spaciously built framework, inside of which the people concerned had room to develop their idiosyncrasies and be themselves, except in the crucial moments when they became the puppets of the plot.
The real novel of situation, a compacter and above all a more inevitable affair, did not, at least on English soil, take shape till "plot," in the old-fashioned sense of a coil of outward happenings, was giving way to the discovery that real drama is soul-drama. The novel of situation, indeed, has never really acclimatized itself in English-speaking countries; whereas in France it seems to have grown naturally from the psychological novel of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein the conflict of characters tended from the first to simplify the drawing of character and to turn the protagonists into embodiments of a particular passion rather than of a particular person.