Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Fashions in the arts come and go, and it is of little interest to try to analyze the work of any artist who does not give one the sense of being in some sort above them. In the art of one's contemporaries it is not always easy to say what produces that sense; and perhaps the best way of trying to find out is to apply a familiar touchstone.
Out of all the flux of judgments and theories which have darkened counsel in respect of novel-writing, one stable fact seems always to emerge; the quality the greatest novelists have always had in common is that of making their people live. To ask why this matters more than anything else would lead one into the obscurest mazes of aesthetic; but the fact is generally enough admitted to serve as a ground for discussion. Not all the other graces and virtues combined seem to have in them that aseptic magic. Vivacity, virtuosity, an abundance of episodes, skill in presenting them: what power of survival have these, compared with the sight of the doddering Baron Hulot climbing his stairs to a senile tryst, to Beatrix Esmond descending hers in silver clocks and red-heeled shoes?