This tone, which induces style, will vary from soul to soul. It may be partly an optical illusion, but modern fiction does seem, more than its antecedents, the work of eccentrics. The writer now makes his marks on paper blanker than it has ever been. Man's common store of assumptions has dwindled, and with it the stock of viable artistic conventions. He must, rather athletically, instill his wrists with the refusal to write whatever is lazily assumed, or hastily perceived, or piously hoped.
Fiction is a tissue of literal lies that refreshes and informs our sense of actuality.
The capture of such accuracies is the surest pleasure a writer receives. Though our ultimate impression of Creation is not that it was achieved by taking pains, perhaps we should, in writing, proceed in the humble faith that, by taking pains to be accurate, we put ourselves on the way toward making something useful and beautiful and, in a word, good. Return to the Writers On Their Craft and Their World Main Page.