Navigating Resistance and Experimentation in Fiction Writing

The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton audiobook.

Genre: self help

In The Writing of Fiction, acclaimed novelist Edith Wharton turns from the page to the workshop, offering a clear-eyed guide to how stories are built and why certain novels endure. Drawn from her lectures and steeped in a lifetime of practice, Wharton walks aspiring writers and serious readers through the essential architecture of fiction: the seed of a situation, the shaping of plot, the creation of character, and the disciplined choices that give a narrative its force. She examines viewpoint and narrative distance, the timing of revelation, the use of scene versus summary, and the often invisible work of selection and omission that makes a story feel inevitable rather than accidental. Along the way, Wharton brings in examples from classic literature not as name-dropping, but as case studies that reveal craft decisions at work on the sentence and on the structure. The result is both practical and bracing: an invitation to treat imagination as only the beginning, and to embrace form, restraint, and purposeful design as the real engines of compelling fiction.

Chapters (Approximate)

(00:00:00) Chapter 01

(00:24:24) Chapter 02

(00:48:40) Chapter 03

(01:15:42) Chapter 04

(01:59:11) Chapter 05

(02:28:10) Chapter 06

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