Literary Fiction: The Story of a Person

Literary fiction is a genre by its priorities rather than its subject: character and language come before plot, and a reader is asked to consider rather than simply to be entertained. It promises attention to interior life, moral complexity, and prose that repays a second reading. Nothing is excluded from it — a literary novel may contain a marriage, a mystery, a war — but the puzzle at its centre is a person rather than an event. It overlaps with every other genre, which is where the confusion arises. A story can be a mystery and be literary; what changes is whether the question of who did it or the question of who this person is carries the reader to the end. Characteristic techniques - Interiority, often in free indirect style, so the narration carries a character's thought without quotation marks. - The significant detail in place of statement: one object chosen well instead of three adjectives. - Motif and image doing work that a summary would not. - Time handled loosely: memory, digression, a scene that interrupts another. - Restraint at the ending, which may leave the reader with a question rather than a resolution. An original example, written for this platform She had told the school that she would come on Thursday. She had also told her sister, who had asked twice, and each time she answered the question a little more briefly, which was how she knew she was not going to go. It was not the walk; it was the corridor. In the corridor there would be the smell of the floor polish they used in the summer term, and there would be the noticeboard with the photograph of the trip she had not been able to pay for, and she would be seen by someone. How the example works Nothing is announced. The sentence about answering more briefly is the whole of her decision, and the reader is left to understand it. No feeling is named; the polish and the noticeboard carry it. The passage ends before the crisis, which is a choice the genre allows and a plot-driven story would not. Practical guidance Write a scene in which nothing is settled and someone wants something anyway. The genre's own risk is preciousness: if nothing is at stake for two hundred pages, the prose is being asked to do the story's work. Give the character one want, however small, and let the language stay plain where the feeling is large. Exercise to try Write one page in which a character is asked a direct question and does not answer it, while the narration shows clearly what they are thinking. Name no emotion. Revision tips Check that the prose is not admiring itself: cut any sentence whose pleasure is in its own sound. Check that something is at stake in the scene rather than only observed. Make sure the significant detail is chosen rather than accumulated. Finally, read the ending and ask whether the restraint is doing something or avoiding something; the two feel similar and are not.