#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
Years ago, my wife and I were at a concert given by the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. At a quiet, difficult passage of bowing, she frowned. Not the usual ecstatic moue of the virtuoso, it expressed sudden irritation. At the same moment, we invented entirely different readings. Claire later said to me: ‘I think she was frowning because she wasn’t playing that bit well enough.’ I replied: ‘No, she was frowning because the audience was so noisy.’ A good novelist would have let that frown alone, and would have let our revealing comments alone, too: no need to smother this little scene in explanation.
Detail like this - that enters a character but refuses to explain that character - makes us the writer as well as the reader; we seem like co-creators of the character’s existence.

Detail 60

摘于06/29/2026 #分别善恶知识树上的果子#