We're always told that everything ought to advance the story...
Over a long career, Thomas McCormack was the editor for writers ranging from James Herriott to Thomas Harris, and was for 28 years the CEO and Editorial Director of St. Martin's Press. In his excellent book The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist, he makes the following interesting observation:
Still another genius is the craving for a certain meaningful modulation in the narrative right here. For example, consider Hemingway’s feeling a need for the fishing scene in The Sun Also Rises; Tolstoy’s urge to send Levin out for a whole chapter to reap wheat; Melville to ask, “How can I hope to explain myself here?” and yet to know in some “dim random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught,” and then indite his fearsome, magniloquent passage on ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’; or Shakespeare to trouble forth his witches in Macbeth—all episodes that, by any artlessly mechanical measure such as “everything must advance the story”, would be deleted at immense aesthetic loss.
Just food for thought.
(Excellent book, by the way. Buy the recently published second edition--it is dramatically revised.)
Over a long career, Thomas McCormack was the editor for writers ranging from James Herriott to Thomas Harris, and was for 28 years the CEO and Editorial Director of St. Martin's Press. In his excellent book The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist, he makes the following interesting observation:
Still another genius is the craving for a certain meaningful modulation in the narrative right here. For example, consider Hemingway’s feeling a need for the fishing scene in The Sun Also Rises; Tolstoy’s urge to send Levin out for a whole chapter to reap wheat; Melville to ask, “How can I hope to explain myself here?” and yet to know in some “dim random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught,” and then indite his fearsome, magniloquent passage on ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’; or Shakespeare to trouble forth his witches in Macbeth—all episodes that, by any artlessly mechanical measure such as “everything must advance the story”, would be deleted at immense aesthetic loss.
Just food for thought.
(Excellent book, by the way. Buy the recently published second edition--it is dramatically revised.)
