The Writing of Fiction (Unabridged‪)‬

A thorough examination of the process of writing fiction from one of America’s great female authors of the 20th century, including:


New preface discussing artistic historical context and contemporary relevance
List of cited authors in order of first mention
List of cited works in order of first mention


Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was brilliant, well-educated, well-read, well-traveled, privileged, and prolific. Wharton was, one might say, an influencer of her time. Her body of work encompasses 15 novels, seven novellas, 80-plus short stories, poems, plays, and nonfiction writings spanning travel, design, criticism, war articles, and a memoir. In 1921, she was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for her most famous novel, The Age of Innocence. In 1925, she published The Writing of Fiction, an extraordinary window into her perspectives on her art, her process, and her view of the evolution of fiction: “an art in the making, fluent and dirigible”.

Despite our often unhelpful and certainly inaccurate societal tendency to view others as polished works and ourselves as mired in messy process, we are all in process all the time. Life is inherently a process. Perhaps a book on process, and particularly a process that strives to reflect and distill human experience, might contain ideas that we can apply to living as well as writing. Wharton repeatedly calls out the need for patient, deep reflection and preparation. What would happen if we lived our lives with the same thoroughness and intensity that she demands of writers? What if we viewed ourselves as she encourages an author to view their subject?