What in the Name of Fiction Is Free Indirect Style?
Mid-week inspiration from James Wood and Katherine Mansfield
Happy mid-week everyone!
As I scanned my craft shelves for inspiration for this post, I spied James Wood’s How Fiction Works, which prompted me to give you a quick trip to Free Indirect Style.
My MFA workshop on Free Indirect Style was one of my favorites, in part because the example I used was the incomparable “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield. Today’s post offers just a taste of the workshop.
Free Indirect Style is a technique used primarily by fiction writers, but the general principle of moving “freely” back and forth between subjective and objective observation definitely applies to memoir, as well. So, if you’d like a longer weekend post to go into Free Indirect Style in greater detail, please let me know in your comments!
Now, write free!
What makes Indirect Style so Free?
James Wood has been a staff writer and critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He also teaches at Harvard. His book How Fiction Works became a mainstay of MFA craft reading lists when it was published in 2008, in part because of his lucid explanation of Free Indirect Style— a POV fusion that’s been used by masters as far back as Austen, Flaubert, and Goethe, though it’s not clear who first coined the term.
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