Book Review: The art of fiction by David Lodge (Penguin) - Part 5

Here are my notes and favourite quotes. I also added useful or fun videos and/or links.

Answers (Part 4)

Sum up the possible elements of stream of consciousness.

• Rapid-fire delivery,

• Jumps in association and logic,

• Very little punctuation.

What are the advantages of stream of consciousness? 

• It can lend itself to a breathless poetic rythm in your story.

• It can allow you to delve deep into the character's mind.

• It can create verisimilitude by mimicking real-life thought patterns.

12 - The sense of place

Description in a good novel is never just description.
The sense of place was a fairly late development in the history of prose fiction. [...] the Romantic movement, which pondered the effect of milieu on man, opened people's eyes to the sublime beauty of landscape and, in due course, to the grim symbolism of cityscapes in the Industrial Age.

13 - Lists (notes)

-- expressive potential of lists in fictional discourse  -- can be subtle, critical --
They can for instance create an impression of prodigality.
Is there order, hierarchy in the list?
It can convey a sense of personality and temperament of the character making the list.
It can add striking images, can suggest gluttony, abundance...
-- analogies.

14 - Introducing a character

[...] character is probably the most difficult aspect of the art of fiction to discuss in technical terms. This is partly because there are so many different ways of representing them:

• major characters and minor characters, 
• flat characters and round characters, 
• characters rendered from inside their minds, like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and characters viewed from outside by others.

Modern novelists usually prefer to let the facts about a character emerge gradually, diversified, or actually conveyed, by action and speech.
In any case, all description in fiction is highly selective; its basic rhetorical technique is synecdoche, the part standing for the whole. (For instance the description of a hand standing for the description of the character).

Introduction to character on Khan Academy. (Interactive lesson and video)

Question 
What did you learn in the Khan Academy video?