The art of fiction: a guide for writers and readers - By Ayn Rand & Tore Boeckmann Page 0,2

am certain that you will not be bored. And I think that you will profit from the reading.

If you do share AR’s philosophy, I know that you will enjoy this book.

—Leonard Peikoff

Irvine, California

September 1998

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Ayn Rand prepared for each of her lectures on fiction only by making some brief notes on a sheet or two of paper. For instance, the material presented here as Chapter 1 (“Writing and the Subconscious”) was delivered on the basis of the following two sentences in her notes for the first lecture: “Is there an ‘innate literary talent’? The relationship of the conscious and subconscious in fiction writing.”

Given the extemporaneous nature of Ayn Rand’s lectures, the transcript of the tape recordings had to be edited before publication. My editing was aimed at giving the material the economy, smoothness, and precision proper to written prose; it consisted primarily of cutting, reorganizing, and line editing.

In general, I cut discussions of issues that Ayn Rand later covered in The Romantic Manifesto. Most of my other cuts aimed at eliminating the repetitiveness typical of (and proper to) oral communication. Ayn Rand often stated a point several times, in slightly different words, to give her listeners time to absorb the point. In such cases, I selected the statement I judged superior, sometimes combining the best parts of different statements.

In the main, this book follows the structure of Ayn Rand’s course. I did, however, make many minor transpositions within her general structure in order to conjoin related points or achieve a more logical progression of argument. Also, the book’s chapter divisions follow the logic of the material rather than Ayn Rand’s lecture breaks, since she often covered related material across those breaks. (The chapter and subchapter titles are mine.)

A lecture given by Ayn Rand in early 1959, as an addendum to her course, has been incorporated into this book (it forms the bulk of Chapter 4). Also included are some comments on fiction that she made in a 1969 course on nonfiction writing. I am grateful to Robert Mayhew for bringing these to my attention. Finally, when Ayn Rand referred to passages in her own (or Sinclair Lewis’s) novels, I sometimes supplied the relevant quote.

I made only a few editorial insertions. These are marked by square brackets, while parentheses always signal Ayn Rand’s own asides.

The line editing consisted mainly of eliminating unnecessary words, rearranging the order of clauses within sentences, changing the tenses of verbs, etc. I also added words that were clearly implied by the original grammatical context (and necessary for a thought’s completeness); and within that context, I made word changes where this improved the precision or economy of a sentence. I did not, however, freely restate any point in my own words. I am confident that none of my changes has altered Ayn Rand’s intended meaning.

Nevertheless, the reader must bear in mind that the following pages have been edited by someone other than Ayn Rand herself. He must also remember the extemporaneous nature of the raw material.

In Chapter 8, Ayn Rand compares the conscientiously precise style of her own published works with the style of Victor Hugo, her favorite writer. Using a metaphor from painting, she says that “[Hugo‘s] brushstrokes are wider and more ‘impressionistic’ than [hers], whereas while [hers] are wide, someone who approached them with a microscope would see that every strand was put there for a purpose.”

In this sense, the style of the present book may be described as more Hugoesque than Randian. The brushstrokes do represent Ayn Rand’s views, but every strand does not necessarily reflect her purpose.

—Tore Boeckmann

1

Writing and the Subconscious

Suppose you start to write a story and your opening sentence describes a sunrise. To select the words of that sentence alone, you must have absorbed a great deal of knowledge which has become so automatic that your conscious mind need not pause on it.

Language is a tool which you had to learn; you did not know it at birth. When you first learned that a certain object is a table, the word table did not come to your mind automatically; you repeated it many times to get used to it. If you now attempt to learn a foreign language, the English word still leaps into your mind. It takes many repetitions before the foreign word occurs without your being conscious of groping for it.

Before you sit down to write, your language has to be so automatic that you are not conscious of groping for words or forming them into a sentence. Otherwise,