15. Further Reading — Reference · The Craft Behind the Story

15. Further Reading

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Annotated, grouped by what each source is good for. Starred items are the recommended first three.

15.1 On beginnings specifically

★ Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978). The indispensable book on this subject and still without a rival. Demanding, formalist, and worth the effort: the suspense/curiosity distinction alone reorganises how a writer thinks about backstory. Read chapters 1–3 if not the whole.
Nuttall, A. D. Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (1992). A historical and philosophical survey from Genesis and Homer through to the novel, attentive to the metaphysical oddity of beginning at all. The best complement to Sternberg’s formalism.
Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975). Concerned with beginning as an intellectual and political act rather than as craft. Difficult, and the source of the useful distinction between an origin (given, divine, passive) and a beginning (made, secular, chosen).
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending (1967) and Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure (1968). The counterpart literature. Read either to understand why the opening and the ending are formally symmetrical and functionally inverse.
Kellman, Steven G. “Grand Openings and Plain” (1977). A short, lively article on the poetics of first lines; a good seminar starting point.

★ Wood, James. How Fiction Works (2008). The most useful single book on free indirect style for a practising writer, and short. Its account of how narration takes on a character’s diction is directly applicable to the voice contract.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961/1983). The origin of the implied author and the unreliable narrator. Long; the chapters on distance and on the “author’s voice” are the relevant ones.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds (1978). The systematic taxonomy of consciousness-rendering. Consult rather than read straight through; the terminology (psycho-narration, narrated monologue, quoted monologue) is precise and worth acquiring.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse (1980). The separation of voice from focalisation, and the vocabulary of analepsis and prolepsis used throughout this chapter.

★ Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading (1987). Underread and immediately practical. The rules of notice explain more about why openings behave as they do than any craft manual.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts (1997). The systematic account of covers, titles, blurbs and prefaces. Essential background to §3.7 and a corrective to the zero-context idealisation.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading (1978). The theory of gaps and the reader’s constitutive activity — the theoretical underwriting of why withheld information can be productive.
Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994). Accessible talks on the model reader and on how texts instruct their own readers. Eco’s account of entering a fictional wood is, in effect, a theory of opening pages.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982). For the horizon of expectations, and for the historical argument that reader expectation is itself a variable.

Zwaan and Radvansky, “Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory” (1998). A review article; the clearest statement of the dimensions readers track. Directly relevant to what orientation actually consists of.
Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension (1997). Contextual frames, and the best available account of why unanchored openings fail.
Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993). Transportation, participatory responses, and the psychology of being absorbed.
Green and Brock (2000); Kuijpers et al. (2014). For students who want the empirical literature rather than the metaphor. Useful for demonstrating that absorption is measurable and has a threshold.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction (1983). The “vivid and continuous dream” and the best account of why technical awkwardness costs more at the start than later. Occasionally magisterial in tone; read past it.
Lukeman, Noah. The First Five Pages (2000). Valuable as a document of the acquisition process rather than as aesthetics. Read it as ethnography of an institution (§3.6).
Swain, Dwight V. Techniques of the Selling Writer (1965). The goal–conflict–disaster scene formula underlying test 2. Mechanistic, dated in idiom, structurally sound.
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. The standard university textbook; useful for its exercises and its wide range of quoted openings.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft (rev. 1998/2015). The best short book on sentence rhythm and point of view, with exercises directly applicable to the voice contract.

Delany, Samuel R. “About 5,750 Words” (1977). The argument that speculative genres alter the subjunctivity of the sentence. Of the essays listed here, the one most directly useful to anyone opening a book set outside the empirical world, since it addresses how literally a sentence is to be read.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). Cognitive estrangement and the novum; the theoretical basis for §4.2’s treatment of the fantastic.

Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene) — the underlying unit; test 2 depends on it.
Chapter 2 (Scene and Sequel) — what happens immediately after the opening scene ends.
Chapter 10 (The Prologue) — the separated unit, and the false-advertising failure of which §8.4 is Chapter One’s version.
Chapter 6 (The Chapter Break) — re-entry, where the reader arrives already oriented.
Chapter 7 (Backstory and Flashback) — the counterpart to §6.2 on distributing exposition.
Chapter 5 (The Transition) — movement between units once the book is running.
Chapter 16 (The Ending) — the formally symmetrical, functionally inverse problem.