I recently read David Jauss’s “Alone With All That Could Happen:  Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction.”  (pauses to catch breath-that’s a long title)  The book is very good on many issues, I especially enjoyed his discussion of the grey areas between choosing a point of view.  Rarely is a book ever written completely in third, or first person.  The reason for the choices are about distance usually, manipulating what, where and how long you want your reader’s attention focused.

The section I enjoyed the most was about opposites and how the best writers reach for a Janussian blend of opposites to create something entirely new.  Some quotes:

Robert Haas:  ”the greatest works of art come very close to saying the opposite of what they mean”

Jane Hirschfield:  ”a good poem is able to both answer uncertainty and contain it”

Robert Venturi:  the aim of art– “the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion”

Oscar Wilde:  ”a truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true”

One of my favorite examples–”and one to me are shame and fame”–Emerson

Plato:  ”Light is the Shadow of God”–love that!

Another section was about using a variety of sentence structures–some beautiful quotes–

Flaubert:  ”The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity”

Yeats:  ”As I altered my syntax I altered my intellect”

Robert Haas again:  ”New rhythms are new perceptions”