This book provides a new, practical guide for those who want to understand how effective writing is achieved. You know a passage sounds dull, you know a story didn’t end right—but do you know how to fix these? Building on observations of how human brains are built for absorbing information, the author reveals the internal engines driving the composition of interesting fiction and non-fiction: successful (and unsuccessful) structuring of plots, characters, and symbolism...

To understand rhetoric, then, we have to understand cognition; the one is designed to accommodate the other, after all. If writers designed their work to hold the attention of a chimpanzee, it might abound in grunts; if an ant, it might be expressed chemically. But always sender and receiver are matched. So when we design our messages for a human reader, with human cognition, we have to take into account the peculiarities of the receiving set. This would be easier t...

Examining Dostoevsky’s narrative choices in Crime and Punishment lays bare the fundamental processes by which novelists make—and are forced to make—choices as they write. Each choice entails particular types of results for the story: desirable, useful, awkward, or even hopeless dead ends. Honed during years of studying the practical problems of creating vividness in fiction, this mode of analysis is based on rigorous use of evidence and deduction. Dostoevsky’s subje...

(From Chap. 1:) “Raskolnikov” is derived from a Russian word for “schism” (raskol). Should we miss the hint, Raskolnikov has a friend whose name, Razumikhin, is derived from a word meaning “reason” (razum). And if we miss even that hint, Razumikhin says about Raskolnikov that it is “as if there really were two opposite characters in him, changing places with each other.” And if all this gets by us, the heroine’s name is “Sonia,” which is a diminutive of the Greek “Sophia,” or “Wisdom”…