The Art of Fiction: Chapter 1

1. "Art depends heavily on feeling, intuition, taste."

2. "There are no rules of real fiction.... There are techniques...--that, like carpenter's tricks, can be studied and taught; there are moral and aesthetic considerations every serious writer must sooner or later brood on a little....There are common mistakes...."

• Techniques
• Moral and aesthetic considerations
• mistakes (in the logic of the world we create, in consistency of character, etc.)

3. "Invention, after all, is art's main business...."

4.  A writer's authority: 

• "sane humanness"
• trust in ability to judge writing and the world

5.  We want to practice techniques so that they become "second nature."

6. Great art comes from an education in the arts. To Gardner and you I say: how can you write something fresh, something experimental, if you don't know what the world has already provided?

• "No one can hope to write really well if he [or she] has not learned how to analyze fiction--how to recognize symbol when it jumps at him [or her], how to make out theme in a literary work, how to account for a writer's selection and organization of fictional details."

7.