Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921) is a pioneering study of novelistic technique. Building on the ideas of Henry James, Lubbock analyzes point of view, scene, and narrative method, arguing that the way a story is told shapes its meaning as much as the story itself.
Through close readings of Tolstoy, Flaubert, James, and others, he explores the difference between showing and telling and the art of controlling a reader’s perspective. Long a standard text for students of fiction, the book helped establish the serious critical study of how novels are made. Download the free EPUB of this influential work on narrative craft.