How to write a book - advice and techniques

AUSTEN'S TECHNIQUE

Austen's use of the form prior to Persuasion has the following main characteristics: 

(1) The engagement of the female protagonist to the male hero is represented as the most desirable outcome for the protagonist, given her particular circumstances and the ethical values of Austen as implied author. The constraints on women's behavior do not become an excuse for Austen's heroines' occasional ethical failings. 

(2) The instabilities driving the progression of the action are both internal and external; that is, the successful resolution depends on the protagonist's recognizing and overcoming deficiencies in her own character even as she negotiates or endures various external obstacles.

(3) Throughout the progression of instabilities, even at the point of their greatest complication, the audience both hopes and expects that the engagement will occur. Consequently, the interest of the audience is focused not on whether the engagement will occur but on how it will come about. 

What matters most are:

(a) the particular route that the protagonist takes to her marriage and 

(b) whether that route produces in the audience the estimation that the marriage represents a satisfactory outcome for the protagonist and an appropriate fulfillment of the promises of the progression.

What makes Persuasion so distinctive among Austen's novels is that here she fully retains only the first of the three essential characteristics of the form. Although she clearly signals that marriage to Wentworth is the most desirable fate for Anne, Anne is already a fully-formed woman who does not need to change in any substantial way; furthermore,as I shall attempt to demonstrate, for the first half of the novel Austen does not provide the usual assurances that the protagonist and the male lead will be united. These differences make the novel not just a variation on the standard form but one that offers a significantly different reading experience, and, thus, from a rhetorical perspective, a significant departure from her previous practice.

what is the function of the initial focus on Sir Walter and his financial troubles and what is the effect of the shift from Sir Walter to Anne at the end of chapter III?

One effect of the shift is that it provides a new energy and direction to the narrative; it is as if the engine driving the narrative suddenly switches into a higher gear as the direction of the narrative's movement shifts. 

 These different perspectives obviously have much in common and suggest that beginnings not only set the narrative in motion but also give it a particular direction. 

 The initial distinction is between opening and beginning. I will use opening as the general, inclusive term that refers to the first few pages and the first chapter.

Beginning is the technical, precise term, referring to a segment of a narrative defined by four aspects. The first two aspects focus on the "aboutness" of the narrative and on the textual dynamics,while the second two focus on the activity of the authorial audience,what I will call readerly dynamics. 

(1) exposition: everything, including the front matter, that provides information about the characters (listings of traits, past history, and soon), the setting (time and place), and events of the narrative. Expositionis the inclusive term that also covers background and orientation.Exposition is of course not limited to an opening but may appear anywhere in a narrative; exposition that is part of a beginning includes anything prior to or immediately following and directly relevant to what I call the launch.

(2) launch: the revelation of the first set of global instabilities or tensions in the narrative. This moment in the narrative typically marks the boundary between the beginning and the middle; when it does not,as in Persuasion, the beginning will soon be completed by additional exposition. The launch may come early or it may come late, but I set the typical boundary at the first central instability or tension because until then a narrative has not established a clear direction. I will take up the issue of what is at stake in this boundary-question when I return to Persuasion. 

(3) initiation, the initial rhetorical transactions among implied author and narrator, on the one hand, and flesh and blood and authorial audience on the other. Rabinowitz's Rules of Notice (1998: 47-75) are especially relevant to the reader's experience of the initiation. 

(4) entrance, the flesh and blood reader's multi-leveled - cognitive,emotive, ethical - movement from outside the text to a specific location in the authorial audience at the end of the launch. This aspect subsumes what Springer means by start (1986-87: 104-105). One chief feature of the cognitive dimension of an entrance is the hypothesis, implicit or explicit, about the whole narrative formed by its audience. Thus,Sacks's claims about our inferences of the form of Persuasion are claims about the entrance.

 Persuasion's beginning has two especially striking features: 

(1) its surprising length: the beginning takes 4 chapters and about 30 pages or more than 10% of the book; 

(2) a very unusual sequence of exposition and launch - a sequence which in turn has important consequences for the initiation and the entrance. The narrative offers a great deal of exposition before revealing the first instability of Sir Walter's money troubles; however,it offers almost no exposition that prepares us for the launch - the last sentence of chapter III - delaying that exposition until the analepsis of chapter IV. It is this sequence of exposition and launch that explains why the end of chapter III provides such a jolt. 

Jane Austen used many techniques when writing Pride and Prejudice but one she used most frequently is creating characterizations. In any passage Austen uses direct narration to describe the background to the reader, but we also learn about the characters from what they do, how they act, and what others say about them. She is probably best known for her ability to capture characterization through what characters say and HOW they say it.

Jane Austen's distinctive literary style relies on a combination of parody, burlesque, irony, freeindirect speech, and a degree of realism. She uses parody and burlesque for comic effect and tocritique the portrayal of women in 18th-century sentimental and gothic novels.

HOW TO WRITE LIKE JANE AUSTEN (Ironic):

1. Don not repeat her openings, especially the one of Pride and Prejudice, it has been done over and over and it is no longer clever. 

2. Give your characters sturdy English names like Katherines and Elisabeths. 

3. Set your story in the regency English era. "This free-wheeling time fizzled under the reign of William IV, then came to an abrupt halt when Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837."

4. Austen is all about dialogue, so write about everything that is in the hearing area of your heroine.

5. Austen is a fan of long and compound sentences.

6. A happy ending is a must, one that answers the moral debate of the heroine: "Should she marry for money or for love?"

SECONDARY SOURCES:

"Techniques Used In Pride And Prejudice." UKEssays.com. 11 2018. All Answers Ltd. 07 2020 <https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/techniques-used-in-pride-and-prejudice-english-literature-essay.php?vref=1>.

Il Mondo di Tels/CLIL CLUB Free Printables

NOTE:

The source for the first points of this guide is to me unknown because I am not able to find back the article I read those information from. If you know where those points are from, please  tell me in the comments, so that I can add it to the sources.