问答题 What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented, has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality. You may say: "If one wants truth, why not go to the literally true book? Biography or documentary, these amazing accounts of amazing experiences which people have." Yes, but I am suggesting to you that there is a distinction between truth and so-called reality. What these people write in their accounts of happenings is not confining itself to what happened. The novel does not simply recount experience; it adds to experience. I hope you will see what I mean. It is not news at all, not anything sensational or spectacular. And here comes in what is the actual livening spark of the novel: the novelist's imagination has a power of its own. It does not merely invent, it perceives. It intensifies, therefore it gives power, extra importance, greater truth and greater inner reality to what may well be ordinary and everyday things. So much is art—the art that, in common with poetry, drama, painting, and music, does, we all know, enter into the novel. But not less and absolutely joined with the art is craft, and craft—craftsmanship—is absolutely and surely an essential for the writing of a novel. I have said the novel is a story. It is the story aspect that I am talking about first and now, and the craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story telling. Would you or I, as readers, be drawn into a novel if our interest was not pegged to the personalities and outlooks and the actions of the people whom we encounter inside the story? They are the attractive elements in the book. This being so, which comes first actually into the mind of the novelist when he begins to work: the people, or character, or the plot? Do not think it strange when I say that the plot comes first. The actual idea or outline of a book is there—the possibilities of a situation—and then the novelist thinks, "what would be the kind of person who would perform such an action? What would be the other kind of person who would react in a particular way?" I think to myself "I need a proud man," or "I need a woman so idiotically romantic in temperament that she will do unwise things." or "I need perhaps an almost excessively innocent or ignorant young person." In that sense the characters are called into existence by the demands of the plot; but I do not want you to feel that the characters are merely invented to formula. That is not so at a11. Their existence having begun, they take into themselves a most extraordinary and imperative reality. And their relation with plot is a dual one because, though to an extent the demands of the plot control them, the plot also serves to give them force and purpose. And, because of the plot, those characters are so shown and so brought into action that as little as possible of them shall go to waste. The people, the characters in a novel, must carry with them into the book their own kind of inevitability. We are conscious when we meet the people involved in a story that they have something within them which will probably take them towards some inevitable fate or end. If that inevitability breaks down—if the characters are compelled by the author to do what we instinctively know they would not do—then I think we feel that there is a flaw in the reality of the novel.