Fiction and knowledge …

… The TLS blog: How novels are smart. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For Ford himself writing novels is an “artisanal process” which involves a lot of “furniture-moving”. He doesn’t always know what he’s doing (which can be thrilling, he said). He thinks that readers tend to open a novel “with a sense of grave uncertainty” – they worry that their time will be wasted, or that they will fail to live up to the book – and look for reasons to stop reading. His first defence against this is action; “guns going off” etc. ("I’m just a realist”).