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's new book, "How Fiction Works," is as knowing as you'd expect from one of the best critics alive—more knowing than that, in fact—but that may not always please writers, since Wood also knows how fiction doesn't work. I guess I'd always thought, for instance, that maybe it wasn't too lame to kick off a novel or story with a description of a photograph. Wood not only identifies this device, correctly, as a cliché marking the writer as a greenhorn, but also cooks up a parody just plausible enough to seduce you before stinging: "My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, on the other hand …" What's wrong with this, besides its triteness? Its laziness. As Wood writes: "It... [read full story]
