Fiction Writing Lessons from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

From crafting fantastic villains to incorporating silence as dialogue, Jane Austen was master of many a literary device. Her Pride and Prejudice is so belovedly well-written that in the more than 200 years since its initial publication, the novel has never once gone out of print. Austen wasn’t just a writer, she was a reader — admiring words by everyone from Walter Scott to Anne Radcliffe.

She also understood the importance of reading with a writer’s eye. As writers, we must do more than understand what literary devices like characterization and foreshadowing mean. We must to recognize them when we read, then instinctively apply the techniques to our own fiction work.

The latter is the hard part, but good news is there’s a fix: Read like a writer. “This means you don’t read just to find out what happens next in the story,” says Gabriela Pereira, author of writing craft book DIY MFA, “You read in order to figure out what the writer is doing and how she achieves a particular effect so that you can recreate something similar in your own writing.”