I didn't set out to study literary fiction techniques. I was reading, and certain books kept doing things to me that I couldn't explain. So I went back and tried to figure out what was happening at the sentence level, in the white space between paragraphs. Four writers changed how I think about prose. Here's what I took from them.
The best literary prose sounds like someone thinking out loud for the first time
George Saunders writes sentences that feel like they're discovering what they mean in the moment of being written. You can hear the mind working. In Tenth of December, a story will start with a voice so casual, so apparently unguarded, that you forget you're reading fiction. The narrator of "Victory Lap" shifts between three perspectives, and each one sounds like someone caught mid-thought, still sorting through what they actually believe.
Most of us, when we sit down to write literary fiction, reach for a tone that signals seriousness. Longer sentences. Heavier diction. We try to sound like we've already figured out what we're saying. Saunders does the opposite. His prose has the texture of someone working it out as they go, and that's exactly why you trust it.
His craft essays at Syracuse get at this directly. He talks about revising a sentence until it sounds like a human being speaking, until you can hear the breath in it. The enemy, for Saunders, is the polished sentence that sounds impressive but doesn't actually contain a thought. Literary fiction writing techniques get taught in workshops as a set of moves you can make. Saunders suggests that the best move might be to stop performing and start genuinely thinking on the page.
I'm still not sure I can do this consistently. Some mornings the writing comes out stiff and careful, and I can feel myself trying to sound like a writer instead of being one. The difference between those two things is everything.
Patience with a scene is more valuable than any technique you can learn
Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is a dying pastor's letter to his young son. The whole novel. And it moves at the speed of a man sitting in a chair, watching light come through a window, thinking about what his life has meant. Scenes that another writer would compress into a paragraph, Robinson lets breathe for five or six pages. A father watching his son play with a cat. An old memory of his own father, surfacing while he eats breakfast.
The instinct most writers have, especially writers trained on contemporary pacing, is to keep things moving. Get to the next scene. Advance the plot. Robinson refuses this completely. She sits with the moment until you feel it in your body. The literary fiction techniques at work in Gilead are almost invisible because the primary technique is patience, and patience doesn't look like technique at all.
Think about how a good physical therapist works compared to someone who just prescribes exercises. The therapist watches you move, waits, pays attention to what your body does when you're not performing. The exercises come later. The watching comes first. Robinson writes the way that therapist watches. She stays with a scene long enough for the thing underneath it to show itself. Most of us leave too early because we're afraid the reader will get bored, and in leaving early, we miss the part that would have made the scene matter.