1At the beginning of the twentieth century, the art of fiction changed in ways that nobody could have predicted.
2A small group of daring novelists completely rejected the tidy plots and neat endings of the previous age.
3They believed that the human mind does not move in straight lines but circles endlessly around its own memories.
4Instead, our thoughts wander freely, loop back on themselves, and collide with each other without any warning at all.
5Writers such as Virginia Woolf tried with enormous patience to capture that inner turbulence on the printed page.
6Her long sentences drift like slow currents beneath the surface, carrying broken fragments of memory and sensation with them.
7James Joyce pushed the same experiment even further, moving the novel steadily toward the condition of pure verbal music.
8Many angry newspaper critics of the time accused these novelists of abandoning the ancient art of storytelling altogether.
9Yet their new methods revealed hidden depths of character that the older storytelling techniques could simply never reach.
10In their hands, a single ordinary day in one small city could now hold the entire weight of a human life.
11Modern fiction owes much of its present freedom to those brave writers who dared to follow the wandering mind.