On Becoming a Novelist (4 page)

Then I fell into an odd piece of luck. In conversation with a slightly older colleague at the California State University, Chico, where I was teaching at the time, I suggested that the two of us do an anthology of fiction including (as anthologies did not then do and most anthologies do not do now) not only short stories but also other forms—fables, tales, yarns, sketches,
etc.
The result was
The Forms of Fiction,
a book (now long out of print and almost impossible to get hold of) that provided a close analysis of the narratives we included. A more important result, for me, was that I learned about taking pains. Lennis Dunlap, my collaborator, was and remains one of the most infuriatingly stubborn perfectionists I have ever known. Night after night for two full years we would work for five, six, seven hours on what sometimes added up to three or four sentences. He drove me crazy, and he wasn’t so kind to himself, either: often we had to stop because the stress of working with a young man as impatient as I was would give Lennis a histamine headache. Gradually I came to feel as unwilling as he was to let a sentence stand if the meaning was not as unambiguously visible as a grizzly bear in a brightly lit kitchen. I discovered what every good writer knows, that getting down one’s exact meaning helps one to discover what one means. Looking back now at our writing in
The Forms of Fiction,
I find the style overly cautious, a bit too tight. (Sometimes saying a thing twice is a good idea.) But that painful two years—the midnight fights and sometimes the shock of joy we would both experience when the right choice of words made us grasp the idea that had until that instant teased and eluded us—showed me what was wrong with my fiction.

Needless to say, since I was writing fiction throughout this period, and since Lennis Dunlap has a mind worth consulting, from time to time I showed him my own fiction. He went over it with the same eye for detail he gave to our work on other people’s writing, and though I cannot say he wasn’t helpful, I soon learned the limits of even the best advice. Coming from Tennessee, he did not speak the same English I speak, or know the same kinds of people, or interpret life experience in quite the same ways I do. When he suggested changes and I accepted his suggestions, the story almost invariably went wrong. What I learned from him, in short, is that a writer must take infinite pains—if he writes only one great story in his life, that is better than writing a hundred bad ones—and that finally the pains the writer takes must be his own.

Another indicator of the young writer’s talent is the relative accuracy and originality of his “eye.” The good writer sees things sharply, vividly, accurately, and selectively (that is, he chooses what’s important), not necessarily because his power of observation is by nature more acute than that of other people (though by practice it becomes so), but because he cares about seeing things clearly and getting them down effectively. Partly he cares because he knows that careless seeing can undermine his project. Imagining the fictional scene imprecisely—failing to notice, for instance, the gesture that would in real life accompany some assertion by a character (the dismissive wave that takes back part of what has been said, or the clenched fist that reveals stronger emotion than the character has expressed)—the writer may be tricked into developing his situation in some way that is unconvincing. This is perhaps the chief offense in bad fiction: we sense that characters are being manipulated, forced to do things they would not really do. The bad writer may not intend to manipulate; he simply does not know what his characters would do because he has not been watching them closely enough in his mind’s eye—has not been catching the subtle emotional signals that, for the more careful writer, show where the action must go next. Both because the cogency of his story depends on it and because he has learned to take pride in getting his scenes exactly right, the good writer scrutinizes the imagined or remembered scene with full concentration. Though his plot seems to be rolling along beautifully and his characters seem to be behaving with authentic and surprising independence, as characters in good fiction always do, the writer is willing to stop writing for a minute or two, or even stop for a long while, to figure out precisely what some object or gesture looks like and hunt down exactly the right words to describe it.

One of the best eyes in recent fiction belongs to the novelist David Rhodes. Look closely at the following:

The old people remember Della and Wilson Montgomery as clearly as if just last Sunday after the church pot-luck dinner they had climbed into their gray Chevrolet and driven back out to their country home, Della waving from the window and Wilson leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands. They can remember as if just yesterday they had driven by the Montgomerys’ brownstone house and seen them sitting on their porch swing, Wilson rocking it slowly and conscientiously back and forth, Della smiling, her small feet only touching the floor on the back swing, both of them looking like careful, quiet children.
Della’s hands were so small they could be put into small-mouth jars. For many years she was their only schoolteacher, and, except for the younger ones, they all had her, and wanted desperately to do well with spelling and numbers to please her. Without fail, screaming children would hush and hum in her arms. It was thought, among the women, that it was not necessary to seek help or comfort in times of need, because Della would sense it in the air and come. The old people don’t talk of her now but what a shadow is cast over their faces and they seem to be talking about parts of themselves—not just that Della belonged to the old days, but that when she and Wilson were gone it was unnatural that anything else from back then should go on without them.
*

The first visual detail in this passage, the abstractly introduced pot-luck dinner, is not especially remarkable: anyone dealing with this culture might have thought of it, and Rhodes doesn’t dwell on it, though it’s worth including as a quick way of characterizing Della and Wilson Montgomery. The “gray Chevrolet” is a little more specific, with its useful connotations of drabness, humble normality; but it’s with the next image that Rhodes begins to bear down: Della waving, Wilson “leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands.” The image of Wilson, though not extraordinary, is specific and vivid; we recognize that we’re dealing with a careful author, one worth our trust. We see more than that Wilson leans over the wheel and steers with both hands: we see, for some reason, the expression on his face, something about his age; we know, without asking ourselves how we know, that he’s wearing a hat. (Hints of his nearsightedness, nervousness, age, and culture lead us to unconscious generalization.) In other words, by selecting the right detail, the writer subtly suggests others; the telling detail tells us more than it says.

Now the images become much sharper: on the porch swing, Wilson rocks slowly and
conscientiously
—a startling word that makes the scene spring to life (adverbs are either the dullest tools or the sharpest in the novelist’s toolbox)—and then, better yet: “Della smiling, her small feet only touching the floor on the back swing, both of them looking like careful, quiet children.” Only the keenest novelistic eye would notice where it is that the feet touch; only a fine novelistic mind would understand how much that detail tells us of how Della sits, how she feels; and yet Rhodes treats it as a passing detail, moving on to his climactic image, “like careful, quiet children.”

The first line of the second paragraph, “Della’s hands were so small they could be put into small-mouth jars,” presents a new level of technique, as when a magician who’s been doing rather ordinary tricks suddenly reveals how good he really is. It matters, of course, that the jars are a part of Della’s country culture, but that’s the least of it. No general statement, such as “Della had small hands,” could touch the vividness of this image. We do not doubt, as we read, that any grown woman’s hands could be so small (though it’s questionable); we accept the metaphor and all it carries in its train—Della’s childlike character and delicacy, her dutifulness and devotion (canning food), her saintly abstractedness, a quality hard to account for in terms of anything Rhodes has said, yet somehow present. After this, we are willing to accept quite odd assertions—that her pupils strain to please her, that children stop crying in her arms (they even “hush and hum”), and that intelligent, grown women somehow think they have no need to call her when they need her. And now, just when things are turning a touch mystical, Rhodes introduces another sharply observed detail: when those who remember her talk of Della, “a shadow is cast over their faces and they seem to be talking about parts of themselves.” The old people, in other words, think of Della Montgomery as they think of their own failing kidneys, slight chest pains, or arthritic fingers. What Rhodes’ eye has caught is the queer similarity of people’s expressions when they talk of their own lost youth and approaching death, on one hand, and, on the other, their feelings about the long-absent Della. Who wouldn’t raptly turn the page and read on?

Rhodes’ eye, like any fine novelist’s, is accurate both about literal details (where one’s feet touch on a porch swing) and about metaphorical equivalencies. Sitting in his study twenty years later, he summons in his mind’s eye exactly how things looked and finds precise expression for what he sees, sometimes literal expression (Wilson bending over the steering wheel, Della’s feet as she swings), sometimes metaphorical expression (the point that the two are like quiet, careful children, the point that the old people, talking about Della, wear the same look they wear when talking about parts of their own lives). The visual power of metaphor, it should be noticed, is as available to novelists as to poets. Often an important gesture or complex of gestures (the man who walks through a hostile crowd like a tired plowhorse, the man who jerks up and looks at his alarm clock like a startled chicken) cannot be captured so efficiently by any other means. Rhodes, like many good writers, depends at least as heavily on metaphor as on the naming of significant details. The main point to be noticed here, however, is that nothing in Rhodes’ vision is secondhand: what he offers he has taken from life experience, not from Faulkner or, say,
Kojak.

The unpromising writer sees derivatively. I once visited a class taught by a graduate-student creative writing teacher, one of whose methods was the use of psychodrama. While three students performed the psychodrama assigned, the rest of the class was to write a description of what each of them saw. The performers were asked to play the parts of a psychologist, a troubled mother, and a tuned-out, pot-smoking, troublesome son. The mother and son arrive, the mother explains her problem to the psychologist, and the son puts his feet on the psychologist’s desk, defending his behavior at home only insofar as he’s forced to do so. One of the most interesting things that happened in this psychodrama was that the woman playing psychologist, in trying to get the son to explain himself, repeatedly held out her hands to him, then looped them back like a seaman drawing in rope, saying in gesture, “Come on, come on! What have you to say?”—to which the son responded with sullen silence. When the drama was over and the descriptions by the class were read, not one student writer had caught the odd rope-pulling gesture. They caught the son’s hostile feet on the desk, the mother’s fumbling with her cigarettes, the son’s repeated swipes of one hand through his already tousled hair—they caught everything they’d seen many times on TV, but not the rope gesture.

Much of the dialogue one encounters in student fiction, as well as plot, gesture, even setting, comes not from life but from life filtered through TV. Many student writers seem unable to tell their own most important stories—the death of a father, the first disillusionment in love—except in the molds and formulas of TV. One can spot the difference at once because TV is of necessity—given its commercial pressures—false to life. Films and series installments on TV are tremendously expensive, though less expensive than commercials. Costs change, always for the worse, but when I was last involved with TV work, a few years ago, a hundred thousand dollars a minute was not unusual. If you’re putting together a thirteen-installment series for TV, you look for ways to beat the numbers. You set up your lights, cameras, and so on, at a particular location—Hollywood and Vine, or Lexington and Fifty-third—and you show the actors their tapes (the places where their feet must go), and you hand each of them a pink slip of paper with words on it, such as, “Walter? I haven’t seen him. I swear it!” or, “Oh, Michael! Not again!” (Sometimes the lines have directions:
angrily, or wearily, or obviously lying.
) You shoot the scene, send the actors to the wardrobe truck for a change of clothes, then hand the actors a different set of slips (it may be a slightly different set of actors), and you shoot a second scene, which will be edited into a wholly different episode in the series. The point is that it pays to make the most of any given location and setup. In this kind of production nobody but the director—sometimes not even the director—knows what the story is. For this reason a serious, thoughtful speech is impossible in the ordinary television series. Any good actor can say, “Walter? I haven’t seen him,” with conviction; but if you hand him a difficult, thoughtful set of lines, the actor is likely to ask, “What’s the context?” TV production costs often prohibit serious concern about context.

I am not denying that TV has value—as an opiate, if nothing else. My point is only that TV is not life, and the young novelist who has watched TV and failed to notice the difference is in trouble, except perhaps if his ultimate goal is to write for TV. (TV movies are sometimes more artistic. Interesting speeches are allowable, up to a point, since TV movie production allows more rehearsal and shooting time than does the usual TV series; but commercial pressures are never entirely absent. The beginning TV writer is given precise instructions on how to time his dramatic crescendos so that they lead to the breaks for “messages.”)