The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (6 page)

I would begin, then, with something real—smaller than a short story, tale, yarn, sketch—and something primary, not secondary (not parody, for example, but the thing itself). I would begin with some one of those necessary parts of larger forms, some single element that, if brilliantly done, might naturally become the trigger of a larger work—some small exercise in technique, if you like, as long as it’s remembered that we do not really mean it as an exercise but mean it as a possible beginning of some magnificent work of art. A one-page passage of description, for example; description keyed to some particular genre—since description in a short story does not work in the same way description works in the traditional tale. And I would make the chief concern of this small exercise the writer’s discovery of the
full meaning
of fiction’s elements. Having written one superb descriptive passage, the writer should know things about description that he’ll never need to think about again. Working element by element through the necessary parts of fiction, he should make the essential techniques second nature, so
that he can use them with increasing dexterity and subtlety, until at last, as if effortlessly, he can construct imaginary worlds—huge thoughts made up of concrete details—so rich and complex, and so awesomely simple, that we are astounded, as we’re always astounded by great art.

This means, of course, that he must learn to see fiction’s elements as only a writer does, or an occasional great critic: as the fundamental units of an ancient but still valid kind of thought. Homer’s kind of thought; what I have sometimes called “concrete philosophy.” We’re not ready just yet to talk about what that kind of thought entails, but we can make a beginning by describing how an exercise in description might work.

To the layman it may seem that description serves simply to tell us where things are happening, giving us perhaps some idea of what the characters are like by identifying them with their surroundings, or providing us with props that may later tip over or burn down or explode. Good description does far more: It is one of the writer’s means of reaching down into his unconscious mind, finding clues to what questions his fiction must ask, and, with luck, hints about the answers. Good description is symbolic not because the writer plants symbols in it but because, by working in the proper way, he forces symbols still largely mysterious to him up into his conscious mind where, little by little as his fiction progresses, he can work with them and finally understand them. To put this another way, the organized and intelligent fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind
begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind.
Through the process of writing and endless revising, the writer makes available the order the reader sees. Discovering the meaning and communicating the meaning are for the writer one single act. One does not simply describe a barn, then. One describes a barn as seen by someone in some particular mood, because only in that way can the barn—or the writer’s experience of barns combined with whatever lies deepest in his feelings—be tricked into mumbling its secrets.

Consider the following as a possible exercise in description: Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing. (The exercise should run to about one typed page.) If the writer works hard, and if he has the talent to be a writer, the result of his work should be a powerful and disturbing image, a faithful description of some apparently real barn but one from which the reader gets a sense of the father’s emotion; though exactly what that emotion is he may not be able to pin down. (In an actual piece of fiction, we would of course be told what the emotion is—telling important stories by sly implication is a species of frigidity. But knowing the emotion, we should get from the description no less powerful an effect.) No amount of
intellectual
study can determine for the writer what details he should include. If the description is to be effective, he must choose his boards, straw, pigeon manure, and ropes, the rhythms of his sentences, his angle of vision, by feeling and intuition. And one of the things he will discover, inevitably, is that the images of death and loss that come to him are not necessarily those we might expect. The hack mind leaps instantly to images of, for instance, darkness, heaviness, decay. But those may not be at all the kinds of images that drift into the mind that has emptied itself of all but the desire to “tell the truth”; that is, to get the feeling down in concrete details. In everything he writes—description, dialogue, the recounting of actions—the writer does the same thing. And so the writer gathers part—still only part—of the materials with which he does his thinking.

At this point the reader can no doubt guess what the remaining parts are. Obviously one does not think in exactly the same ways, or about exactly the same kinds of things, in a short story, a tale, and a yarn; and reflection on that fact leads to the further observation that, as Wallace Stevens put it, “a change of style is a change of subject.” It was once a fairly common assumption among writers and literary critics that what fiction ought to do
is tell the truth about things, or, as Poe says somewhere, express our intuitions of reality. Viewed in this way, fiction is a kind of instrument for coming to understanding. But we can see that there are problems to be solved if that view is to be defended. The realist says to us: “Show me, by a process of exact imitation, what it’s like for a thirteen-year-old girl when she falls painfully, faintingly in love.” And he folds his arms, smug in the conviction that
he
can do just that. But questions dismay us. Shall we tell the truth in short, clipped sentences or long, smooth, graceful ones? Shall we tell it using short vowels and hard consonants or long vowels and soft consonants?—because the choices we make may change everything. Does fiction, in fact, have anything whatever to do with truth? Is it possible that this complicated instrument, fiction, studies nothing but itself—its own processes?

A common answer at the present time is that that is the question the serious writer spends his whole life trying to work out by means of the only kind of thinking he trusts; that is, the fictional process. For the moment, we must let that answer stand—with only this reservation: Great fiction can make us laugh or cry, in much the way that life can, and it gives us at least the powerful illusion that when we do so we’re doing pretty much the same things we do when we laugh at Uncle Herman’s jokes, or cry at funerals. Somehow the endlessly recombining elements that make up works of fiction have their roots hooked, it seems, into the universe, or at least into the hearts of human beings. Somehow the fictional dream persuades us that it’s a clear, sharp, edited version of the dream all around us. Whatever our doubts, we pick up books at train stations, or withdraw into our studies and write them; and the world—or so we imagine—comes alive.

Interest and Truth

Anything we read for pleasure we read because it interests us. One would think, since this is so, that the first question any young writer would ask himself, when he’s trying to decide what to write, would be “What can I think of that’s interesting?” Oddly enough, that is not a very usual first question; in fact, when one points out to young writers that it might be, they often react with surprise. To some extent, bad teaching is to blame, encouraging us to rise beyond, and forget, our most immediate, most childish pleasures—color in painting, melody in music, story in fiction—and learn to take pleasure in things more abstract and complex. Those sophisticated pleasures are real enough and can be intense, but something may have gone wrong when they come to be the first pleasures we seek. To read or write well, we must steer between two extreme views of aesthetic interest: the overemphasis of things immediately pleasurable (exciting plot, vivid characterization, fascinating atmosphere) and exclusive concern with that which is secondarily but at times more lastingly pleasurable, the fusing artistic vision.

Though it cannot be said of all teachers of literature, it is common to find teachers indifferent to the kinds of poetry and fiction that go most directly for those values we associate with
simple entertainment—popular lyrics, drugstore paperbacks, and so forth. The reason may in some cases be snobbery, but probably just as often the cause is the sensitive reader’s too frequent experience of disappointment—the boring sameness found at its extreme in the scripts of television Westerns, copshows, and situation comedies. Driven off by too much that is merely commercial—often shoddy imitation of authentic originality in the realm of the popular—we fail to notice that popular song writers like Stevie Wonder and Randy Newman, to say nothing of the Beatles, can be dedicated, energetic poets more interesting than many of the weary sophisticates, true-confessors, and randy academics we encounter in the “little magazines,” and that drugstore fiction can often have more to offer than fiction thought to be of a higher class. The result of such prejudice or ignorance is that literature courses regularly feature writers less appealing—at least on the immediate, sensual level, but sometimes on deeper levels as well—than Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delaney, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Roger Zelazny, or the Strugatsky brothers, science-fiction writers; or even thriller writers like John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth; the creators of the early
Spider-Man
comics or
Howard the Duck
. In theory it may be proper that teachers ignore thrillers, science fiction, and the comic books. No one wants Coleridge pushed from the curriculum by a duck “trapped in a world he never made!” But when we begin to list the contemporary “serious” writers who fill highschool and literature courses,
Howard the Duck
can look not all that bad.

The snobbery or limited range of teachers is one of the reasons we forget to think about interest in the sense of immediate appeal; but another cause may be more basic. The business of education is to give the student both useful information and life-enhancing experience, one largely measurable, the other not; and since the life-enhancing value of a course in literature is difficult to measure—since, moreover, many people in a position to put pressure on educational programs have no real experience
in or feeling for the arts—it is often tempting to treat life-enhancement courses as courses in useful information, putting them on the same “objective” level as courses in civics, geometry, or elementary physics. So it comes about that books are taught (officially, at least) not because they give joy, the incomparably rich experience we ask and expect of all true art, but because, as a curriculum committee might put it, they “illustrate major themes in American literature,” or “present a clearly stated point of view and can thus serve as a vehicle for such curriculum objectives as (1) demonstrating an awareness of the author’s purpose, (2) reading critically, and (3) identifying organizational patterns in literary selections used to support a point of view.” One cannot exactly say that such teaching is pernicious, but to treat great works of literature in this way seems a little like arguing for preservation of dolphins, whales, chimps, and gorillas solely on the grounds of ecological balance.

At all levels, not just in the highschools (as the above might suggest), novels, short stories, and poems have for years been taught not as experiences that can delight and enliven the soul but as things that are good for us, like vitamin C. The whole idea of the close critical analysis of literary works—the idea emphasized by the “New Critics” of the thirties and forties—has had the accidental side effect of leading to the notion that the chief virtue of good poetry and fiction is instructional. If we look at the famous New Critical anthologies designed to teach analysis (for instance,
Understanding Fiction
and
Understanding Poetry
, by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren), we cannot help noticing that subtly, no doubt unwittingly, the authors suggest that what makes a piece of literature “good” is the writer’s thorough and orderly exploration of ideas, his full development of the implications of his theme. What these authors suggest is in important ways true, though ill-considered books “against interpretation” (as one of them is entitled) have driven close analysis from many classrooms: However dazzling and vivid the characters, however startling the action, no piece of
fiction can be of lasting interest if its thought is confused, simple-minded, or plain wrong. On the other hand, reading fiction or poetry without regard for the delight it can give—its immediate interest—can mutilate the experience of reading. It is not incidental that Shakespeare’s plays present fascinating characters engaged in suspenseful actions. To write fiction without regard for immediate interest, purposely choosing the most colorless characters possible, a plot calculated to drive away the poor slob interested in seeing something happen, and suppressing all textural richness and variety—to write, that is, as if fiction were much too serious to be enjoyed—is to raise suspicion that the writer is as insensitive to art’s true nature, and its value to humanity, as a stone in a farmer’s field.