On Becoming a Novelist (10 page)

BOOK: On Becoming a Novelist

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A psychological wound is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven. Some fatal childhood accident for which one feels responsible and can never fully forgive oneself; a sense that one never quite earned one’s parents’ love; shame about one’s origins—belligerent defensive guilt about one’s race or country upbringing or the physical handicaps of one’s parents—or embarrassment about one’s own physical appearance: all these are promising signs. It may or may not be true that happy, well-adjusted children can become great novelists, but insofar as guilt or shame bend the soul inward they are likely, under the right conditions (neither too little discomfort nor too much), to serve the writer’s project. By the nature of his work it is important that one way or another the novelist learn to depend primarily on himself, not others, that he love without too much need and dependency, and look inward (or toward some private standard) for approval and support. Often one finds novelists are people who learned in childhood to turn, in times of distress, to their own fantasies or to fiction, the voice of some comforting writer, not to human beings near at hand. This is not to deny that it also helps if a novelist finds himself with one or more loved ones who believe in his gift and work.

The novelist is in a fundamentally different situation from the writer of short stories or the poet. Generally speaking, if he wins, he wins more handsomely than they do: a commercially successful artistic novel—especially a third or fourth one—may bring in upwards of a hundred thousand dollars (no real win by businesspeople’s standards; it may have taken him ten years to write) and in addition may bring stature, honor, maybe love letters from photogenic strangers. None of that is—or ought to be—the reason the novelist chose the genre he works in. He is the particular kind of writer he is, what William Gass has called a “big-breath writer,” and in effect he does what is most natural for him. He has, unlike the poet or short story writer, the endurance and pace of a marathon runner. As Fitzgerald put it, there is a peasant in every good novelist. And he has, besides, the kind of ambition peculiar to novelists—a taste for the monumental. He may begin as a short story writer; most novelists do. But he quickly comes to find himself too narrowly caged: he needs more space, more characters, more world. So he writes his large book and, as I began by saying, if he wins, he wins handsomely. The trouble is (and this is the point I’ve been struggling toward), the novelist does not win nearly as often as do poets and writers of short stories. That is why he needs to be a driven man, or at any rate directed by inner forces, not daily or monthly bursts of applause. A good poem takes a couple of days, maybe a week, to write. A good short story takes about the same. A novel may take years. All writers thrive on praise and publication; the novelist is the writer who makes the huge, long-term investment, one that may or may not pay off.

A writer’s successes bring him more than praise, publication, or money: they also help him toward confidence. With each success, writers, like stunt riders and ballet dancers, learn to dare more: they take on riskier projects and become more exacting in their standards. They get better. Here the novelist is at a disadvantage in comparison to writers of shorter forms. Especially in his apprentice years, when it matters most, success comes rarely.

Let us look more closely at the process a novelist must depend upon. First of all, the serious novelist can seldom punch straight through, write from beginning to end, knock off a quick revision, and sell his book. The idea he’s developing is too large for that, contains too many unmanageable elements—too many characters, each of whom the writer must not just create but figure out (as we figure out peculiar people in real life) and then must present convincingly; and the story contains too many scenes, too many moments, each of which the writer must imagine and render with all the intensity and care of his being. He may work for weeks, even months, without losing his focus and falling into confusion, but sooner or later—at least in my experience—the writer comes to the realization that he’s lost. His overfamiliarity with the characters, after endless hours of writing and rewriting, may lead to his suddenly feeling bored with them, irritated by everything they say or do; or he may become so close to them that, for lack of objectivity, he’s baffled by them. Just as we can often predict how casual acquaintances will behave in a given situation, though we cannot make out what we ourselves or those close to us would do, so writers often have a clearer fix on their characters when the novel is still a fresh idea than they do months later, when the writing is well along and the characters are like family. I myself am stopped cold when I cannot make out how a character would deal with the situation presented to him. If the situation presented is trivial, one’s perplexity can be maddening. Once during the writing of
Mickelsson’s Ghosts
I found the novel’s heroine being offered an hors d’oeuvre, and I couldn’t tell whether she would accept it or not. I forced the issue, made her refuse it; but then I found myself stuck. It didn’t matter a particle which choice she made, but damned if I could move to the next sentence. “This is ridiculous,” I told myself, and tried a little gin—to no avail. It seemed to me now that I knew nothing about this woman; I wasn’t even sure she’d have come to the party in the first place.
I
wouldn’t have. Stupidest party in all literature. I quit writing, put the manuscript away, and took out my frustration on woodworking tools, making furniture. A week or so later, in the middle of a band-saw cut, I saw, as if in a vision, the woman taking the hors d’oeuvre. I still didn’t understand her, but I was positive I knew what she would do, and what she would do after that, and after that.

Or the novel may bog down because in terms of overall structure—pace, emphasis, and so on—the writer can no longer see the forest for the trees. I’ve often labored with ferocious concentration on a scene, polishing, revising, and tearing out; rewriting, polishing, and revising again until finally I realize that I have no idea what I’m doing, can’t even recall why it was that I thought the scene necessary. Experience has taught me that, unpleasant as it is to do so, I have no choice but to put the manuscript away for a while—sometimes it takes months—and then look at it again. When the proper time has elapsed—in other words when the manuscript is “cold”—the faults stand plain. One may discover that the scene is much too elaborate in relation to scenes before and after it, or that it does not belong in the novel at all, or—this happened to me just once—that the scene is terrific but the rest of the novel has to go. It is hard even for an experienced writer to throw away two hundred pages of bad writing, or anyway it’s hard if one is still close enough to the writing to remember how much time and work it took. A year or two later, taking a fresh look at those bottom-drawer pages, it is easy—even satisfying—to be merciless.

I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again, work some more, month after month, year after year, and then one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it’s published and you read the printed book you see a thousand.) This tortuous process is not necessary, I suspect, for the writing of a popular novel in which the characters are not meant to have depth and complexity, where character A is consistently stingy and character B is consistently openhearted and nobody is a mass of contradictions, as are real human beings. But for a true novel there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking. We’ve all heard the stories of Tolstoy’s pains over
Anna Karenina
, Jane Austen’s over
Emma
, or even Dostoevsky’s over
Crime and Punishment
, a novel he grieved at having to publish prematurely, though he had worked at it much longer than most popular-fiction writers work at their novels.

So by the nature of the novelist’s artistic process, success comes rarely. The worst result of this is that the novelist has a hard time achieving what I’ve called “authority,” by which I do not mean confidence—the habit of believing one can do whatever one’s art requires—but, rather, something visible on the page, or audible in the author’s voice, an impression we get, and immediately trust, that this is a man who knows what he’s doing—the same impression we get from great paintings or musical compositions. Nothing seems wasted, or labored, or tentative. We do not get the slightest sense that the writer is struggling to hear in his mind what he’s saying, the rhythm with which he’s saying it, and how it relates to something later in the book. As if without effort, he does it all at once. He snaps into the trance state as if nothing were easier. Probably only examples can suggest what I mean.

Notice the careful, tentative quality of the opening paragraph of Melville’s
Omoo:

It was in the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that we made good our escape from the bay. The vessel we sought lay with her main-topsail aback about a league from the land, and was the only object that broke the broad expanse of the ocean.

There is, I think, nothing actively bad about this writing; but we get no sense of the speaker’s character, no clear mood from the rhythm (we cannot tell how seriously to take the word “escape”), certainly no sense of prose invading the domain of poetry. If you’re musical you will notice that the sentences fall naturally into 4/4 time. That is:*

Compare what the same writer can do once he’s found his booming, authoritative voice:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.….

That
is what I mean by authority. No further comment is necessary, but notice how flowing, tricky, and finely balanced the music is. (Needless to say, another reader might analyze the rhythms differently. My notation reflects my own hearing of the sentences.)