On Becoming a Novelist (3 page)

If a writer cares more for his language than for other elements of fiction, if he continually calls our attention away from the story to himself, we call him “mannered” and eventually we tire of him. (Smart editors tire of him quickly and reject him.) If the writer seems to have less feeling for his characters than we feel they deserve, insofar as they reflect actual humanity, we call the writer “frigid.” If he fakes feeling, or appears to do so—especially if he tries to achieve sentiment by cheap, dishonest means (for instance, by substituting language, “rhetoric,” for authentically moving events)—we call him “sentimental.”

So one of the things one considers when asked if the young writer has what it takes to become a good novelist is his feeling for language. If he’s capable of writing expressively, at least sometimes, and if his love for language is not so exclusive or obsessive as to rule out all other interests, one feels the young writer has a chance. The better the writer’s feel for language and its limits, the better his odds become. They are very good indeed for the writer who has a fine ear for language and
also
a fascination with the materials—character, action, setting—that make up fictional realities. He may develop into the virtuoso stylist (Proust, the later Henry James, or Faulkner) who has the best of both worlds.

The writer with the worst odds—the person to whom one at once says, “I don’t think so”—is the writer whose feel for language seems incorrigibly perverted. The most obvious example is the writer who cannot move without the help of such phrases as “with a merry twinkle in her eye,” or “the adorable twins,” or “his hearty, booming laugh”—dead expressions, the cranked-up zombie emotion of a writer who feels nothing in his daily life or nothing he trusts enough to find his own words for, so that he turns instead to “she stifled a sob,” “friendly lopsided smile,” “cocking an eyebrow in that quizzical way he had,” “his broad shoulders,” “his encircling arm,” “a faint smile curving her lips,” “his voice was husky,” “her face framed by auburn curls.”

The trouble with such language is not only that it is cliché (worn out, overused); but also that it is symptomatic of a crippling psychological set. We all develop linguistic masks (arrays of verbal habits) with which to deal with the world; different masks for different occasions. And one of the most successful masks known, at least for dealing with troublesome situations, is the Christian Pollyanna mask embodied and atrophied in phrases like those I’ve mentioned. Why the mask turns up more often in writing than in normal speaking—why, that is, the art of writing becomes a way of prettifying and tranquilizing reality—I cannot say, unless it has to do with how writing is taught, in our early years, as a form of good manners, and also perhaps with the emphasis our first teachers give to the goody-goody (or taming) emotions fashionable in school readers. In any event, the Pollyanna mask, if it cannot be torn off, will spell ruin for the novelist. People who regularly seek to feel the bland optimism the Pollyanna mask supports cannot help developing a vested interest in seeing, speaking, and feeling as they do—with two results: they lose the power to see accurately, and they lose the power to communicate with any but those who see and feel in the same benevolently distorted way. Once one has made a strong psychological investment in a certain kind of language, one has trouble understanding that it distorts reality, and also trouble understanding how others—in this case those who take a more cautious or warily ironic view—can be so blind. No one with a distorted view of reality can write good novels, because as we read we measure fictional worlds against the real world. Fiction elaborated out of attitudes we find childish or tiresome in life very soon becomes tiresome.

The Pollyanna mask is only one among many common evasions of reality. Consider a few lines by a well-known science fiction writer:

It’s not often people will tell you how they
really
feel about gut-level things. Like god or how they’re afraid they’ll go insane like their grandfather or sex or how obnoxious you are when you pick your nose and wipe it on your pants. They play cozy with you, because nobody likes to be hated, and large doses of truth from any one mouth tend to make the wearer of the mouth
persona non grata
. Particularly if he’s caught you picking your nose and wiping it on your pants. Even worse if he catches you eating it.
*

This is not the Pollyanna style favored by hack writers of the twenties and thirties but the hack-writer style that superseded it, disPollyanna. Sunny optimism, with its fondness for italics, gives way to an ill-founded cynicism, also supported by italics (“It’s not often people will tell you how they
really
feel”), and “broad shoulders” give way to “gut-level things,” or worse. Sentence fragments become common (a standard means of falsely heightening the emotion of what one says), and commas disappear (“grandfather or sex or how obnoxious you are”) in rhetorical imitation of William Faulkner, who was also on thin ice. (Dropping commas is all right except if one’s purpose is to increase the rush of the sentence and thus suggest emotion not justified by what is being said.) Instead of giving “friendly lopsided smiles” people “play cozy with you,” which means that they’re false, unreal, not even the owners (just the wearers) of their mouths. (The same stock depersonalization of human beings gives cheap detective fiction one of its favorite rhetorical devices, the transformation of “the man in the gray suit” to “Gray Suit,” and the man in the sharkskin to “Sharkskin,” as in “Gray Suit looks over at Sharkskin. ‘Piss off,’ he says.” This tends to happen even in fairly good detective fiction. It’s hard to rise above your class.) Crude jokes and images, slang phrases borrowed from foreign languages, are all stock in disPollyanna fiction—in an attempt to shock prudes. No one is shocked, of course, though a few may misread their annoyance as shock. One is annoyed because the whole thing is phony, an imitation of things too often imitated before. The problem with such writers, it ought to be mentioned, is not that they are worse people than those who wrote in Pollyanna. They are almost exactly the same people: idealists, people who simple-mindedly long for goodness, justice, and sanity; the difference is one of style. This same science fiction writer’s character Jack the Ripper reacts in howling moral outrage when he learns how the Utopians have made him their plaything:

A psychopath, a butcher, a lecher, a hypocrite, a clown.
“You did this to me! Why did you do this?”
Frenzy cloaked his words….
*

A young writer firmly hooked on bad science fiction, or the worst of the hard-boiled detective school, or tell-it-like-it-is so-called serious fiction, fashionably interpreting all experience as crap, may get published, if he works hard, but the odds are that he’ll never be an artist. That may not bother him much. Hack writers are sometimes quite successful, even admired. But so far as I can see, they are of slight value to humanity.

Both Pollyanna and disPollyanna limit the writer in the same ways, leading him to miss and simplify experience, and cutting him off from all but fellow believers. Marxist language can have the same effects, or the argot of the ashram, or computer talk (“input”), or the weary metaphors of the business-and-law world (“where the cheese starts to bind”). When one runs across a student whose whole way of seeing and whose emotional security seem dependent on adherence to a given style of language, one has reason to worry.

Yet even linguistic rigidity of the kind I’ve been discussing is no sure sign of doom. Though some would-be writers may be incurably addicted to a particular way of oversimplifying language, others who seem no better off prove curable, once they’ve understood the problem and worked on it. What the writer must do to cure himself is rise above his own acquired bad taste, figure out how his language habits are like and unlike the language habits of other people, and learn to recognize the relative virtues (and limitations) of language styles surrounding his own. This may mean working closely with a teacher who is sensitive to language, not only “good English” in the sense of “standard English,” but vivid, expressive English, “standard” or not. Or it may mean thinking hard about words, phrases, sentence structure, rhythm, and the like; reading books about language; and above all, reading the work of universally acclaimed literary artists.

Every word and phrase, from holy to clinical to obscene, has its proper domain, where it works effectively and comfortably, offending no one. For instance, the phrase “We are gathered this day” is hardly noticeable floating from a pulpit, sounds ironic coming from a professor in a classroom, and in a business letter may sound insane. A phrase like “the blond youth” may be all but invisible in the foliage of an old-time novel but stands out in a modern one written in colloquial style. A comic vision of culture may help: the recognition that all human beings and literary styles have their amusing imperfections—the tendency of people and their language to slip into puffed-up pride, fake humility, dumb cunning, pretentious or fake-unpretentious intelligence. If all human styles are prone to reflect our human clownishness, we need not view any style with superstitious awe nor dismiss any style out of hand. We need only to figure out exactly what it is that we’re trying to say—partly by saying it and then by looking it over to see if it says what we really mean—and to keep fiddling with the language until whatever objections we may consider raising seem to fall away.

To put all this more philosophically, language inevitably carries values with it, and unexamined language carries values one might, if one knew they were there, be ashamed of accidentally promoting. People sensitive to the disadvantage placed on women in our culture are likely to be annoyed each time common English usage makes us say “man” or “men” or “mankind” when we really mean “people”—or “he,” as I mostly do (not that I like it) when I am speaking of the writer, whoever he or she may be. All of us are to some extent tricked by our language, thinking of the brain in terms of telephone circuits, or of the sun as “rising,” or of “discovery” as (in faintly Platonic fashion) the uncovering of something that was always there (“He discovered a new way of eliminating fumes”). But the writer excessively tricked by language, “stuck” in the norms and prejudices of some narrow community, or unable to shake the influence and vision of some literary model—Faulkner or Joyce or the common locutions of bad science fiction—will never be a writer of the first rank because he will never be able to see clearly for himself.

The writer who knows himself to be insufficiently sensitive to language might try some of the following:

Get a first-rate freshman composition book (the best, in my opinion, is W. W. Watt’s
An American Rhetoric
) and work hard, with or without a teacher, on everything you’re unsure of, especially those sections dealing with style, diction, and sentence structure.

Create and work hard on exercises of your own. For example:

—
Write an authentic sentence four pages long (do not cheat by using colons and semicolons that are really periods).
—
Write a two-or three-page passage of successful prose (that is, prose that’s not annoying or distracting) entirely in short sentences.
—
Write a brief incident in five completely different styles—such an incident as: A man gets off a bus, stumbles, looks over and sees a woman, smiling.

Improve your vocabulary, not in the
Reader’s
Digest way (which encourages the use of fashionable big words) but by systematically copying from your dictionary all the relatively short, relatively common words that you would not ordinarily think to use, with definitions if necessary, and then making an effort to use them as if they’d come to you naturally—use them, in other words, as naturally and casually as you’d use words at a party.

Read books and magazines, paying careful attention to the language. If what you’re reading is bad (you can generally count on women’s magazine fiction), underline or highlight the words and phrases that annoy you by their triteness, cuteness, sentimentality, or whatever—in other words, anything that would distract an intelligent, sensitive reader from the vivid and continuous dream. If what you are reading is good (you can usually count on
The New Yorker
, at least for diction), account for why the language succeeds. Perhaps even type out a masterpiece such as James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

If the promising writer keeps on writing—writes day after day, month after month—and if he reads very carefully, he will begin to “catch on.” Catching on is important in the arts, as in athletics. Practical sciences, including the verbal engineering of commercial fiction, can be taught and learned. The arts too can be taught, up to a point; but except for certain matters of technique, one does not learn the arts, one simply catches on.

If my own experience is representative, what one mainly catches on to is the value of painstaking—almost ridiculously painstaking—work. I’d been writing happily since the age of eight, the age at which I first discovered the joys of doggerel; I’d written poems, stories, novels, and plays in high school; in college and graduate school I’d taken good courses in understanding fiction and good creative writing courses, some with well-known writers and editors, and I’d worked with real devotion through the other sorts of courses one takes to get a PhD; but somehow, for all that, I wasn’t very good. I worked more hours at my fiction than anyone else I knew, and I was lavishly praised by friends and teachers, even published a little; but I was dissatisfied, and I knew my dissatisfaction was not just churlishness. The study where I buried myself alive, the first year or two after graduate school (a toolshed so small I could touch the outer walls from the center, and so poorly ventilated that the smoke of my pipe made my typewriter vanish in fog), came to be so crammed with my manuscripts and drafts that I couldn’t move my chair—yet still nothing I wrote seemed worth the trouble.

I had by this time already faced the painful truth every committed young writer must eventually face, that he’s on his own. Teachers and editors may give bits of good advice, but they usually do not care as much as does the writer himself about his future, and they are far from infallible; in fact, I am convinced, after years of teaching and editing, and watching others do the same, that a large sample of comments by teachers and editors, myself included, would show these comments to be more often wrong, for the particular writer, than right. I, at any rate, had worked with teachers generally considered outstanding, had done my best at the young writers’ hothouse, the Iowa Workshop, and had weaseled whatever help I could get out of other writers I admired. But now nothing was clearer than that I must figure out on my own what was wrong with my fiction.