The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (18 page)

But while we’re obviously right to keep Joyce’s dissatisfaction with
Finnegans Wake
in perspective, we need to notice that in fact he said what he meant. He was pointing out, quite seriously, something that he’d discovered to be going wrong with the age—not only in his own work but in everybody’s work. Turning back, with praise, to his early, most unmannered writings, and raising for inspection as a literary touchstone an unmannered, simple fable, Joyce was reiterating principles he had recognized from the beginning, though he’d slipped from them sometimes in practice. He’d said long ago that all fiction should begin “Once upon a time …” and by an ingenious trick had begun his
Portrait of the Artist
on that formula. He’d long since offered his memorable metaphor on the unobtrusive artist imitating God. He was pointing out, in short, an important truth, a truth his disciples both early and late, from Faulkner and Dos Passos forward, have too often refused to hear.

Not all original or strikingly individual writing is mannered. No style is easier to recognize than Chekhov’s, but it’s difficult to think of a writer less mannered. It should be clear, too, that though a writer may be painfully mannered in one place, he may not be in others. Nowhere in Joyce’s finest work—“The Dead,” for instance—do we find the artist’s personality illegitimately intruding on the story. Nowhere in Melville’s greatest passages, certainly not in “Benito Cereno” or “Bartleby the Scrivener,” does Melville’s voice rise to (as Lawrence said) a “bray.” In these works, and others like them, poetic effects are kept subtle and unobtrusive. No one can fail to notice the poetic beauty of Joyce’s closing lines in “The Dead,” but the poetry comes from the rhythm of the sentences (rhythm so subtle only prose can achieve it), from the precisely focused imagery (the image of falling snow, which circles outward till it fills all the universe), and the last lines’ echoes—merest whispers—of passages encountered earlier. Yet it need not be obvious poetic effect
that makes a story seem mannered. As William Gass shows in his best fiction—“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” for instance—even quite spectacular artifice can sit firmly inside the fiction, not suggesting intrusion by the writer.

What does the beginning writer look for, then, as signs that his writing is slipping toward the mannered? He should think hard about any innovation he’s introduced into his work, making sure that the work would not be, for all practical purposes, the same if he had done what he’s done in more conventional ways. So, for instance, if he has substituted commas for periods in much of the story, trying for some subtle new rhythmical effect that seems to him appropriate to this particular narrative, he might try retyping key passages in conventional punctuation, then reading both versions over and over, making sure that the new way really does add more than it detracts. (Detracts in the sense that it distracts the reader’s mind until he adjusts to it—adjusts as we do to the best innovative writings.)

If the writer has introduced flamboyant poetic effects—noticeable rhyme, for example—the writer might read and reread what he’s written, then put it away awhile, allowing it to cool, then again read and reread, carefully analyzing his emotion as he reads, trying to make out whether the new device works because it gives new interest and life to the material or whether, on the other hand, it begins to wear thin, feel slightly creepy. Needless to say, no final decision, in a matter like this, should be based on cowardice. Any fool can revise until nothing stands out as risky, everything feels safe—and dead. One way or another, all great writing achieves some kind of gusto. The trick lies in writing so that the gusto is in the work itself, and whatever fire the presentation may have comes from the harmony or indivisibility of presentation and the thing presented.

Technique

What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws but artistic mastery. He cannot hope to develop mastery all at once; it involves too much. But if he pursues his goal in the proper way, he can approach it much more rapidly than he would if he went at it hit-or-miss, and the more successful he is at each stage along the way, the swifter his progress is likely to be. Invariably when the beginning writer hands in a short story to his writing teacher, the story has many things about it that mark it as amateur. But almost as invariably, when the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional. This may not happen if the writer works blindly—if he has not been warned about the problems he will encounter and given some guidance on possible ways of dealing with the main problem set for him. But it’s a common experience in writing classes that when the writer works with some sharply defined problem in technique, focusing on that alone, he produces such good work that he surprises himself. Success breeds suecess.
Having written some small thing very well, he begins to learn confidence.

Two important lessons can be learned from the fact that the beginning writer does his best when working with some limited problem. The first is that the writer’s relative indifference to his material can be an advantage (though this is by no means to say that the writer should always be indifferent to his material). In beginning an exercise assigned him by his teacher, the writer has no commitment to the message about to be conveyed, no concern about whether or not the character to be created is true to life—an accurate picture, say, of his mother. In an exercise, one simply makes things up as the assignment requires, and if by chance a talking tree emerges, one gets playfully involved in figuring out what a tree might think to mention. The tree, after all, must somehow be made interesting; otherwise the exercise will be a bore. In fact, the tree cannot help but say things of importance to the writer—otherwise the writer wouldn’t have thought of the tree’s remarks—and soon the writer discovers that his playful involvement has turned somewhat earnest. Consciously or not, he is expressing more feeling about, for instance, childhood frustrations and maternal love than he would be likely to spring in a true-to-life story about his mother. Whether a given exercise leads to realistic fiction or non-realistic fiction, it leads to fiction: to a studied simulation, through recollection and imaginative projection, of real feeling within the writer. When one writes about an actual parent, or friends, or oneself, all one’s psychological censors are locked on, so that frequently, though not always, one produces either safe but not quite true emotion or else—from the writer’s desire to tell the truth, however it may hurt—bold but distorted, fake emotion. In the first case, one’s old friend Alma Spire, who was occasionally promiscuous, turns out to be “sensitive and warmly sensual”; in the second, she turns out to be a slut. Real-life characters do sometimes hold their own in fiction, but only those, loved or hated, whom the writer has transformed in his own mind, or through
the process of writing, to imaginary beings. Writing an exercise, the writer is in the ideal artistic state, both serious and not serious. He wants the exercise to be wonderful, so that his classmates will applaud, but he is not in the dark psychological set of the ambitious young novelist struggling to write down his existence as it is, with the ghost of the young James Joyce standing horribly at his back.

Writing an exercise, the beginning writer is doing exactly what the professional does most of the time. Much of what goes into a real story or novel goes in not because the writer desperately wants it there but because he needs it: The scene justifies some later action, shows some basis of motivation, or reveals some aspect of character without which the projected climax of the action would not seem credible. Again and again one finds oneself laboriously developing some minor character one would never have introduced were he not needed to sell the clock for the time-bomb or to shear the sheep. Again and again one finds oneself struggling with all one’s wits to make a thunderstorm vivid, not because one cares about thunderstorms but because, if the storm is not made real, no one will believe Martha’s phonecall in the middle of the night. If he brilliantly succeeds with his exercise, the writer learns, consciously or not, the value of the mind-set that produced the success.

The second important lesson the beginning writer learns is that fiction is made of structural units; it is not one great rush. Every story is built of a number of such units: a passage of description, a passage of dialogue, an action (Leonard drives the pickup truck to town), another passage of description, more dialogue, and so forth. The good writer treats each unit individually, developing them one by one. When he’s working on the description of Uncle Fyodor’s store, he does not think about the hold-up men who in a moment will enter it, though he keeps them in the back of his mind. He describes the store, patiently, making it come alive, infusing every smell with Uncle Fyodor’s emotion and personality (his fear of hold-up men, perhaps); he
works on the store as if this were simply an exercise, writing as if he had all eternity to finish it, and when the description is perfect—and not too long or too short in relation to its function in the story as a whole—he moves on to his story’s next unit. Thinking in this way, working unit by unit, always keeping in mind what the plan of his story requires him to do but refusing to be hurried to more important things (Aunt Nadia’s hysteria when the gun goes off), the writer achieves a story with no dead spots, no blurs, a story in which we find no lapses of aesthetic interest.

One way to begin on the road to artistic mastery, then, is to work at the systematic development of fictional techniques. By techniques I mean, of course, ways of manipulating fictional elements. No book can treat all the techniques that exist or might exist—every writer invents new ones or uses old ones in new ways—but it will be useful to examine here in general terms the role technique plays in contemporary fiction, then to look, more or less at random, at a few technical matters that prove basic.

In contemporary fiction, technique is, on the whole, more self-conscious than ever before. Given any basic story situation—the murderer creeping through the bushes, Grandmother’s conversion, the lovers’ first kiss—the contemporary writer is likely to know more ways of handling the situation than did the writer of any former time. Whereas once it was common for writers to work always in some one basic style, contemporary writers may on occasion change so radically from story to story or novel to novel that we can hardly believe their productions are all by one hand. The reasons are of course not far to seek. For one thing, we have more models available to us. When Sir Thomas Malory wrote a mass battle scene, he had virtually no models. The result is that, brilliant as he was as an innovator, his battles sound to modern ears tiresomely alike. The modern writer has a vast
supply of available models, from Homer’s writings to Mongolian bandit legends to stories from the French Revolution or Vietnam.

For another thing, thanks partly to certain movements in modern philosophy, the art of fiction, like all the arts, has become increasingly self-conscious and self-doubting, artists repeatedly asking themselves what it is they’re doing. Chekhov and Tolstoy could say with great confidence that the business of fiction was “to tell the truth.” Contemporary thought, as we’ve seen, is often skeptical about whether telling the truth is possible. Though we may be fairly confident that art does tell the truth, that fiction’s elements and techniques form a language that the artist can use with great precision, and that the reader has intuitive means of checking on the truth of what the artist says, it will be helpful to look at this whole matter in a little more detail, since knowledge of the arguments will help clarify the role of technique.

Telling the truth in fiction can mean one of three things: saying that which is factually correct, a trivial kind of truth, though a kind central to works of verisimilitude; saying that which, by virtue of tone and coherence, does not feel like lying, a more important kind of truth; and discovering and affirming moral truth about human existence—the highest truth of art. This highest kind of truth, we’ve said, is never something the artist takes as a given. It’s not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he’s surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand. He may have a pretty clear idea where his experiment will lead, as Dostoevsky did when he sent Raskolnikov on his unholy mission; but insofar as he’s a true artist, he does not force the results. He knows to the depths of his soul that when an artist creates in the service of wrong beliefs—that is, out of wrong opinions he mistakes for knowledge—or when he creates in the service of doctrines that may or
may not be true but cannot be tested—for instance, doctrinaire Marxism or belief in the eventual resurrection of the dead—the effect of his work, admirable or otherwise, is not the effect of true art but of something else: pedagogy, propaganda, or religion.