The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (5 page)

Who can doubt the scene? Taylor tells us that the horse is “jumpy” and proves it by a closely observed detail: George holds the reins—as one must to control a jumpy horse when one is
standing on the ground—“close to the bit.” That Josie is sitting on a real horse, and a jumpy one, is proved by further authenticating details: The horse’s flesh quivers “under her leg,” and when the writer tells us that Josephine “looked over her shoulder when it stomped one rear hoof,” we are at once convinced by both the horse’s action and the woman’s response. Since Josie is dizzy and presumably not a good rider, we are fully persuaded by the detail telling us “her face was almost in the horse’s mane,” by the panicky way in which she talks to herself, “slicing out the words with a sharp breath,” by the fact that, riding down the dirt road, she “saw nothing but the yellow dirt,” by the “three-plank wooden bridge” (in her alarm she looks closely), by the fact that she hears George’s horse before she sees it, and by the fact that, turning to look at him, she sees George “through the hair that hung over her eyes.” Examining the scene carefully, we discover that something like half of it is devoted to details that prove its actuality.

Compare a short passage from a comic tale in Italo Calvino’s
Cosmicomics
(translated from the Italian by William Weaver). The narrator, old Qfwfq, is recalling the days, in the Carboniferous period of the planet, when osseous, pulmonate fish, including Qfwfq, moved up from the sea onto land.

Partly we believe, or forget to disbelieve, what Calvino tells us because of the charm of old Qfwfq’s voice; and partly we’re convinced by vivid detail. I will not labor the point—the fish-animals “padding about” on shore, the vivid picturing of great-uncle N’ba N’ga’s home (the muddy shallows among the roots of protoconifers), the vivid image of the fish-animals pushing themselves “over the softer layers of vegetation until we could feel ourselves sinking into the dampness,” the specificity and appropriateness of the measure “a few palms’ lengths,” the column of little bubbles, the great-uncle’s habit of “breathing heavily the way old folks do,” the “little cloud of mud scraped up by his sharp snout, always rummaging around, more out of habit than out of the need to hunt for anything.”

Consider, finally, the piling up of authenticating details in Ivan Bunin’s “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” a more conventionally narrated, serious tale. The passage presents an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic.

One can see at a glance that the details are symbolic, identifying the ship as a kind of hell constructed by the pride of modern man and more terrible than the power of the Devil. But my point at the moment is only this: that here too, as everywhere in good fiction, it’s physical detail that pulls us into the story, makes us believe or forget not to believe or (in the yarn) accept the lie even as we laugh at it.

If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a
train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by rain. We read on—dream on—not passively but actively, worrying about the choices the characters have to make, listening in panic for some sound behind the fictional door, exulting in characters’ successes, bemoaning their failures. In great fiction, the dream engages us heart and soul; we not only respond to imaginary things—sights, sounds, smells—as though they were real, we respond to fictional problems as though they were real: We sympathize, think, and judge. We act out, vicariously, the trials of the characters and learn from the failures and successes of particular modes of action, particular attitudes, opinions, assertions, and beliefs exactly as we learn from life. Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.

This is not the place to pursue that suspicion—that is, the place to work out in detail the argument that the ultimate value of fiction is its morality, though the subject is one we must return to—but it is a good place to note a few technical implications of the fact that, whatever the genre may be, fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind. We may observe, first, that if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must probably be vivid and continuous—
vivid
because if we are not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and
continuous
because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion. There may be exceptions to this general rule—we will consider that possibility later—but insofar as the general rule is persuasive it suggests that one of the chief mistakes a writer can
make is to allow or force the reader’s mind to be distracted, even momentarily, from the fictional dream.

Let us be sure we have the principle clear. The writer presents a scene—let us say a scene in which two rattlesnakes are locked in mortal combat. He makes the scene vivid in the reader’s mind; that is, he encourages the reader to “dream” the event with enormous clarity, by presenting as many concrete details as possible. He shows, with as much poetic force as he can muster, how the heads hover, jaws wide, slowly swaying, and then strike; how the teeth sink in; how the tails switch and lash, grope for a hold, pound up dust clouds; how the two snakes hiss, occasionally strike and miss, the two rattles roaring like motors. By detail the writer achieves vividness; to make the scene continuous, he takes pains to avoid anything that might distract the reader from the image of fighting snakes to, say, the manner in which the image is presented or the character of the writer. This is of course not to say that the writer cannot break from the scene to some other—for instance, the conservationist rushing toward the snakes in his jeep. Though characters and locale change, the dream is still running like a movie in the reader’s mind. The writer distracts the reader—breaks the film, if you will—when by some slip of technique or egoistic intrusion he allows or forces the reader to stop thinking about the story (stop “seeing” the story) and think about something else.

Some writers—John Barth, for instance—make a point of interrupting the fictional dream from time to time, or even denying the reader the chance to enter the fictional dream that his experience of fiction has led him to expect. We will briefly examine the purpose and value of such fiction later. For now, it is enough to say that such writers are not writing fiction at all, but something else,
metafiction
. They give the reader an experience that assumes the usual experience of fiction as its point of departure, and whatever effect their work may have depends on their conscious violation of the usual fictional effect. What interests us
in their novels is that they are
not
novels but, instead, artistic comments on art.

We’ve come a long way from our opening question, “If there are no rules, or none worth his attention, where is the beginning writer to begin?” Among other things, you may impatiently object, we’ve raised the specter of a great morass of rules: Don’t try to write without the basic skills of composition; don’t try to write “what you know,” choose a genre; create a kind of dream in the reader’s mind, and avoid like the plague all that might briefly distract from that dream—a notion wherein a multitude of rules are implied.

But nothing in all this, I patiently answer, has anything to do with aesthetic law or gives rules on how to write. That literature falls into genres is simply an observation from nature, comparable to Adam’s observation that the animals need names. If one is to write, it helps to know what writing is. And the fact that all three of the major genres have one common element, the fictional dream, is another observation, nothing more. We are speaking, remember, only of realistic narratives, tales, and yarns—that is, fiction’s primary forms—so that in listing ways in which the reader can be distracted from the fictional dream, as I will in Part Two, I am in fact dealing only with things to watch out for when striving for the effects of traditional fiction. My premise of course is that before one can work well with metafiction, one needs some understanding of how the primary forms work.

Let us turn again, then, to that opening question: Where should one begin?

I have said that a good answer, but not an ideal one, is “Write the kind of story you know and like best”; in other words, choose a genre and try to write in it. Since we’re living in an age very rich in genres—since a given student may have encountered almost anything, from tales like Isak Dinesen’s to
New Yorker
realistic fiction, from surreal, plotless fictions-in-question-and-answer-form
to philosophically enriched and dramatically intensified prose renderings of something like the vision in
Captain Marvel
comics—such instructions to the writer may produce almost anything. Set off in this way, the writer is sure to enjoy himself, first riffling through genres, discovering how many and how complex they are, then—tongue between his teeth—knocking off his brilliant example. The approach has the advantage of reminding the student of what freedom he has, how vast the possibilities are, and the advantage of encouraging him to find his own unique path.

The reason the approach seems to me not ideal is that, except in the extraordinary case, it wastes the writer’s time. It instructs him to do something he cannot realistically be expected to do well—and here I mean “well” in the always urgent artist’s sense, not the more casual, more gentlemanly way in which we do things badly or well in other university programs. Let me explain. True artists, whatever smiling faces they may show you, are obsessive, driven people—whether driven by some mania or driven by some high, noble vision need not presently concern us. Anyone who has worked both as artist and as professor can tell you, I think, that he works very differently in his two styles. No one is more careful, more scrupulously honest, more devoted to his personal vision of the ideal, than a good professor trying to write a book about the
Gilgamesh
. He may write far into the night, he may avoid parties, he may feel pangs of guilt about having spent too little time with his family. Nevertheless, his work is no more like an artist’s work than the work of a first-class accountant is like that of an athlete contending for a championship. He uses faculties of the mind more easily available to us; he has, on all sides of him, stays, checks, safeties, rules of procedure that guide and secure him. He’s a man sure of where he stands in the world. He belongs on sunlit walkways, in ivied halls. With the artist, not so. No critical study, however brilliant, is the fierce psychological battle a novel is. The qualities that make a true artist—nearly the same qualities
that make a true athlete—make it important that the student writer never be prevented from working as seriously as he knows how to. In university courses we do exercises. Term papers, quizzes, final examinations are not meant for publication. We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party, picking up the good bits of food or conversation, bearing with the rest, going home when it comes to seem the reasonable thing to do. Art, at those moments when it feels most like art—when we feel most alive, most alert, most triumphant—is less like a cocktail party than a tank full of sharks. Everything’s for keeps, nothing’s just for exercise. (Robert Frost said, “I never write exercises, but sometimes I write poems which fail and then I call them exercises.”) A course in creative writing should be like writing itself; everything required should be, at least potentially, usable, publishable: for keeps. “A
mighty will
,” Henry James said, “that’s all there is!” Let no one discourage or undermine that mighty will.