Writing the Novel (19 page)

Be that as it may, I have no quarrel with the implied message—i.e., that the best way to develop a style is to make every effort to write as naturally and honestly as possible. It is not intentionally mannered writing that adds up to style, or richly poetic paragraphs, or the frenetic pursuit of novel prose rhythms. The writer’s own style emerges when he makes no deliberate attempt to have any style at all. Through his efforts to create characters, describe settings, and tell a story, elements of his literary personality will fashion his style, imposing an individual stamp on his material.

There are a handful of writers we read as much for style as for content. John Updike is one example who comes quickly to mind. The manner in which he expresses himself is often interesting in and of itself. It is occasionally said of a particularly effective actor that one would gladly pay money to hear him read the telephone directory. Similarly, there are readers who would gladly
read
the phone book—if someone like Updike had written it.

The flip side of this sort of style is that it sometimes gets in the way of content in the sense that it blunts the impact of the narrative. Remember, fiction works upon us largely because we are able to choose to believe in its reality. Hence we care about the characters and how their problems are resolved. Just as a poor style gets in our way, making us constantly aware that we are reading a work of the imagination, so does an overly elaborate and refined style set up roadblocks to the voluntary suspension of our disbelief. From this standpoint, one may argue that the very best style is that which looks for all the world like no style at all.

Style, along with the various technical matters that come under that heading, is difficult for me to write about, very possibly because my own approach has always been instinctive rather than methodical. From my earliest beginnings as a writer, it was always a relatively easy matter for me to write smoothly. My prose rhythms and dialogue were good. Just as there are natural athletes, so was I—from the standpoint of technique, at least—a natural writer.

This gave me a considerable advantage in breaking into print. I can see now that a lot of my early pulp stories had rather little to recommend them in terms of plot and characterization, but the fact that they were relatively well-written in comparison to the efforts of other tyros got me sales I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But a smooth style in and of itself is no guarantee of true success. For years I was accustomed to a particular message in letters of rejection. “The author writes well,” my agent would be advised. “This book didn’t work for us, but we’d be very interested in seeing something else he’s written.” That sort of response is encouraging the first few times you receive it. When it becomes a common refrain, all it sparks is frustration.

I know several writers who were similarly gifted stylistically and who report similar early experiences. Over the years we’ve worked to develop our abilities at plotting and characterization, though for some of us the disparity is still in evidence. In my own case, it hasn’t been all that long since an editor last explained how much he liked my writing—but that he didn’t like my book.

Other writers have the opposite problem. A friend of mine has an extraordinary natural sense of story, coupled with an enthusiasm for his plots and characters which communicates itself in the drive of his narrative. From a technical standpoint, however, he’s almost numbingly maladroit. His first novel was rewritten several times prior to publication, and received extensive textual editing from his publisher; even so, it remained a crude book. He has improved considerably since then, but to this day, ten books later, he is still very much the heavy-handed writer. Nevertheless, his books are almost invariably best sellers because of the particular strengths they do possess.

My point here is that someone like my friend, who has had to teach himself so much about the nuts-and-bolts side of writing, might well be better equipped than I to discuss the subject. It’s harder to discourse effectively upon something when one’s approach to it has always been intuitive.

That said, perhaps we can have a look at a handful of subjects which fit under the general umbrella of style. Perhaps you’ll find something here of some value, whether you yourself are a natural literary athlete or whether you have to work very hard to make it look easy.

Grammar, Diction and Usage

A fiction writer doesn’t have to be the strictest grammarian around. He can get by without a clear understanding of the subjunctive. Indeed, the sort of slavish devotion to the rules of grammar that might gladden the heart of an old-fashioned English teacher can get in the way of the novelist, giving his prose a stilted quality and leading his characters to talk not as people speak but as they ought to.

In my own case, I’m aware that I make certain grammatical errors, some of them deliberate, others through sheer ignorance. I have a copy of Fowler’s
Modern English Usage,
a book I unhesitatingly recommend, and yet months pass without my referring to it. When I’m hammering away a the typewriter keys, trying to get a scene written and to get it right, I’m not remotely inclined to interrupt the flow for the sake of what Churchill called “the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

In first-person writing, I would maintain that the writer is fully justified in breaking grammatical rules and regulations at will. How the narrator expresses himself, the words he uses and the way he puts them together, is part of the manner in which his character is defined. I will argue further that a first-person narrator may follow a particular precept on one page and violate it on another. If our characters are to be lifelike, we can hardly demand absolute consistency of them.

The same principle applies, and rather more obviously, in dialogue. Most people don’t express themselves the way English teachers wish they would, and it’s part of the novelist’s license to make their speech as grammatical or ungrammatical as suits his purpose.

You’d think this would go without saying. I’ve far too often had my characters’ grammar corrected by overzealous copyeditors to believe that
anything
in this area goes without saying.

Copyeditors are even more of a nuisance when it comes to punctuation. Various rules for punctuation have grown up over the years, but it’s a moot point whether they apply to fiction, where punctuation may be properly regarded as a device the writer can use to obtain the effect he desires. You can choose to write this sentence:

She was angry, and not a little frightened.

Or you can write it this way:

She was angry and not a little frightened.

The decision, I maintain, is personal. The presence or absence of a comma in this sentence determines the rhythm of its reading, and that’s a choice the author is fully entitled to make. It will hinge on the rhythm of the sentences which precede and follow it, on the author’s natural style, on the effect he’s trying to achieve, and on such intangibles as the weather and the astrological aspects. It should not hinge on what someone with a red pencil was taught in English Comp 101.

I get rather emotional on this subject. For years copyeditors have gone through my manuscripts, arbitrarily deleting commas of mine and inserting commas of their own. I don’t put up with this sort of thing anymore. Brian Garfield, similarly infuriated, has taken to writing before-the-fact memos to copyeditors, explaining that he’s been in this line for a few years now and knows the rules of punctuation sufficiently well to break them at will.

And yet, and yet….

I remember, back in school, a student’s inquiring of a teacher as to whether spelling errors would lower one’s grade on a particular examination.

“That depends,” the teacher explained. “If you spell cat with two t’s, I might let it pass. If you spell it D-O-G, it’s a mistake.”

Some writers approach grammar and usage and punctuation like the kid who spelled cat D-O-G. I’ve been trying lately to read what is either a memoir of Hollywood or a novel in the form of a memoir—the publisher’s blurb leaves the question open—and the author’s cavalier disregard for matters of usage makes the book sporadically unreadable, for all that’s interesting in the material.

Consider this sentence, a personal favorite of mine:
They didn’t even say “Presbyterian Church”
—
they called it “the First Pres,” that’s how the texture of even as innocuous as watered-down Protestantism was watered down.

Now the trouble with that sentence is that you can read it three times trying to figure out what it means and you won’t get anywhere. I can’t even figure out how to fix it. The whole book is full of stuff like this, and it’s enough to give you a headache.

A reputable publisher issued this one, and I can only assume the author had strong feelings about the integrity of her prose. Otherwise a copyeditor would have made any number of changes, most of which could only have been for the better. When a writer’s style is at the expense of clarity, when the prose obscures the meaning, something’s wrong.

Dialogue

When you’re looking for something to read at a library or bookstore, do you ever flip through books to see how much dialogue they have? I do, and I gather I’m not alone.

There’s a reason. Dialogue, more than anything else, increases a book’s readability. Readers have an easier and more enjoyable time with those books in which the characters do a lot of talking to one another than those in which the author spends all his time telling what’s happening. Nothing conveys the nature of a character more effectively than overhearing that character’s conversation. Nothing draws a reader into a story line better than listening to a couple of characters talking it over.

A good ear for dialogue, like a sense of prose rhythms, can be a gift.
Ear
is the right word here, I believe, because I think it’s the ability one has to hear what’s distinctive in people’s speech that expresses itself in the ability to create vivid dialogue in print. (Likewise, I think it’s the ear that enables some people to mimic regional accents better than others; the acuity with which you perceive these things largely determines your ability to reproduce them.)

I think a writer can improve his ear by learning to keep it open—i.e., by making a conscious effort to listen not only to what people say but to the way they say it.

It’s worth noting that the best dialogue does not consist of the verbatim reproduction of the way people talk. Most people, you’ll notice, speak in fits and starts, in phrases and half-sentences, with “uh” and “er” and “you know” tossed in like commas. “I was, see, like the other day I was goin’ to the store, see, and uh, and like I was, you know, like, walkin’ down the street, and ….”

People do talk this way, but who the hell would want to read it? It’s tedious. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a character express himself in this fashion, but that you would do so not by holding a tape recorder in front of him but by
suggesting
his conversational manner: “Like the other day I was goin’ to the store, see, and I was like walkin’ down the street….”

A little goes a long way. Same thing with phonetic spelling of dialogue. There was a great vogue for that sort of thing a while back, when regional fiction was in its heyday, and there are still people who are crazy about it. Most people find it off-putting. There’s no question that it slows things down for the reader; he has to translate everything before going on.

Here again, the answer lies in suggestion, in picking a couple of key words and using them to illustrate the character’s unorthodox speech patterns. You might indicate a West Indian accent by spelling man
M-O-N,
for example, or a Puerto Rican inflection by rendering don’t
doan
or affixing an
E
to the front of a word like
study.
A light sprinkling of this sort of thing reminds the reader that the speaker has a particular accent; he’ll then be able to supply the rest of the accent, hearing it in his mind as he reads the character’s dialogue, even though the rest of the words are spelled in the traditional manner.

Remember, less is better, and when in doubt, forget it.

Richard Price handles dialogue brilliantly. His first book,
The Wanderers,
traces the lives of members of a Bronx street gang. Their speech patterns are faithfully rendered and add greatly to the book’s impact. Recently, though, I happened on a back issue of a literary quarterly in which a chapter of
The Wanderers
appeared prior to the book’s publication. In that version, Price made extensive use of phonetic spelling, and while other elements of the story were identical, the spelling put me off. Evidently the book’s editor reacted similarly. Whether Price or his editor made the actual changes is immaterial. The book gained greatly by them.

Good dialogue differs from real-life dialogue in another respect. It’s written out. The reader gets the words without the inflection. If you just put down the words, the result can be ambiguous. You can italicize a word to show that it’s being
stressed
by the speaker, or you can include the occasional notation that a given sentence was said lightly or seriously or heavily or archy or whateverly, but sometimes you have to restructure a sentence so that the reader will not have trouble getting your meaning.

Another thing you have to do in dialogue is compress things. People generally have more time for conversation in real life than in books. You have to speed things up in the actual dialogue, cutting out a certain amount of the normal volleying, and you also have to do a certain amount of summing up. In my Scudder novels, for example, Scudder receives the bulk of his information by going around and talking to people, and the reader overhears much of this in the form of dialogue. But from time to time Scudder will break off reporting exactly what was said in dialogue form and simply give the gist of a conversation in a sentence or two.

When this isn’t done, when a book’s all dialogue, it feels puffy and padded. It moves fast and it’s easy to read, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying. One’s left with the feeling that nothing has happened at great length.