On Becoming a Novelist (20 page)

Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised, knowing the characters’ actions may change. It makes no difference how clumsy the sketch is—sketches are not supposed to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one’s story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one’s head, gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the characters’ problems and hopes. Fiction does not spring into the world full grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original and profound. One cannot judge in advance whether or not the idea of the story is worthwhile because until one has finished writing the story one does not know for sure what the idea
is;
and one cannot judge the style of a story on the basis of a first draft, because in a first draft the style of the finished story does not yet exist.

Sometimes when one cannot stand the story or novel one is working on, it helps to write something else—a different story or novel, or essays venting one’s favorite peeves, or exercises aimed at passing the time and incidentally polishing up one’s craft. The best way in the world for breaking a writer’s block is to write a lot. Jabbering away on paper, one gets tricked into feeling interested, all at once, in something one is saying, and behold, the magic waters are flowing again. Often it helps to work on a journal, since that allows the writer to write about those things that most interest him, yet frees him of the pressure of achievement and encourages him to develop a more natural, more personal style. Almost any diversion from the overawing main job will do. I myself have kept going for years mainly by avoiding the one serious novel I mean to write someday. There it sits, five hundred rough-draft pages of it, watching me from its shelf like a skull. Nothing else I do is significant, by comparison, at least in my own mind. I am free to scatter words as an October wind scatters leaves.

Insofar as one’s block comes mainly from outside oneself—from a lack of useful appreciation, from social pressures of one kind or another, or from harsh criticism one feels to be just—there is little one can do except change one’s life. The feeling that one’s friends have no taste, even if it’s true, is not a healthy feeling for a writer: it fills him with arrogance and self-pity, makes him a bad friend and, as a result, makes him a person plagued by secret guilt. One approach is to find a better pack of friends; another is to strive to become a more generous person. The latter way, if the writer can bring it off, will considerably enhance his odds of becoming a good writer if he ever starts working again. Occasionally, mean-spirited people have written good books, but the odds for it are long.

The best way of all for dealing with writer’s block is never to get it. Some writers never do. Theoretically there’s no reason one should get it, if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of. If children can build sand castles without getting sandcastle block, and if ministers can pray over the sick without getting holiness block, the writer who enjoys his work and takes measured pride in it should never be troubled by writer’s block. But alas, nothing’s simple. The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.

Writer’s block comes from the feeling that one is doing the wrong thing or doing the right thing badly. Fiction written for the wrong reason may fail to satisfy the motive behind it and thus may block the writer, as I’ve said; but there is no wrong motive for writing fiction. At least in some instances, good fiction has come from the writer’s wish to be loved, his wish to take revenge, his wish to work out his psychological woes, his wish for money, and so on. No motive is too low for art; finally it’s the art, not the motive, that we judge.

As for writing in the wrong way, there is almost no wrong way to write fiction; there are only ways that, for a given writer, are more efficient or less. Some respectable writers simply pour out onto paper everything that comes into their heads, then sift, edit, rearrange, and rewrite until a story of some kind emerges; others plan carefully and stick to the plan as closely as possible, so long as the characters don’t object. As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night. Some writers compose on small cards, one sentence to a card (a crazy way to write, it seems to me, but the method is one some undeniable masters, including Nabokov, have used); and at the opposite extreme some good writers compose on typewriters fed by huge rolls of paper, so that they never have to change a page. Some writers write all day and half the night, never pausing except to keep the body functioning, shifting according to convenience from one writing implement to another, plunging into new scenes late at night when the mind’s at its dreamiest, and revising in the morning, when cold-blooded intellect is at its best. Some novelists never write anything but novels, with maybe an occasional journal about a trip; others shift restlessly from form to form—now a play, now a poem, now a short story, now an article about U.S. foreign policy.

Any approach will do. But to any young novelist troubled about how or where he ought to start, I suggest something like the following: If you have trouble with novel-writing, go back for a while to short stories. In a short story it is fairly easy to work out and thus come to understand from within the basic form of storytelling. The genre is small enough that one can grasp the fundamental concepts of fiction—how one event must cause another (however the order of events may be disguised by flashbacks or by odd narrative technique); how characters’ motives must be shown dramatically, not just talked about; how setting, character, and action must interpenetrate, each supporting and infusing the others; how plot must have rhythm, so that in some way it builds in intensity toward an emotional high point; how the narrative must have design, a firm structure that gives every part value but does not vulgarly call attention to itself; how style, plot, and meaning must finally be all one.

In writing short stories—as in writing novels—take one thing at a time. (For some writers, this advice I’m giving may apply best to a first draft; for others, it may hinder the flow at first but be useful when time for revision comes.) Treat a short passage of description as a complete unit and make that one small unit as perfect as you can; then turn to the next unit—a passage of dialogue, say—and make that as perfect as you can. Move to larger units, the individual scenes that together make up the plot, and work each scene until it sparkles. Like the stand-up comic who polishes each joke to its highest possible luster (gives each joke its proper accents and timing, proper eye rolls and double takes), polish each element of the total fiction so that the story is not only good as a whole but arresting from moment to moment. As class writing exercises show, almost any writer can write fairly well if he’s dealing with one small problem. It’s only when the writer gets confused that he begins to sound like an amateur. Break up the larger story into its components, make sure you understand the exact function of each component (a story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn’t turn something), and after each component has been carefully set in place, step back and have a look at the whole. Then rewrite until the story flows as naturally as a river, each element so blending with the rest that no one, not even yourself two years from now, can locate the separate parts. (If writing in small units bothers you, don’t do it. Some writers are more comfortable pouring out page after page and only then going back to deal with problems; and some, once a draft of the story is down on paper, can rewrite only by going back to the beginning and writing straight through to the end all over again. A terrible way of working, clearly, but all right if it’s the only way you’ve got.) The real message is, write in any way that works for you: write in a tuxedo or in the shower with a raincoat or in a cave deep in the woods.

When you write a novel, start with a plan—a careful plot outline, some notes to yourself on characters and settings, particular important events, and implications of meaning. In my experience, many young writers hate this step; they’d rather just plunge in. That’s O.K., up to a point, but sooner or later the writer has no choice but to figure out what he’s doing. Consider doing for yourself what movie people call a “treatment,” a short narrative telling the whole story, introducing all the characters and events but skipping most of the particulars, including dialogue. Carefully studying and revising the treatment until the story has a clear inevitability, you will find yourself understanding the story’s implications more fully than you did with just an outline, and you will save yourself time later. For some writers it may also prove useful to write a detailed critical explication of the text—the text that, so far, exists only in the writer’s head. The risk here is obvious: that the resulting novel will be “workshoppy,” too neat to move or persuade.

The last step before the actual writing may be the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the plot. It’s here that the writer figures out in detail what information, necessary for understanding later developments, should be worked into Chapter One, what can be slipped into Chapter Three, and so on. Obviously one cannot begin with sixty static pages of exposition setting up the background of the story. Writing a novel is like running grain through a hammer mill: one has to get the central action rolling, and then feed in the background, or sprinkle in the larger implications, whenever and wherever one can do it without losing a finger. For some novels, working in the background is easy; for others, it’s torture. In a novel like
Grendel,
all the reader needs to know in order to follow the action is that Grendel is a monster; comes from a cave and from a mute, mindless mother; hates his sense of himself as an animal; and feels mysteriously drawn to human beings, whom he hungrily studies, longs to be friends with, and also scorns and occasionally eats. All this can easily be shown within the first chapter.

On the other hand, working in the background for the action of a novel like
Mickelsson’s Ghosts
can drive a writer to the edge of despair. The novel is about a famous philosopher who, midway through his career, suddenly finds himself (as Dante did) lost. He feels he has failed his wife and family (the wife has left him), feels he has betrayed his early promise and the values of his Wisconsin Lutheran background, has lost interest in his students and has ceased to care about philosophical questions, has lost faith and hope in democracy (and owes a large sum of money to the IRS), scorns the university where he teaches and the unsophisticated town in which it’s situated, and has good reason to believe he is losing his mind. He cuts himself off from his university community by buying a huge rotting house in the country, which turns out to be haunted (if he can trust his wits), and he finds himself up to the neck in evils he never before dreamt of—middle-of-the-night dumpings of poisonous wastes, witchcraft, backwoods prostitution, a mysterious string of murders, and more. (I need not here run through the whole plot and its conclusion.)

The easy way to write such a novel is to start fairly far back in time, with the breakup of the marriage, say, and then dramatize the philosopher’s troubles one by one, in order. The problem is that that is not the real beginning of the story. The real beginning is the moment the philosopher, Peter Mickelsson, chooses to opt out—buy the decaying house in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains and turn his back on all he formerly believed in or loved. What starts the novel on its dangerous course, in other words, is not Mickelsson’s bad luck (that is background information which must somehow be worked in) but Mickelsson’s active choice, his quest decision. If the novel is to begin where the story begins, then by the end of Chapter One Mickelsson must at least have located the house he will buy. We must know why he is hunting a house and what the hunt means to him—must understand why he hates living in town near other professors; must know, by the firm proof of dramatized scenes, why he feels superior to those around him; why even very intelligent students annoy him, as do philosophy books and lectures; why he feels himself a failure (what his family was like, what his career was like earlier, what kind of house he lived in in his days in the Ivy League); and we must understand why he’s afraid he’s going mad (we must see in action what it is that deeply disturbs him), and we must already in this chapter have the opportunity to observe (not just hear about from the narrator) the streak of violence in Mickelsson that enables him to cut himself off from those around him—a streak that will, later in the novel, enable him to behave in even less admirable ways—and all this must be shown without undermining Mickelsson’s credibility as a brilliant man, someone who really might once have been an Ivy League professor of philosophy.

Though I knew from the beginning (more or less) the nature of the problems facing me, I cannot say I figured out the answers intellectually. I knew that, within the span of the first of the thirty-to forty-page chapters my plan of the novel allowed me (long chapters for a dense elephantine rhythm), I could not hope to do more than introduce Mickelsson’s main troubles, bringing each forward in sharp relief, then leaving its development to later chapters, wherever I could work the material in; and I knew that I would have to find a few strong scenes, sufficiently slow-moving (though dramatic and active) to allow maximum drift to Mickelsson’s mind. I knew that for power, or emotional energy, I would have to depend on the force of Mickelsson’s character—fuming, repressed rage and self-doubt, a deep nastiness barely reined in, and a sentimental streak always on the verge of turning repellent, saved at the last moment by Mickelsson’s intelligence, the backlash of irony—a character force I would have to support by the best prose (or at least the most difficult to achieve) I’d ever written: huge, rolling sentences as dense and crackling as my weight-lifter, former-college-football-star, mad philosopher.