On Becoming a Novelist (11 page)

Melville, we may be sure, did not sit down and score his rhythms like a composer, but his ear found them—found brilliantly subtle rhythmic variations, poetically functional alliteration (compare “broke the broad expanse of the ocean,” in
Omoo
, with “watery part of the world. It is a way I have,” in
Moby Dick
), and at the same time found orbicular rhetoric like a nineteenth-century congressman’s or a Presbyterian minister’s (as Mark Twain might say), and a compressed, energetic way of going for meaning. He reached authority.

Unlike a poet or short story writer a novelist cannot hope to reach authority by frequent successes. I first declared myself a serious novelist in 1952, when I began
Nickel Mountain;
that is, I decided then that, come hell or high water, a novelist was what I would be. I published my first novel in 1966—not
Nickel Mountain.
I wrote several novels between 1952 and 1966, none of them successful even by my youthful standards. I worked, as I still work, long hours, seven days a week. As a young man I worked a regular eighteen-hour day; now I work less, but now I know more tricks and get more done in an hour. I do not mean to boast about this. Nearly all good novelists work as I do, and there are many good novelists in the world. (Besides, it can’t really be called work. A famous basketball player once remarked, “If basketball were illegal, I’d be in prison for life.” It’s the same with novelists: they’d do what they do even if it were illegal, which, in comparison to basketball, it is.)

So—to return to the subject—a novelist is not likely to develop authority by success after success. In his apprenticeship years he succeeds, like Jack o’ the Green, by eating his own white guts. He cannot help being a little irascible: some of his school friends are now rich, perhaps bemused by the fact that one of their smartest classmates is still struggling, getting nowhere, so far as anyone can see.

If the young would-be novelist is not in some way driven, he will never develop into a novelist. Most don’t. Some give up, some get sidetracked. TV and film devour more brilliance and imagination than a thousand minotaurs. They need the true novelist’s originality, but they cannot deal with it except in crippled form—pink slips instead of thought, and worse. I once visited a successful Hollywood producer, and he gave me a list of what “the American people don’t like.” They’ve done marketing research, and they know. The American people don’t like movies with snowy landscapes. The American people don’t like movies about farmers. The American people don’t like movies in which the central characters are foreigners. The list went on, but I stopped listening, because the movie I’d come to talk about concerned a Vietnamese immigrant family’s first winter in Iowa. What one notices, when one hears about Hollywood marketing research, is that the only movie one is allowed to write is a cheap imitation of last year’s blockbuster.

The would-be novelist can get sidetracked in many ways. He can do TV movies or “real” movies (this is not to deny that we occasionally get fine movies) or moronic TV episodes; he can become a full-time teacher of creative writing; he can move into advertising or porno or pieces for the
National Geographic;
he can become an interesting local bum; with a little popularnovel success he can become a regular on talk shows; he can become a politician or a contributor to
The New York Times
or the
New York Review of Books
….

Nothing is harder than being a true novelist, unless that is all one wants to be, in which case, though becoming a true novelist is hard, everything else is harder.

Daemonic compulsiveness can kill as easily as it can save. The true novelist must be at once driven and indifferent. Van Gogh never sold a painting in his life. Poe came close with poetry and fiction, selling very little. Drivenness only helps if it forces the writer not to suicide but to the making of splendid works of art, allowing him indifference to whether or not the novel sells, whether or not it’s appreciated. Drivenness is trouble for both the novelist and his friends; but no novelist, I think, can succeed without it. Along with the peasant in the novelist, there must be a man with a whip.

No one can really tell the beginning writer whether or not he has what it takes. Most people the young writer asks aren’t qualified to judge. They may have impressive positions, even fame, but it’s a law of the universe that 87 percent of all people in all professions are incompetent. The young writer must decide for himself, on the available evidence. I’ve given, in some detail, the evidence to think about:

Verbal facility is a mark of the promising novelist, but some great novelists don’t have it, and some quite stupid novelists have it in abundance.

The accuracy and freshness of the writer’s eye is of tremendous importance. But one can learn it if one hasn’t got it. Usually. One can recognize that the abstract is seldom as effective as the concrete. “She was distressed” is not as good as, even, “She looked away.”

Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher’s dictum “Write about what you know.” But whether you’re writing about people or dragons, your personal observation of how things happen in the world—how character reveals itself—can turn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advice might be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy, not that they can necessarily write it down. When husbands and wives have fights, they work brilliantly, without consciously thinking. They go precisely as far as it’s safe to go, they find the spouse’s weakness, yet they know without thinking just when to hold back. The unconscious is smart. Writers have this brilliance in them as surely as do trout fishermen and mountain climbers. The trick is to bring it out, get it down. Getting it down precisely is all that is meant by “the accuracy of the writer’s eye.” Getting down what the writer really cares about—setting down what the writer himself notices, as opposed to what any fool might notice—is all that is meant by the
originality
of the writer’s eye. Every human being has original vision. Most can’t write it down without cheapening or falsifying. Most human beings haven’t developed what Hemingway called the “built-in shock-resistant shit detector.” But the writer who sets down exactly what he sees and feels, carefully revising time after time until he fully believes it, noticing when what he’s saying is mere rhetoric or derivative vision, noticing when what he’s said is not noble or impressive but silly—that writer, insofar as the world is just, will outlast Gibraltar.

As for the novelist’s special intelligence, ask yourself whether or not you’ve got it. If you haven’t, then knowing what it is may help you to develop it. If you dislike the novelist’s special intelligence, don’t become a novelist—unless, in spite of all I’ve said, you really want to.

Daemonic compulsiveness. If you haven’t got it and you nevertheless write fine novels, I’ll be the first to say, “Gentlemen, hats off!” I mention the value of compulsiveness because I would not have anyone go into the novelist’s arena unarmed. There are many ways of surviving an activity not easily justified in practical terms. Thousands of Americans stand for hours in streams trying to catch fish. The novelist’s work is no more visibly useless than amateur fish-catching. And I suspect most fishermen are not daemonically compulsive.

The question one asks of the young writer who wants to know if he’s got what it takes is this: “Is writing novels what you want to do?
Really
want to do?”

If the young writer answers, “Yes,” then all one can say is: Do it. In fact, he will anyway.

*
Harlan Ellison,
Over the Edge
(New York: Belmont Books, 1970), p. 18.

*
Over the Edge
, p. 96.

*
David Rhodes,
Rock Island Line
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. I.

II.
THE WRITER’S TRAINING
AND EDUCATION

One of the most common questions asked by young writers is whether or not they should study creative writing and literature in college or graduate school. If the writer means only: “Will these courses help me become a better writer?” the answer is generally, Yes. If he or she means: “Will they improve my chances of supporting myself, for instance by getting a Master of Fine Arts degree and then getting a job teaching writing in college?” the answer is, Possibly. The world has far more writing teachers than it needs, and as a rule it is publication, not the MFA degree, that impresses employers, though an MA or MFA from a good school may help.

It’s common for students to think of their college and/or grad school education in practical terms, as preparation for making a living. In many fields it is reasonable to think in this way, but not in the arts. European and English writers receive a good deal of support from the state, but in America, though federal, state, and local governments make feeble gestures of support (the whole National Endowment for the Arts comes to, I think, the cost of one frigate), it seems clear that nobody quite knows what to do with artists. In former times, when artists were church-or patron-supported, things were simple. Not now. Today, true, serious artists in all fields (music, visual arts, literature) are something like an alternative culture, a group set apart from all other groups, from theology to professional pornography. They sacrifice the ordinary TV-watching pleasures of their society to pursue an ideal not especially valued by the society, and if they are lucky, they bring the society around, becoming culture heroes, but even the successful pay dearly. Both in the world of grants and in the marketplace, the novelist probably has a better chance than any other artist—certainly a better chance than the serious actor, poet, or composer. But very few novelists can support themselves by their writing. The study of writing, like the study of classical piano, is not practical but aristocratic. If one is born rich, one can easily afford to be an artist; if not, one has to afford one’s art by sacrifice. On this, more later.

Let us turn to the benefits and dangers of going through a creative writing program and of studying literature in college.

It is true that most writers’ workshops have faults; nevertheless, a relatively good writers’ workshop can be beneficial. For one thing, workshops bring together groups of young writers who, even in the absence of superb teachers, can be of help to one another. Being with a group of serious writers at one’s own stage of development makes the young writer feel less a freak than he might otherwise, and talking with other writers, looking at their work, listening to their comments, can abbreviate the apprenticeship process. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that, after the beginning stages, a writer needs social and psychological support.

When a writer first begins to write, he or she feels the same first thrill of achievement that the young gambler or oboe player feels: winning a little, losing some, the gambler sees the glorious possibilities, exactly as the young oboist feels an indescribable thrill when he gets a few phrases to sound like real music, phrases implying an infinite possibility for satisfaction and self-expression. As long as the gambler or oboist is only playing at being a gambler or oboist, everything seems possible. But when the day comes that he sets his mind on becoming a professional, suddenly he realizes how much there is to learn, how little he knows.

The young writer leaves the undergraduate college, where everyone agrees he is one of the best writers there, and he goes to, say, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or Stanford, Columbia, or Binghamton. There he finds nearly every one of his classmates was a writing star at his or her college; he finds famous teachers who read his work and seem largely unimpressed; and suddenly the young writer’s feelings are mainly alarm and disappointment. Why did his undergraduate teachers so mislead him? he wonders. I’m not sure myself why undergraduate reputations are inflated even by good teachers with high standards; perhaps because outside the specialized, nationally known writers’ workshops one encounters relatively few young writers of real promise; or perhaps because at this early stage of a writer’s work, the teacher believes that encouragement and praise seem more beneficial than a rigorous assessment of the writer’s skills.

In any event, the writer adjusts (or else he gives up). He accepts the truth that he is not as great as his teachers and classmates imagined. He recognizes that the success he hopes for will take work. What a writer in this gloomy situation needs above all is a community that values what he values, a community that believes, rightly or wrongly, that it is better to be a good writer than to be a good executive, politician, or scientist. Good writers are after all intelligent people. They
could
have been executives, politicians, or scientists. They might not like or want such jobs, but they could do them, and in some ways any one of those jobs might be easier. What keeps the young writer with the potential for success from turning aside to some more generally approved, perhaps easier path is the writing community.

No doubt the truth is that as often as not the writing community saves the writer by its folly. It is partly made up of fools: young innocents who’ve not yet had the experience of valuing anything other than writing, and maniacs who, having considered other things, think writing the only truly valuable thing the human mind can do. It is partly made up of born writers: people who value other human activities but have no wish to do anything but write. (Asked why she wrote fiction, Flannery O’Connor once said, “Because I’m good at it.”) Some members of every writing community are there because they’re snobs: writing, or just being around writers, makes them feel superior; others are there because they think being a writer (though they may not have much talent) is romantic. Whatever their reasons or reasonings, these various contingents form, together, a group that helps the young writer forget his doubts. However good or bad the writing teacher, the young writer can count on close attention from all these kinds of people, not to mention a few chemists who enjoy going to readings. The young writer writes, feels uncertain about his work, and gets praise or, at very least, constructive criticism—or even destructive criticism, but from people who appear to care as much about writing as he does himself.