On Becoming a Novelist (18 page)

The poison or miraculous ointment—it can be either one or both—comes at first in small doses. The usual experience of young writers is that during the process of writing the first draft they feel that all they write is alive, full of interest, but then when they look at the writing the next day they find most of it dull and lifeless. Then comes one small moment qualitatively different from the rest: one small dose of the real thing. The more numerous those moments, the more powerful the resulting addiction. The magic moment, notice, has nothing to do with
theme
or, in the usual sense,
symbolism
. It has nothing to do, in fact, with the normal subject matter of literature courses. It is simply a psychological hot spot, a pulsation on an otherwise dead planet, a “real toad in an imaginary garden.” These queer moments, sometimes thrilling, sometimes just strange, moments setting off an altered state, a brief sense of escape from ordinary time and space—moments no doubt similar to those sought by religious mystics, or those experienced by people near death—are the soul of art, the reason people pursue it. And young writers sufficiently worried about achieving this state to know when they’ve done it and feel dissatisfied when they haven’t are already on the way to calling it up at will, though they may never come to understand how they do it. The more often one finds the magic key, whatever it is, the more easily the soul’s groping fingers come to land on it. In magic as in other things, success brings success.

But it is not all magic. Once one knows by experience the “feel” of the state one is after, there are things one can do to encourage its onset. (Some writers, with practice, become able to drop into the creative state at any moment; others have difficulty all their lives.) Every writer must figure out for himself, if he can, how he personally works best.

Let us go back to the matter of the pen, pencil, or typewriter. There is of course no right answer to the question: “Should one write with a pen or a typewriter or what?” nor is the question worth answering except insofar as it reveals something about the creative process. Think for a moment about the very young writer, the writer of high-school or early college age. Not yet a good typist, he sits staring at the paper in his typewriter, distracted by the look of the type on the page, distracted by the fact that the paper’s not quite centered, distracted by the unmanageability of the keys and, if the typewriter’s electric, the impatient, henpecking hum. The writer knows that if he can ever get good at typing, writing on a typewriter will be faster, but in the meantime he seems unable to write at all. At last he tears the paper out of the typewriter, crumples it in his fist, and throws it in the wastebasket, then starts over with a pen. He begins to get into the scene he means to write—he begins to see people moving around as they’re supposed to do, getting themselves into trouble as his idea for the story requires—and then, as the writer glances over what he’s written, trying to get a “run” on the place where he has gotten stuck, he notices that the ink is smudged. He tries to ignore it, throwing himself back into the fictive dream, but that smudge keeps nagging. At last he copies over what he’s written onto clean paper, then once more reads from the top, trying to throw himself into the dream so that when he comes to the point where his imagination failed, the dream will keep going of its own momentum, he’ll “see” what the characters must do next.

The trouble, he discovers, is that handwriting, like speech, is full of gestures. We don’t normally think about that fact, unless we’re amateur analysts of handwriting. Nevertheless it’s the case: just as when we’re speaking we give conscious or unconscious signals of our feelings, accidentally curling the lip or glancing away evasively, so, too, our writing gives off second-by-second signals of our happiness or uncertainty or weariness or secret dishonesty and bluff. We do not necessarily know all this as we look over what we’ve written, but we find ourselves noticing the penmanship; it begins to stand like a stone wall between us and the Active dream. We do not see a dog rummaging through garbage cans but, instead, individual words: A dog was.

I don’t know whether any very young writer besides myself ever really suffered the woes I’ve been assigning him (perhaps not, except for the part about the typewriter: I had a terrible time learning to write on one, and I know many writers who’ve never managed it); but what I’m saying about the distracting quality of mechanics is meant to illuminate by analogy a darker problem, the distracting quality of words. Even for the expert writer, and much more noticeably for the relative beginner, language is, like an unfamiliar typewriter, a complicated, overawing, clumsy, and impatiently nagging machine. You stare at the fictive dream, you try to get it down in words, and you find language resisting you. You want to say: “She intended to tell him so-and-so”; you decide she should
go
to him and tell him, so you shift to: “She intended on going to him and …” but one can’t say “intended on”; and you’re pulled out of the dream. It’s a trifle, this recalcitrance of language (especially in the example I’ve given, since the problem is too easily solved), but the nuisance is real. Most of the young novelists I’ve worked with had problems initially with idiomatic English. Which is correct for an authorial, nondialectal voice: “She thought that she should tell him” or “She thought she should tell him”? Is it correct to say: “She’d anticipated that he would be angry”? (Should one say: “She’d anticipated his anger”?) Most writers for some reason come from the middle or lower middle class, at least in America, and very few lack quirks of speech that betray their origins; such oddities as, for instance, the New York City middle-class substitution of “bring” for “take,” or “came” for “went,” or the idiom “stood on line” for, as the rest of the country says, “stood in line.” As long as one clings to the safest approaches (first-person narration, or third-person-limited), linguistic quirks may be texturally enriching; but as soon as the writer tries something more august—omniscient narration, or first-person narration by Bismarck or the Virgin Mary—the quirks make the writer look ignorant. Fiction in dialect has its interest, and as writers like Faulkner prove, it is possible to write large, deep-breathing fictions without unlearning one’s dialect. (Instead of the usual king’s English spoken by most omniscient authors, Faulkner uses a distinct Southern voice, one that does not distinguish between “infer” and “imply.”) But whatever the beauties of dialect, few writers possessed of the ambition that characterizes the novelist want to be barred forever from the high tone of a Mann or Proust or Melville. So there stands language, difficult and intimidating, throwing roadblocks in the way of the writer’s attempt to get the fictive dream onto the page.

And as smudges on the page written in ink, or gestural signs in the writer’s handwriting, distract our hypothetical young writer from what it is he is trying to say, so blurs and the uncontrolled secondary meanings of words distract and impede. If a character in a story tells us that some thoroughly incompetent, feeble king now being carried to his grave “was born dead,” meaning that the king was never really alive at all, the word “born” puns on “borne” (carried), and—unless we understand that the speaker means to be witty—we are distracted. Every writer can give examples from his own experience of how language slips and slides, turning serious moments cheap, making the writer look silly (“a two-headed lady’s snake ring”), obfuscating meaning, or slyly turning the writer into a hypocrite or pretentious fool. So the writer copies down his fictive dream, then looks at the words he chose with such care and blushes like one willfully misunderstood, betrayed. Or the words say exactly what he meant, but so carefully that they make him seem prissy and self-conscious.

The trouble is not that the writer can’t start up the fictive dream in his mind. If that were the trouble he wouldn’t have written any words at all. The trouble is that having started up the dream and written some of it down, he’s become suddenly self-conscious, self-doubting. The dreaming part is angel-like: it is the writer’s eternal, childlike spirit, the daydreaming being who exists (or seems to) outside time. But the part of the writer that handles the mechanics, typing or writing with pencil or pen, choosing one word instead of another, is human, fallible, vulnerable to anxiety and shame. Making mistake after mistake, the beast in the writer begins to sweat and grind its teeth, longing to be raised up once more by the redeeming angel within—but miserably unworthy, shy in the presence of the holy, and afraid of heights.

So far, all I’ve said treats language as a recalcitrant and passive medium, the indifferent clay to be shaped into a figure, or the lead on which the image is to be stamped. Actually, language plays a far more active role in the creative process. No doubt it is sometimes true that the writer has an intuition of what it is he wants to say and, after a struggle, finds just the right words to express the meaning he knew was there waiting to be expressed. Just as often—probably more often—language actively drives the writer to meanings he had no idea he would come to. This process is easier to show in poetry than in prose, though I’ll try to show it in both. Let me start with a poem of my own, not because I claim skill as a poet but because it seems to me an adequate poem of its kind and, more important, I know exactly the process by which it took the shape it has.

Lovely, spooky, dark blue Gentian,
Inner walls like speckled snakeskin,
Trumpet shaped, fit for a small
Angel’s grimly puckered lips
Set on the Last Day to call
Ants and bees to Apocalypse,
What sins too minute to mention
Wouldst thou bring to man’s attention,
Lovely, spooky, dark blue Gentian?

I will not dwell on my various false starts in trying to get this poem down but will simply explain the choices I finally made. Having a heavy teaching load and numerous nonfictional writing responsibilities (including this book), and having therefore no time to write fiction, I decided to write a poem, a flower poem since I thought I might someday publish a book of children’s flower poems to match an earlier children’s book of mine on animals. I found a picture of the dark blue gentian and looked at it to see what one might say. The main things I could think of to say, at least in the light of this particular photograph, were that the flower was pretty and that it looked ominous, the luminous dark blue of nightmare. My mind stumbled around in search of a suitably gloomy rhythm and possible words to fit with it and so came up with the first line. Obviously the gloom is slightly tongue-in-cheek (flowers usually aren’t good candidates for the truly scary), hence the word choice “lovely,” a word one can never take quite as seriously as it would like to be taken, and “spooky,” a kid’s word that, in a thudding trochaic rhythm, gets drawn out a little, inflated as it would be in a ghost story told orally to kids at camp. It’s this same tongue-in-cheek seriousness that made me decide to capitalize “Gentian,” giving it a faintly old-timey, Romantic quality (the Romantics were nothing if not naively earnest, as some of them, like Blake, at times understood).

Once the first line was down, I looked back at the picture for a clue to the second line (What else can I say?), knowing this line could rhyme or not, though rhythmic possibilities were limited slightly (the line must satisfy the ear as consonant with the line already in existence); and I saw immediately the odd fact reported in the second line, that the throat of the flower has a speckled, waxy sheen like snakeskin—and noticed in the same instant that “snakeskin” rhymes with “gentian,” or anyway comes close enough for government work. After a little muddling in search of solemn trochees meaning “throat,” I came upon “inner walls” and the line fell into place. Looking back at the picture for what more I might say, I noticed the most obvious thing about the flower, that it’s trumpet-shaped, and wrote that down. Where to go from there? Perhaps someone suitably ominous (in keeping with the choices I’d made so far) might be imagined as playing the trumpet. (If I’d said “bell shaped,” another legitimate trochee, the idea of a small instrumentalist would probably not have come up.) My childhood interest in—and slight uneasiness about—religion came to my rescue, as it so often does in my writing, and I thought of the Doomsday angel. Since after many years of practice I’ve learned—so that I no longer have to stop and think about it—that every character who enters a fiction needs vivid rendering, I chose words that would make my angel individual (“grimly puckered lips”; this angel of doom is personally
involved
in his work, no mere functionary); and now the natural requirements of drama raised the next question: If the angel is so concerned, whom or what is he behaving so sternly toward—elves? small children? The answer simply came to me; that is, I saw it in the Active dream: bugs of some kind (natural inhabitants of the garden’s small world, and enemies of flowers). I chose ants and bees partly because those creatures have, for me, a certain inherent nastiness, and partly because the word “ants” has a hard, nasty sound, as does “bees,” to a lesser extent, but the effect is nonetheless there, especially if you push the z sound. I now had a mock-solemn set of lines in an old, easily recognizable literary tradition, the Moralizing Verse. What solemn lesson could I squeeze out of my setup? It occurred to me that the question was absurd, that maybe the whole Moralizing Verse tradition was at least just a little absurd, a way of bullying the young, so that what was needed was a comically sententious close—chiming rhymes, the mock formality and churchiness of “Wouldst thou bring,” and the preacherly rhetoric of the last line’s echoing of the poem’s first line—a device that especially pleased me because, in the orthodox view, Doomsday brings Christian history full circle.

Lest my main point here be lost in my argument’s details, let me reiterate it: words not only serve but help to shape the fictive vision. I had no inkling, when I started the poem, that I would write about a tiny angel or Doomsday as it applies to ants and bees, or, ultimately, the way grownups bully children with fables.