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September 2006
Writing Well
Not long ago, as I write this, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld seemed to have blundered into the realm of ontology.
Or perhaps it was epistemology. Or it could have been phytology
for all I know.
Anyway, what he said was (in a rambling discussion of either
why we stay in Iraq or what our next major national threat
was or . . . something) – “We know what we
know. We can call that the known. We know what we don’t
know. We can call that the known unknown. But we don’t
always know what we don’t know. We could call that the
unknown unknown. And there the greatest danger lies.”
Way to go, Rummy! This reminds me of my philo-theo-psycho-historilogical
discussions with the other guys at 3 a.m. as a Wabash College
undergraduate lo those many decades ago, fueled by fervor
and a half dozen beers. The unknown-unknown indeed. So much
of life and experience fell into that category in those days.
Well, what unknown-unknowns are there standing (invisibly)
between us and becoming a really good writer?
We know what we know about what it takes to be a decent writer.
(We can call that “the known.”) To write well
it takes more than a modicum of intelligence, a command of
the English language (in our case, at least, on this continent),
an understanding of basic prose protocols, an ability to tell
a story, and a story to tell.
Then there are the unknowns that we may not have dived into
yet, but which we know are out there and which we know will
test us. (We can call these the known-unknowns.)
First there is the known unknown of whether we have the rather
unusual ability to spend days, weeks, months, and literal
years in the unusual state of disciplined isolation that being
a professional novelist demands. It seemed easy enough during
the brief, inspired wind sprints of our writing to date, but
what about the long haul? Do we have what it takes for the
marathon that is any professional writing career? (And “having
what it takes” here may not be all that flattering,
since it must include the inclination as well as the ability
to subordinate many human relationships and experiences to
the dubious priority of just planting your butt in a chair
and working alone.)
Then there is the known unknown of whether we can maintain
that disciplined isolation and writing regimen for years under
the absolutely guaranteed pressures – financial, social,
financial, domestic, financial, psychological, and financial.
Then there is the known unknown of how we may react under
quite different kinds of pressure. . . pressure not unique
to a writer’s life but at the very least rare in a non-writer’s
life and work: the pressure of bad reviews, of so many opportunities
to embarrass yourself at public readings and media interviews,
of annual book tours that break your health and ruin your
schedules, and of always having to be “creative”
less you starve.
Finally, there’s the huge known unknown of whether you’d
enjoy being a full-time writer. The only way to answer that
is to be good enough to get published and then to stick with
it for a few years.
But now we enter the realm of the unknown-unknowns.
In this case, I’m going to discuss elements of writing
itself that tend to separate the great writers from the mediocre,
those authors we find on the “Literature” shelves
at Borders, separated by quality – or at least longevity
-- from the rest of us lurking in genre aisles. More importantly,
I’d like to look at the rarely discussed aspects of
what is unique about the work of writers who really have changed
lives and deepened our understanding of ourselves, even while
entertaining us. These factors are the unknown-unknowns in
the craft of writing and they separate the sheep from the
goats.
 As
the Cowardly Lion said – “What have they got that
I ain’t got?”
Strangeness:
This is a term and concept I first encountered in Harold
Bloom’s critical writings. “Strangeness”,
he suggests, is the single common element to be found in all
literary works that should be herded into that most dreaded,
cursed, and secretly coveted corral – the Canon of Western
Literature.
 Strangeness
in this context does not mean weirdness or experimental style
or deliberate Catch-22 wackiness (although there is a wonderful
strangeness about Heller’s Catch-22 that alerts
us to something new and dangerous.) Strangeness can be clad
in a spinster’s life-drabness and lack of direct experience
– witness the almost frightening strangeness from the
Brontes and a Dickinson named Emily – or it can crow
its aggressive life story from the rooftops, adding its barbaric
yawp to our endless literary dialogue in the form of leaves
of grass hurled like glass daggers. Strangeness can arise
from the staccato bursts of cutting-edge minimalist Carveresque
prose or be found deep within labrynthine Proustian sentences
that never seem to end.
Shakespeare’s work is the epitomy of strangeness. Hitting
on all cylinders – from the bawdy popular to the linguistically
brilliant to its surgical ability of probing so dangerously
near the heart of being human – Shakespeare’s
writing, while sometimes hasty and sloppy and derived, held
a consistent strangeness that guaranteed its immortality.
Good readers – in every generation -- sense strangeness
the way a shark is said to smell blood from miles away. It
is, in a real sense, our sustenance as readers. It is the
first indication that we, as readers, are about to put ourselves
in the hands of a new guiding intelligence that will reveal
things about us to ourselves.
I have no idea how great writers attain strangeness or how
we might try. I know it’s not something that you can
acquire in courses for writers or in workshops. It’s
not even something a writer acquires simply through reading
other writers gifted with strangeness. In that sense, strangeness
may be like that other elusive aspect of a human being which
we admire, encourage, and wish to emulate but can rarely summon
at will . . . character.
Narrative Power:
In visiting workshops for writers in recent years, I’ve
become aware of a great and growing confusion about what constitutes
narrative energy and power.
Instructors at these workshops – and even some editors
and agents who should know better – talk about things
such as “elevator pitches” and “the power
of the pitch,” while barely published writers just at
the beginning of their writing careers, (and who knows if
they’ll even have a career,) sagely counsel beginners
just one step below them that to be published one must have
a killer narrative hook and dynamite non-stop-action for the
first few pages. The idea is to hook the reader or agent in
immediately by slam-bang action, they explain, or your book
will go unread.
Well, I understand how some weary – or putridly lazy
– agents or slushpile readers might counsel such nonsense
to beginners. What they’re really saying is “put
everything you have on the first page, preferably in the first
two paragraphs, to show you’re commercially viable because
I’m too jaded and lazy to read your whole book.”
That’s hardly a description of narrative power.
Think of all the great and rewarding books from A Portrait
of a Lady to In Search of Lost Time to The
Grapes of Wrath to Light in August to Joyce’s
Ulysses that would go unread and unpurchased if this
idiot definition of “everything up front and fast”
were the real definition of narrative power.
Nor is the Da Vinci Code narrative style of breathless
rushing to and fro without allowing time for one’s characters
to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom what I mean by narrative
power. If there’s a phrase for that, it might be “bestselleroid
attention deficit disordered hyperactivity.”
 Here,
in an essay titled “To a Young Friend Charged with Possession
of the Classics,” writer William H. Gass talks about
sentences and narrative and harmony and good books:
“No, the good books don’t sing harmony,”
he writes. “They cannot be good because of
that.
“But in them, comprising them – as the atom
the molecule, the molecule the compound – there are
more sentences than people alive in this world, sentences
that exhibit a range of savors surpassing your spice rack.
Anyone who looks with care into the good books shall find
in them sentences of every length, on every imaginable subject,
expressing the entire range of thoughts and feelings possible,
in styles both as unified and various as the colors of the
spectrum; and sentences that take such notice of the world
that the world seems visible in their pages, palpable, too,
so a reader might fear to touch those paragraphs concerned
with conflagrations or disease or chicanery lest they be victimized,
infected, or burned; yet such sentences as make the taste
of sweet earth and fresh air – things that seem ordinarily
without an odor or at all attractive to the tongue –
as desirable as wine to sip or lip to kiss or bloom to smell;
for instance this observation from a poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s:
‘Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood, each
petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette butt’ –
well, she’s right; go look – or this simile for
style, composed by Marianne Moore: ‘It is as though
the equidistant three tiny arcs of seeds in a banana had been
conjoined by Palestrina’ – peel the fruit,
make the cut, scan the score, hear the harpsichord transform
these seeds into music (you can eat the banana later); yet
also, as you read these innumerable compositions, to find
there lines that take such flight from the world that the
sight of it is totally lost, and, as Plato and Plotinus urge,
that reach a height where only the features of the spirit
of the mind and its dreams, the pure formations of an algebraic
absolute, can be made out; for the o’s in the phrase
‘good books’ are like owl’s eyes, watchful
and piercing and wise.”
Who says that one has to write in “short, punchy sentences?”
Remember our T-unit analysis from an earlier discussion?
T-unit as in “thought unit,” which with most literate
adult’s writing amounts to the number of words in a
sentence? Do a T-unit analysis of Gass’s second sentence,
the one beginning “Anyone who looks . . .”
and then study the punctuation he uses to make such a sentence
work. Challenge his excerpts of poetry, or the verity of the
images, or even his selection of poets for you to consider
– Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore (rather than,
say, Adrienne Rich) – and see if his commitment to excellence
is held to there.
Commanding Intelligence:
This sounds bogus . . . even domineering or chauvinist .
. . the idea of a “commanding intelligence” being
one of the unknown unknowns that great writers have and writers
aspiring to be great must seek. But think about it for a minute.
I don’t know whether it was in Norman Rush’s
novel Mating or in a Michael Ondaatje novel that
I encountered the question – “Is it really possible
to fall in love with someone who is not smarter than you are
. . . or at least with someone you don’t think
is smarter than you?” It’s an intriguing question
in terms of romantic relationships, but it also begs the question
of the role of intelligence in the very intimate relationship
between a reader and writer.
I would suggest that with the best books, we – as readers
– fall in love with someone smarter, or at least surrender
to the illusion that the writer is smarter than we are, within
the confines of the world that is the author’s novel
or play.
This is one reason that typos, continuity errrors, and mistakes
in simple facts – geographical, technical, research-oriented,
whatever – damage that illusion of competence, of a
commanding intelligence we can trust implicitly. There is
a strange element of submission when we surrender ourselves
to the illusionary world of a novel and it’s actively
irritating when our guide to that world turns out to be a
mere mortal.
It’s obvious that one doesn’t have to be a genius
or to be smarter than all possible readers of one’s
book in order to write a book, but it should be equally
obvious that smart people don’t want to spend hours,
days, or weeks immersing themselves in a world created and
maintained by someone demonstrably less intelligent and
worldly and informed than they are.
At this point you may be saying – “I do that
all the time” – to which I would reply that you’re
an especially brilliant person, or a hard case, or that you
read too much junk. Or perhaps all three.
Stupid people write and publish books, even novels, all the
time. Each of us could provide a long list of names and titles
(we might even agree to start with the enormously successful
Left Behind series). But that fact is irrelevant
to our efforts at writing well. From our own reader-experiences
with the finest books we’ve read, culling out the shallow
entertainments and bestseller buzzes, we know – we remember
– that feel of commanding intelligence in a text, of
trust through submission to the tale-teller being rewarded.
How to achieve it in our own work may be an answer still residing
in the realm of the unknown unknown, a quantum-mechanics probability
wave just waiting to be observed before collapsing into one
shell of reality or the other, but better the unknown unknown
we think we know is waiting than the known unknown we don’t
think we know we know.
I’ll get back to you later about that last sentence.
The Courage to Speak Just for Yourself:
Who else besides yourself could you possibly speak for, you
might be asking yourself (or me).
The truth is that in the shallows of the wading pool part
of the lagoon bordering this broad sea that will be the 21st
Century, few people dare speak for themselves, even in fiction.
It is the age of “communities.” At a time when
fewer and fewer people even know their actual neighbors, much
less speak to them regularly or socialize with them, the more
theoretical and tendentious communities are popping up like
bumps on a naked chicken.
In the old days, a community tended to be defined as a bunch
of mostly disparate people who found themselves sharing the
same geography, location, weather, economy, work, threats,
dangers, and problems. Now communities seem to be dictated
by DNA and vicissitudes, real or imagined.
There have always been writers of fiction who claim to speak
for a larger group than the mass of shifting cells and atoms
and opinions that make up him or her, but now “speaking
for my people” is endemic . . . especially if “my
people” can claim to be victimized. And which group
on Earth can’t fairly make that claim at one time or
another?
So writers of fiction now find it necessary to speak for
the African-American community, or the Christian community,
or the gay community, or the evangelical community, or the
substance-abusing addicted community, or the physically challenged
community, or the sexually abused community, or . . . . You
know the chorus. Last night as I write this, I watched Billie
Jean King giving a speech upon receiving the honor of having
the Flushing Meadow tennis complex named after her –
an honor she earned and well deserves – and in her rambling
talk she announced that such a naming was a victory for the
GLTB Community. How many out-of-it older folks, I wonder,
who cheered Billie Jean on in the 1970’s, didn’t
know that she was talking about the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgendered
community?
It doesn’t matter. Public figures and writers of gritty,
pathetic memoirs, no matter how fictionalized, can claim to
belong to and can claim to speak for whatever communities
they wish.
But writers of fiction, to be great, have to subordinate
their memberships to a higher loyalty.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is full of atitudes
and opinions, ranging from his white-hot thoughts about Christianity
to his almost equally passionate interest in the problems
of serfdom and modern farming practices – not to mention
some opinions he may have had about the inverse relationship
between adultery and happiness – but at no point in
the novel does Tolstoy subordinate his author’s obligation
to honesty in favor of the siren song of polemic. At no point
does he forget that the purpose of fiction is to illuminate
the eternal struggle of the human heart in conflict with itself
. . . not merely to join in the political and social debates
of his day. The problem of what to do with the Russian serfs
has long since been resolved; the problem of Anna’s
questing heart touches each of us anew in each succeeding
generation.
Having said this, it should be noted that while anointing
oneself as a spokesperson for an oppressed, victimized, or
marginalized community is the death of honesty for a true
novelist (and also one of the surest ways to win major awards
and to get on “Oprah”), it is not the same as
working within a tradition.
There are many traditions and many of them seem DNA-based,
arising from culture, ethnicity, national origin, or what
we call race in these days. When a young African-American
writer such as Tananarive Due writes a classic ghost story
from a uniquely southern black perspective, using the tropes
and protocols of such oral ghost stories told for centuries,
she is working within a proud tradition.
Similarly, many of our finest American writers of the 20th
Century – including Saul Bellow and Philip Roth –
work brilliantly within the Jewish tradition. (Although Bellow,
a Nobel Prize Winner, always stressed that he was no spokesmen
for Jews in general – he was, rather, an American Jew
who wrote novels.)
 Last
week when I couldn’t sleep and had nothing to read,
I wandered into the basement bookshelves and picked up a good
book I hadn’t quite completed reading. It was Meyer
Levin’s The Fanatic, published in 1963. I’d
last opened the pages of that paperback in 1966. I don’t
know what kept me from finishing it – perhaps it was
the dislocation of going off to college – but last week
I opened to the page where I’d left off 40 years ago
and continued with no trouble at all remembering the first
half of the novel.
In fact, some years ago I wrote a novel of my own called
A Winter Haunting in which the narrator is the personality
– not the ghost – of a boy who had died
40 years before the events of the novel begin. The boy, “Duane”
from Summer of Night, had “survived”
by being a “cyst of memory” in the mind of another
character, his 11-year-old friend Dale Stewart in 1960, a
middle-aged Dale Stewart in the novel. I knew when I wrote
that novel that I’d borrowed the idea of a living narrator
from the dead surviving in the mind of another character from
Meyer Levin’s The Fanatic.
In The Fanatic, the narrator is an older man, a
writer, residing in the mind and memory of his beloved, his
fiancé from a decade earlier. He – the narrator
– had been gassed at Auschwitz. His beloved had survived.
Now she has come to America to wed another man, another Jew,
but also a writer and researcher obsessed with the Holocaust
who loves her – the narrator’s beloved –
but who also needs, through her, to have and to publish the
writings of the dead narrator, most specifically a play about
the Holocaust that is the equivalent of The Diary of Anne
Frank. The idea of the vestige of a soul – especially
the soul of a righteous person -- surviving death primarily
in the hearts and memory of those loved ones left behind is
true to Judaic thought and belief, but it is also a powerful
and unusual narrative device, and I knew when I wrote
A Winter Haunting precisely where I had encountered it
so many decades earlier.
The Fanatic is a powerful tale about Jews, about
the Jewish experience before, during, and after the Holocaust,
an event that was perhaps the clearest example of innocent
victims suffering from evil in our recorded human history,
but the book does not pretend to speak for Jews. Nor does
Meyer Levin. Indeed, much of the conflict within the book
is between Jews – intellectuals, survivors, writers
and others with different perceptions of the message from
the Holocaust, or different needs. And at the center of the
novel, as it must be, is a chronicle of the human heart in
conflict with itself.
 Chaim
Potok, author of The Chosen, is another example of
a writer working within a proud, deep, and powerful tradition,
but speaking for no one. In The Chosen we see the
Hassidic culture and tradition that Potok knows so well, but
we see it from the narrative point-of-view of a Jewish boy
outside of that tradition, someone trying to understand
it from the outside, and his problematic friend – the
son of an Hassidic rabbi – eventually makes the choice
to leave the faith, to leave the tightly bound culture, and
to become a doctor and a secular man. Once again, it is the
heart in conflict with itself that drives the novel to its
substantial depths, not an attempt by an author “to
speak for a community.”
Cynthia Ozick discusses this in her essay “Tradition
and the Jewish Writer” –
“It is self-evident that any writer’s subject
matter will emerge from that writer’s preoccupations;
all writers are saturated, to one degree or another, in origins,
in history. And for everyone alive in the century we have
left behind, the cataclysm of murder and atrocity that we
call the Holocaust is inescapable and indelible, and inevitably
marks – stains – our moral nature; it is an event
that excludes no one.
 “And
yet no writer should be expected to be a moral champion or
a representative of ‘identity.’ That way lies
tract and sermon and polemic, or, worse yet, syrup. When a
thesis or framework – any kind of prescriptiveness or
tendentiousness – is imposed on the writing of fiction,
imagination flies out the door, and with it the freedom and
volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers
and commands. Writers as essayists, or polemicists, or pundits,
may take on the concerns of a collectivity when they are moved
to; but writers of fiction ought to be unwilling to stand
for anything other than Story, however deeply they may be
attached to a tradition. Tradition, to be sure, suggests a
collectivity and a history, and invokes a kind of principled
awareness; it carries with it a shade of teacherliness, of
obligation.
“But tradition is useful to the writer only insofar
as the writer is unconscious of its use; only insofar as it
is invisible and inaudible; only insofar as the writer breathes
it in with the air; only insofar as principled awareness and
teacherliness are absent; only insofar as the writer is deaf
to the pressure of the collectivity. What could be more treacherous
to the genuine nature of the literary impulse than to mistake
the writer for a communal leader, or for the sober avatar
of a glorious heritage? No writer is trustworthy or steady
enough for that. The aims of imaginative writers are the aims
of fiction. Not of community service or community expectation.
“Writers are responsible only to the comely shape
of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination, which sometimes
leads to wild places via wild routes. At the same time one
must reserve one’s respect for writers who do not remain
ignorant of history (a condition equal to autolobotomy), who
do not choose to run after trivia, who recognize that ideas
are emotions, and that emotions are ideas; and that this is
what we mean when we speak of the insights of art.”
(from “Tradition and the Jewish Writer” collected
in THE DIN IN THE HEAD, © 2006 by Cynthia Ozick)
I apologize to Ms. Ozick and to you for the long quotation
there, but – what the hell – the lady said it
better than I could.
Irresponsibility:
This is a strange unknown unknown – and a strange trait
to argue as a necessity for greatness as a writer or anything
else – but if Ozick hadn’t mentioned it, I would
have.
There is, by definition, an element of childishness, a certain
deliberate and wilful shunning of all of our proper responsibility
to grow up and become a true adult – to put away the
things of childhood -- in choosing to sit home alone and to
tell made-up stories for most of your life.
A writer never escapes – indeed, must will himself
not to escape – from the fantasy-energy of
a child’s play (no matter how “adult” or
“serious” the subject matter of the work itself.)
A writer must be irresponsible in the sense that he must answer
only to himself and to his craft. This must not to be confused
with a lack of discipline. Perhaps the highest praise I ever
read of one writer giving to another was Henry James’s
comment, after reading Kidnapped or Treasure
Island (I forget which), of Robert Louis Stevenson –
“He writes of childhood as a child would . . . if a
child could.”
But a child cannot. For all our praise of children’s
“creative energy,” a child cannot write about
his or her own childhood. To write honestly and truthfully
about anything takes a perspective from outside that
experience. In a word, it takes maturity. (Not necessarily
maturity born of age, but a profound maturity of
sensibilities and skills nonetheless.)
But it is a maturity yoked most oddly with the volatility
of unsurrendered youth and the pure energy of play.
The most powerful unknown unknown of great writers, their
only true secret from the non-writing world, is that all through
their lives they continue to tap into the primal, forceful
energy of imaginative and joyous expression that was so much
a part of their childhood.
All writing is play.
Those who know this, know. Those who do not, never will.
John Keats said –“That which is creative
must create itself.”
That includes, I think, the creation of an artist or writer
or poet out of the confused and all-too-mortal dross that
is himself or herself. Those who create themselves –
and who produce good writing – will do so, as Emerson
said, through the grace of God. But also through the grace
of play.
“Think of a pencil,” wrote John Updike
in “Why Write?” “What a quiet, nimble,
slender and then stubby wonder-worker he is! At his touch,
worlds leap into being; a tiger with no danger, a steam-roller
with no weight, a palace at no cost. All children are alive
to the spell of a pencil and crayons, of making something,
as it were, from nothing; a few children never move out from
under this spell and try to become artists.”
(Note: Between installments of WRITING WELL, visitors to
this web site interested in discussing writing issues can
talk to each other and to me on the new ON WRITING WELL strand
in the Dan Simmons Forum. While I will answer questions there
from time to time, my hope is that these Writing Well installments
might serve – at least partially – as a template
for discussion so that we can move more slowly toward the
usual huge questions of “How do I write a masterpiece
and where can I get it published?”)
>>click
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