On Becoming a Novelist Read Free

the beginning writer does something interesting with language—shows that he’s actually listening to himself and looking closely at words, spying out their secrets—that is sign enough of the writer’s promise. Only a talent that doesn’t exist at all can’t be improved. Usually. On the other hand, if as readers we begin to suspect that the writer cares about nothing but language, we begin to worry that he may be in for trouble. Normal people, people who haven’t been misled by a faulty college education, do not read novels for words alone. They open a novel with the expectation of finding a story, hopefully with interesting characters in it, possibly an interesting landscape here and there, and, with any luck at all, an idea or two—with real luck a large and interesting cargo of ideas. Though there are exceptions, as a rule the good novelist does not worry primarily about linguistic brilliance—at least not brilliance of the showy, immediately obvious kind—but instead worries about telling his story in a moving way, making the reader laugh or cry or endure suspense, whatever it is that this particular story, told at its best, will incline the reader to do.
    We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images—a dog hunting through garbage cans, a plane circling above Alaskan mountains, an old lady furtively licking her napkin at a party. We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we’re sitting in, forgetting it’s lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. If the dream is to be vivid , the writer’s “language signals”—his words, rhythms, metaphors, and so on—must be sharp and sufficient: if they’re vague, careless, blurry, or if there aren’t enough of them to let us see clearly what is being presented, then the dream as we dream it will be cloudy, confusing, ultimately annoying and boring. And if the dream is to be continuous , we must not be roughly jerked from the dream back to the words on the page by language that’s distracting. Thus, for example, if the writer makes some grammatical mistake, the reader stops thinking about the old lady at the party and looks, instead, at the words on the page, seeing if the sentence really is, as it seems, ungrammatical. If it is, the reader thinks about the writer, or possibly about the editor—“How come they let him get away with a thing like that?”—not about the old lady whose story has been interrupted.
    The writer who cares more about words than about story (characters, action, setting, atmosphere) is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can’t tell the cart—and its cargo—from the horse. So in judging the young writer’s verbal sensitivity one does not ask only, “Has he got any?” but also, “Has he got too much?” If he has none, he’s in for trouble, though as I’ve said, he may succeed anyway, either because he has something else that compensates for the weakness, or because, once the weakness has been pointed out, he’s able to learn. If the writer has too much verbal sensitivity, his success—if he means to write novels, not poems—will depend (1) on his learning to care about other elements of fiction, so that, for their sake, he holds himself back a little, like a compulsive punster at a funeral, or (2) on his finding an editor and a body of readers who love, beyond all else, the same thing he loves, fine language. Such editors and readers do appear from time to time, refined spirits devoted to an exquisitely classy game we call fiction only by stretching the