Human beings are essentially social animals, and the anglophone novel is essentially a social form; it is in addition a rational form and a moral form. So one shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that, on the little planet called Fiction, social realism is the lone superpower. And although most modern writers, once or twice in their writing lives, will want to get out from under it and go off somewhere else, social realism still stands as their primary residence – their fixed address.
Literary experimentalists can do anything they want – indeed, they have already done just that by confronting you with a literary experiment. Literary social realists are temperamentally drawn the other way: they embrace solid conventions, and then work within and around them; and as they embark on a novel they reflexively accept that certain social norms will still apply. Readers are your guests, after all, and they come to your house as strangers; so you reassure them and make them feel at home, and then you start warming them up…
Now, if you ever paid a call on Anthony Trollope, the master social realist, I’m sure you’d be suavely received. Trollope was proud of his professional facility (he spent only three hours a day in his study, and produced over forty novels), and he would want to regale you with the fruits of his success (the house, the grounds, the dining room, the cellar, and other incidentals). Far more importantly, though, he would greet you with an alert and inquisitive eye, and would want to stimulate you into vividness…We now ask ourselves, What would James Joyce, the master experimentalist, be like to pay a call on?
The cryptic directions you were given lead you to a house that does not exist, or, rather, to a vast and gusty demolition site through whose soot and grit you can glimpse, in the middle distance, one unrazed building. And so you slither and hurdle your way down there and squelch through the mud and somehow activate the elaborate gong, and after a lengthy and soundless wait the door is wrenched open to reveal a figure who is angrily arguing with himself in several languages at once – before he again slips away, to be found an hour later in a distant scullery, where he gives you a jamjar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels.
So don’t do that: don’t be baffling and indigestible. The good, the thoughtful host doesn’t do that. And he doesn’t do this: he doesn’t overwhelm you. Don’t, for example, harass your visitor with a multitude of fresh acquaintances, as Faulkner tends to do, beginning a short story with something like Abe, Bax, Cal, and Dirk were sitting up front, so I got in back with Emery, Fil, Grunt, Hube, and J-J (who used to be called Zoodie), and out on the flatbed I could see Keller, Leroy, Mo, Ned, Orrin…Even Muriel Spark, often the very deftest of writers, can quickly exhaust your powers of retention (there are far, far too many girls of slender means in The Girls of Slender Means). At the outset, before things loosen up, introduce only one character or maybe two, or possibly three, or at the very most four.
Take the earliest opportunity to give the readers a bit of typographical air – a break, a subhead, a new chapter. As I remember it, the first of Updike’s Rabbit books, Rabbit, Run, trundles on for thirty or thirty-five pages before we get so much as a line-space – long enough, at any rate, to establish an impression of fathomless garrulity. Don’t do that: don’t keep them waiting too long for a stretch of clear white paper. They will be grateful for a chance to catch their breath and to brace themselves for more; and so will you.
This is yet another example of the strange co-identity of writer and reader. Just as guest and host have the same root – from Latin hospes, hospit- (‘host, guest’) – readers and writers are in some sense interchangeable (because a tale, a teller, is nothing without a listener). And readers are artists, too. Each and every one of them paints a different mental picture of Madame Bovary.
Asked to sum up the pleasures of reading, Nabokov said that they exactly correspond to the pleasures of writing. I for one have never read a novel that I ‘wished I’d written’ (that would be simultaneously craven and brash), but I certainly and invariably try to write the novels I would wish to read. When we write, we are also reading. When we read (as noted earlier), we are also writing. Reading and writing are somehow the same thing.
‘I can’t start a novel’, my stepmother Jane used to say, ‘until I can jot down its theme on the back of an envelope. Just a few words – and it doesn’t matter how trite they are. Appearances are deceptive. Cheats never prosper. Look before you leap…Then I’m ready to begin.’
‘That would be impossible for me,’ my father Kingsley used to say. ‘I don’t know what its theme is. I’ve got a certain situation or a certain character. Then I just feel my way.’
‘Well I feel my way too. Once I’ve got going. But I can’t get going until I can at least fool myself that I know what I’m getting going on.’
…For me it’s a journey with a destination but without maps; you have a certain place you want to get to – but you don’t know the way. As you near that goal, though (one year later, or two, or four, or six), you can probably do what Jane did: you can formulate its gist in a single phrase; and that commonplace motto can serve as a touchstone during your final revisions. This is when you begin to sense the salutary pressure to cut…Particular sentences and paragraphs will feel strained and unstable; they seem to be hinting at their own expendability. And now’s the time to consult the back of that envelope: if the passage that disquiets you has no clear bearing on the stated theme – then (with regret, having saved what you can for another day) you should let it go. What you are after, at this stage, is unity.
Writing a novel is a…is a learning experience. In the old days I would get to the end of a first draft and then flip the whole thing over, and stare at it in wonder; and then start reading. And I was always astonished and embarrassed by how little I knew about that particular fiction, how larval it seemed, and how approximate. That’s the first page. By the last page you are back where you were (and confirming that, yes, the entire cast without exception has been transformed en route: their names, their ages, even sometimes their genders)…A much milder reprise of the same experience can be expected when you come to the end of draft two.
In writing this or that novel, you are learning – you are uncovering information – about this or that novel.
I knew at once what he meant. ‘Mart,’ said my brother Nicolas on the phone. ‘It’s happened.’ In other words, Jane had bolted from the house on Flask Walk.
It wasn’t at all unexpected. Here was a marriage audibly pleading to be put out of its misery…Kingsley was hurt, romantically hurt (he came close to writing a poem about it – until his feelings fiercely hardened); and there was a great deal of disruption.*1 But there was no surprise and no censure. Everybody understood.
Still, I am forced to conclude that there was some resentment on my part (filial protective solidarity, perhaps), because I exacted a small but interesting revenge on Jane – strangely mean-spirited, as I now judge it. She ceased to be my legal stepmother in 1983, but she continued to be my confidante and mentor until her death (in 2014 at the age of ninety). It was a writerly revenge. I didn’t stop seeing her; I just stopped reading her.*2
There are three impersonal forces – three guardian spirits – hovering over the theme park of fiction; they are there to help you; they are your friends.
First: genre. If you write Westerns, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to Westerns. If you write historical romance, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to historical romance. If you write social realism, you will have the tacit support of all those attracted to society and reality – a rather larger quorum. And you have the ballast of the familiar and the everyday; you have the ballast of human interaction and the way we live now.
Second: structure. If it has energy, fictional prose will tend to be headstrong. Structure is there to keep it in line. It’s a question of chopping up the narrative and parcelling it out in a satisfying pattern. Once the pattern is formed, you can be confident that the building won’t fall apart overnight; the scaffolds are in place.
Third: the subconscious.
On this subject I hesitate to say too much – because I don’t want to spook you. The mysterious contribution of the subconscious, in particular, is spooky (it’s why Norman Mailer called his collection of his very perceptive ‘thoughts on writing’ The Spooky Art). The business of compiling a novel puts you in near-daily contact with a force that feels supernatural (and duly gives rise to superstitions).
I’d been writing fiction for twenty years before I was personally aware of its existence, let alone its power. In the old days when I was young, if I came up against a difficulty, a stretch of prose that bloodymindedly went on resisting me, I would simply redouble my attack on it; after a nasty couple of weeks I would grind out something that never satisfied me (a little later I came to recognise these dead bits and to jettison them, after only a couple of wasted days). If I can spare you one such session of pointless struggle, then…
No one will ever understand the subconscious; but you can learn to humour it. Nowadays, when the obstruction announces itself, I don’t bang my head against the wall; rather, I stroll off and do something else. This has become instinctual and even crudely physical: my legs straighten up and bear me away from the desk, usually from hard chair to easy chair, where I sit and read while I let time pass. It may take an hour, it may take a day, a night, two days, three nights, until I find myself again in the hard chair, because my legs have delivered me there, just as my legs, earlier on, drew me away. It means that the path is now clear.
A sinister process, but benign: a type of holistic white magic (and I’m convinced, incidentally, that ‘writer’s block’ simply describes a failure in the transmission belt: an internal power cut). One of the several hindrances in life-writing is that it gives the subconscious so little to do. With fiction, you often have to sleep on it – to rejoin the world of dreams and death, from which, many believe, all human energy comes. Life-writing (the facts, the linear reality of things that went ahead and happened) doesn’t leave much room for the subliminal. And this cannot be anything but a loss.
Most fictions, including short stories, have their origin in the subconscious. Very often you can feel them arrive. It is an exquisite sensation. Nabokov called it ‘a throb’, Updike ‘a shiver’: the sense of pregnant arrest. The subconscious is putting you on notice: you have been brooding about something without knowing it. Fiction comes from there – from silent anxiety. And now it has given you a novel to write.
A few minor points.
Dialogue should be very sparely punctuated. Just use the comma, the dash, and – above all – the full stop. People talk in short sentences (however many of them they string together). For centuries it was a convention to represent (say) rural labourers as saying things like Arr, the master lived over there: beyond them hillocks; he used to loik coming over the…Despite what some novelists still seem to believe, no one talks with colons and semicolons – not farmers, and not phoneticians.
If you want to show a moment of hesitation, use the ellipsis, the dot-dot-dot (which has many other very civilised uses); it will save you the indignity of typing out such makeweight formulations as ‘She paused for thought, and then continued’. Otherwise, in dialogue, confine yourself to those marks that have some kind of aural equivalent: the comma (a short pause), the full stop (a rounded-off statement followed by a longer pause), and the dash.
The dash is a versatile little customer – but a word of warning. A single dash will do as an informal colon (among many other functions). Two dashes signal a parenthesis, like brackets (though without their slight sotto voce effect). But never present your reader with three dashes in the same sentence (as some highly distinguished writers persist in doing), typically with two serving as brackets and one as a colon. This is a sure formula for syntactical chaos.
Last and also least (so far as I’m concerned), there is the subjunctive, the verbal mood that deals in conjecture (‘if I were a carpenter’). Well, I’m pleased to report that it’s on its way out. The subjunctive, in English, used to swan around the place with some freedom. No verb was safe from it. If she have a fault. I recommend that Mrs Jones face a sentence of no less than…But for some time the subjunctive has been confined to one verb and one verb only: to be. Yes, to be is the last man standing (note too those rusting trinkets as it were and albeit). So for a little while longer it’s just a question of if she were or if she was.
And which is it?…That question has inspired huge volumes of linguistic philosophy, full of graphs and equations. No doubt it is all nauseatingly complicated. I stick to a simple rule. If I’m writing in the present tense I use it, and if I’m writing in the past tense I don’t. So it’s she wishes she were and it’s she wished she was. The present can go either way. The past is settled. I really think that’s all you need to know. He wishes his friend were alive. He wished his friend was alive. Is that at least reasonably clear?
*1 It was of course the disruption, and not the hurt, that (feebly) agitated Philip Larkin. ‘Sorry to hear about your misfortunes. To me the loss of a loved one (in this sense) would be nothing at all compared to the consequent throes of MOVING – I think I hate moving almost more than anything. Are you really going to have to do all that?’ So Phoebe was right. ‘He’s never going to move to London, he’s never going to move out of Hell. He couldn’t. He couldn’t move next door.’
*2 And this half-conscious retaliatory flail cost me far more than it cost Jane Howard. It postponed my engorged encounter with her five-volume magnum opus, the Cazalet Chronicles. And it deprived Jane of the many hours of detailed praise I would’ve given it, face to face (and she needed detailed praise, in life and in art). To hear that would have pleased her, and to voice it would have pleased me. Of course, it’s too late now. She no longer needs that praise. Nevertheless, the omission, and all the attendant regret, is lastingly mine.