13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

I was in a low period when Jane Smiley's mammoth book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel arrived on hold at the library, just the antidote I needed. You'd have thought Jane came over to keep me company, cheering me with her chatty and thoughtful style, and reminding me of what makes me giddy about novels. So here are:

13 things I Learned from Jane Smiley

1. Novel writing "most often grows out of a compulsive habit of reading as a child."

Undoubtably, we were reading for all the wrong reasons--escape, pleasure, avoidance of responsibilities and human contact. We were reading because it was easy and fun and we were unsupervised. We were reading to find companions more congenial than those around us. We wanted to fill our heads with nonsense and tune out practical considerations. We were not, most likely, athletic or useful sorts of children. We were reluctant to help around the house or to go outside and play. We did not have very good manners, because in numerous ways to be cited later, reading books is deleterious to good manners. We did not have good sleep habits, because if we had, we would not have read under the bedcovers with a flashlight, or held the book up to the moon that shone through the window, and ruined our eyes. We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid.

2. Every novel has five essential elements: "A novel is a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist."

Every novel has all of these elements. If any of them is missing, the literary form in question is not a novel. All additional characteristics--characters, plot, themes, setting, style, point of view, tone, historical accuracy, philosophical profundity, revolutionary or revelatory effect, pleasure, enlightenment, transcendence, and truth--grow out of the ironclad relationships among these five elements.

Some writers are afraid of research, thinking perhaps it will contaminate their ideas, but the strangest fact about the novel ("novel" means "new or original") is that novelty and originality are automatic. What is difficult is not to write something new but to write something interesting and true. As any piece becomes interesting and true, it becomes original. On the other hand, many original pieces of writing never find readers because they are solipsistic, tedious, tendentious, or self-indulgent. To pursue truth and interest is much more productive than to pursue originality, which will happen in any case.

4. The length of novels requires that writing become a habit.

. . . the absolutely minimal, simplest, easiest way of writing can accumulate a book as well as the most dedicated, self-conscious, ascetic way. Some novelists write by obligation, others by desire. These are questions of temperament. There is no intrinsically better way, since the only standard of achievement to begin with (and for quite a long time) is the accumulation of pages. Another thing both Beckerman and Proust show you is that writing is writing, not planning. The sooner you put words on paper, the happier you will be.

5. Press ahead with your first draft until it is complete.

. . . every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect. For this reason, I advise against rewriting, except for grammar and clarity, until you have the whole arc of the novel complete. The desire to get each scene "just right" works against productivity because it allows you to get in the habit of ruminating upon your self-doubts. . . .

You can follow [the model of Victorian serial writers] by setting aside the tendency to second-guess yourself. Each day, you sit down to your work, reread what you wrote the day before, correct the spelling and untangle thoughts you no longer understand. If there is a sequence of actions that is unclear, fix it as best you can and then go on. Do not worry about finding newer, righter words. Do not worry about fixing major problems of setting or character or theme. Do not make things more complex. Use rereading and fiddling with details to orient yourself in your text and get on with it.

6. Don't be too harsh with your rough draft.

After you read your rough draft over, you will be tempted to judge it rather than analyze it, but your task is above all an analytical one. It is not for you to decide whether, for example, it is "publishable." How could you know? Many novels you have read and enjoyed might not be publishable in today's world. Whether your novel is publishable is, for you, an imponderable, so my advice is to avoid the occasion of sin and try to put this question out of your mind. You have made your commitment; now make the most of it. You will also try to decide whether it is good. Let me answer that for you--it is, but it can be better, and your job in rewriting it is to make it better.

7. Even experienced writers have moments when they don't know what they're doing.

Jane (I gotta call her Jane, to maintain the illusion that she's my buddy) had written numerous novels when she hit a wall with Good Faith--

One day I waited for inspiration, got some, went off in a completely new direction, then had second thoughts the next day and tried something new. This was a symptom, indeed, a symptom that I didn't know what in the world I was doing, and it was way too late in the game for that. My heart sank. No, my flesh turned to ice. No, my eyes popped out of my head. No, my stomach churned. No, all I did was close the file on my computer and walk away. But that was very bad.

8. There comes a time to stop rewriting.

How do you know if you are finished? The first step here is to know yourself. Are you a dissatisfied perfectionist who tends to overdo everything? Or are you a careless sort who loses interest after the first rush of energy? Novels are long projects, and are more difficult to write if you go about it unsystematically. The reader wants both the finished surface and the energy simultaneously, all through the book. Your rewriting should promote both.

9. If you enjoy the writing process, you are less vulnerable to the successes and failures of the finished work.

The key to my survival as a novelist was not only my general cluelessness as to the meaning of these events [publishing mishaps with her first novel, Barn Blind], it was also that I had enjoyed writing Barn Blind no matter what the critics said or what happened to it in the big world, and I was well into writing my next novel by the time Barn Blind was published. I laugh at Barn Blind's misadventures now, but I laughed at them then, too. The great thing, as Henry James would say, is to do that rough draft, recognizing it as your first experience of "the incomparable luxury of the artist."

10. I have a great literary birthday (September 24).

The end of September is a great time to have a birthday if you want to be a writer. Jane Austen might be December 16 and Shakespeare April 23 and Charles Dickens February 9, but for a sheer run of greatness, I challenge anyone to match September 23 through September 30--F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Marina Tsvetayeva, William Blake, and Miguel Cervantes. And, I used to add (to myself, of course), moi.

11. Jane Smiley loved writing Horse Heaven as much as I loved reading it.

And then came Horse Heaven, which was, for me, book heaven. I had successfully combined my two obsessions, and the result was pure joy every day. As far as I was concerned the book had only one flaw, that its composition ended far too soon, and I had to go on to something else. Whatever the lasting virtues of the book are (and I am no judge, especially of that one), it was perfectly suited to me and my sensibility. It was funny and poignant by turns, it had a large cast, it was written in the omniscient third person (which allowed stylistic exuberance), and it had horses in every chapter except one.

12. It's okay if you don't enjoy reading every single novel, even if they're classics.

Jane didn't care much for Leo Tolstoy, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, or William Makepeace Thackery. And she didn't like Henry James, his "prissy, domineering manner" and the way he called himself "the Master."

My preferences on the list do what preferences always do--they make an outline of who I am, depict me as a reader and as a person. But, I think, they are transitory preferences, as preferences in novels almost always are.

13. I am a novelist.

The reason I filed this entry under "Finding Your Material" is because this book made me realize that while I enjoy and appreciate many forms, poetry and short stories among them, as both a writer and reader I am a devotee of the novel.

A novelist is a compleat generalist--he depicts as much as he can of what is around him. If he were more of a specialist, he wouldn't be a novelist, he would have a field of study (if he were more a specialist of words, he would be a poet). If he were more a generalist, he wouldn't be a novelist, he would be a roving bore, spouting theories to anyone who couldn't get away fast enough. A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Thanks so much for lifting my writerly spirits, Jane. I'm forever in your debt.

Writing from the Heart

I recently found the Canadian Writers Collective, and the latest is post is by Tricia Dower, called "Summer School, Part 1: Courageous Hearts":

A few weeks ago, I attended the 11th annual summer school of the Victoria School of Writing hoping to get tips on writing more from the heart — something gurus keep telling you to do. “Write your heart out,” says Joyce Carol Oates. My writing can be so objective at times as to seem clinical, I’ve been told. I’m not one for gushing.

I found what I was seeking but not from the workshops on craft. From faculty and student readings, instead, many of them so emotional they caught me off guard.

Dower goes on to talk about Susan Musgrave and Maria Coffey, two women who write deeply and honestly from their pain.

How much of yourself do you reveal in your writing? Are you afraid of putting yourself on the page for everyone to see?

For some reason, writing from the heart has become vital to my process, because that's where the most juicy, interesting material is. I want to move myself to tears, to explore the emotions and experiences that matter to me most. I didn't always write like that: my thesis advisor once described my early stories as "standing stiffly in patent leather shoes." I felt a real shift between writing my first book, which was more objective, and my later stories, which drew on more personal material. Cutting closer to the bone made the stories more moving.

Perhaps I'm something of an exhibitionist, getting a thrill from laying my heart bare. Sometimes I wonder whether I go too far, giving too much of myself away. But I have found that vulnerability in a writer inspires trust in readers, something I learned from Patricia Raybon. If I'm willing to reveal myself, and give others the power to criticize or ridicule me if they choose, that makes them feel safer and more open to what I have to say.

Poetry Interlude

Rembrandt's "Jacob Wrestling the Angel", 1659

Wrestling the Angel, a poem by Jamie Wasserman

Finding Meaning

I'm on page 305 of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, just over halfway through. The book is littered with scraps of paper marking interesting passages. The chief response I have to literary biographies is "So that's how you do it!" There's no one career path for writers, so I think we have to look around and see how others have managed it.

A coherent thematic post is escaping me at the moment (it's 80 degrees outside and I really should be out in the sun on my last day of vacation) but I'll give you some choice quotations for the moment, still on the subject of personal material in writing:

Munro characterized the 1950s -- the time before she wrote "The Peace of Utrecht" -- as the time when her attitude was "I will be a writer." After that story, which takes up the searing "personal material" surrounding her mother's death in 1959, her attitude became "some things have to be written by me." Thus Munro sees the 1950s stories largely as exercises, or what she calls "holding-pattern stories." As with her subsequent characterization of her decision to leave her university studies behind, Munro is mostly persuasive here, but not completely. The stories Munro wrote, submitted, and published during the 1950s are more than exercises; they show her grappling with personal material early on -- perhaps not with the deep feelings like those about her mother, but with the personal material derived from Wingham. (p. 131-132)

[With early 1950s stories] Munro is clearly back home in Wingham -- this is personal material; when Jill Gardiner, of the University of New Brunswick, read it to her during an interview in June 1973, she commented, "And yet, you know, that was not an imagined setting. I actually lived [it] . . . it's all real. It's all there. I did not make it for its meaning. I was trying to find meaning." (p. 134)

I am thinking a lot more about why I work in the realist genre, as Munro does, using personal experience so directly, rather than more obliquely as might be done in other genres like historical or science fiction. I am sure these genres choose us as much as the other way around (I certainly read many genres besides realism, but have never felt drawn to write them). I think looking intentionally at the genre I'm in and its implications for my subject matter may be useful.

Thinly Veiled Autobiography

On vacation this week I'm reading a biography by Robert Thacker, titled Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Alice Munro, of course, is the award-winning short story writer, who publishes most of her stories in the New Yorker, and has been called the Canadian Chekhov.

A central theme of the biography is the way that Munro's fiction draws on and parallels her own life experiences and history:

Probably no more than most professional writers of fiction, yet nonetheless very precisely and so verifiably, Alice Munro has drawn on the factual details of her life -- where she has been, who she has known, her roots, what has happened, how things have turned out -- in the fiction she has published. As she told Harry Boyle in 1974 and has freely admitted throughout her career, "There is always a starting point in reality." For Munro, those starting points are first noticed, then probed, and then sharply detailed as she intuitively articulates them. . . .

Following Munro's own pattern, this biography traces her life and career going from the fact to the fiction and back again. Autobiography is imbedded in Alice Munro's work, autobiography always resonant with fictional imaginings ("grafted on from some other reality"), and she can be seen as always "writing her lives," the lives she has both lived and imagined.

I'm fascinated with the way that Munro has taken license to write so recognizably about her own childhood, her parents, her home town of Wingham, her ancestors, her marriage ... I'm looking forward to seeing how she negotiated the personal nature of this material, both in transforming it into fiction, and in the way it affected her family and friends.

With my first book of fiction, Brick and Mortar, I deliberately avoided thinly veiled autobiography, because 1) I didn't want to be a typical author whose first book is a kunstlerroman about a girl growing up to be a writer; 2) I wanted to be a better writer before I dealt with personal material, so that the work I produced would do justice to the importance of the subject matter; and 3) I wanted to experiment with writing from many different characters' points-of-view, as a sort of apprenticeship. So while the church community of Brick and Mortar is rooted in my memories of churches past, the characters and their situations are largely imagined.

After I finished that book, I found myself drawn to my own and my mother's story more strongly. My next short story, "Broken Water," had that "starting point in reality" -- I did indeed come home from swimming lessons to find my mother in labour. These later stories are more moving for me as a writer, and I think that power derives from my deeply felt experiences, and hopefully transfers to the reader.

But I still have doubts from time to time. Is it cheating to draw so heavily on my own experience? Would it be more artistically rigorous for me to create entirely imagined stories? Am I giving away too much of myself? How will my family and friends respond?

I hope to find some answers to these questions in the story of Munro's writing life.

P.S. The friend who recommended Thacker's book to me said that she reread Munro's stories simultaneously, in the order and at the time they were mentioned in the biography. I love that idea, and I wish I had time to do the same. Someday ...