Good Prose (16 page)

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When quoting great writers we tend to use the present tense, even if they died centuries ago: “Milton reminds us …” “As Shakespeare says …” The literary convention recalls the truth that must have inspired it. Writers we revere feel like colleagues and confidants, as if they were speaking to us directly. This communion of strangers, living and dead, derives from the rather mystical quality called “voice.”

The term “voice” appears constantly in criticism today. Sometimes people use it interchangeably with “style,” but usually it is supposed to mean more, often nothing less than the writer’s presence on the page. The term indeed may soon buckle under the weight it is asked to bear. Certainly it has become discomfiting to hear writers speak about their own voices. You cannot, must not, try to design and create a voice. The creation of voice is the providential result of the writer’s constant self-defining and self-refining inner dialogue. When it happens, let someone else tell you, and be grateful.

Yet it is undeniable that good writing must have a human sound. Maybe that is the more modest word to keep in mind: sound. You try to attune yourself to the sound of your own writing. If you can’t imagine yourself saying something aloud, then
you probably shouldn’t write it. That is not the same as saying, “Write the way you talk.” If we all did that, civilization would be in even worse shape than it is. This is closer: Write the way you talk on your best day. Write the way you would like to talk.

Sometimes it will happen, in the middle of a difficult piece of writing, that one morning you wake up with a sentence in mind, and the sentence contains a sound that seems to unlock the problem for you. Speak to no one, go and write that sentence down. The sound can be more useful than a multipage outline. It is the sketch that precedes an architect’s blueprints, the writer’s equivalent of a vision.

So listen to yourself. And it helps to keep one’s ear tuned to the great voices that have preceded us, not to copy them but to be inspired by them. Hunter Thompson once said that he taught himself to write by typing out
The Great Gatsby
. This seems touchingly innocent—and Thompson’s choice of models is odd, given the turns that his own style took. But probably he wasn’t so naïve as to think he was going to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps he knew that we all need writers from whom we learn lessons that go deeper than mannerism. Listen to yourself, and listen to those writers who are so great that they cannot be imitated.

I recall, with a warmth I didn’t feel at the time, the day in 1978 when great good luck descended on my writing career. By then I had written my bad unpublished novel and a bad but published book of nonfiction, which had received almost no reviews and had not sold enough copies to earn out the publisher’s small advance. For about five years since then, I had been writing articles freelance for
The Atlantic.
I had just finished another article, a long one, and was sitting in Todd’s office. I was drinking beer, a custom I had established for such moments, which Todd tolerated, I think, because he hoped that it would keep me from expressing my usual postpartum anxiety. I was broke, I explained once again. I was tired of writing articles. I wanted to write a book, a better book than I had written before. What could I write a book about?

Todd said, “Why don’t you look into computers?”

I was afraid of math and science, and consequently I disdained the class of people who were competent with them. The prospect of looking into computers seemed daunting and drab, as drab as the word “engineering.” I wish I could claim that I was the sort of daring young reporter who would press forward and let himself be proven wrong. In fact I took Todd’s suggestion because just then I couldn’t think of anything else to look into
.

Three years later I had a book
, The Soul of a New Machine.
Todd’s idea turned out to have been, at the very least, timely. The personal computer did not yet exist. Computers were still curiosities, but they were arousing great interest, in part because the business in those machines was already producing vast amounts of wealth
. The Atlantic
published excerpts of the book, and, probably more important commercially, so did a trade magazine widely distributed among people involved in the computer business. Then the editors of
The New York Times Book Review
chose an engineer to review it—Samuel Florman, who had himself written a book called
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering,
and who was clearly delighted to read something that ran counter to what he felt was an antiengineering bias among the literati, delighted by a book that seemed to make a branch of his profession exciting. And the editors of the
Book Review
put Mr. Florman’s review on the magazine’s cover
.

I had high hopes for my book, but I had not expected any of that, or any of what followed. Nor had the publisher—Atlantic–Little, Brown. After the
Times
reviews—there was a very kind one in the daily paper, too—the publisher sent me to New York to visit the many bookstores that were still arrayed along Fifth Avenue. But there were no books left to sign. All up and down the avenue, every copy had been sold. I learned that it would take weeks for more copies to be printed and delivered. I felt aggrieved, of course. Unreasonably aggrieved. The publishers had in fact made a substantial bet on my book, a bet against the odds, a roulette bet. How could they have been expected to foresee a skein of luck that would make their bet look small?

Luck followed on luck, or possibly grew out of luck. My book won prizes. I like to think it was a good book, but I hope it does not seem ungrateful of me to say that, having served on prize committees since,
I know that choosing winners is often a negotiation, and that negotiations over matters of taste can end up awarding the prize to everyone’s third choice
.

At one of the prize ceremonies I met John Updike, who told me he had my book. “It’s a nice book,” he said
.

I thanked him, then added, lying, “I don’t take all this prize stuff too seriously.”

He replied, “Don’t.”

I was only in my thirties. I tell myself that I was too young to follow his advice and to acknowledge what had really happened to me
.

It is easy to believe in the power of luck when one’s own luck is bad. Good luck tends to tempt fishermen—and even gamblers!—to credit their own abilities. But for writers, at least, antidotes are available. Think of all the books in the stacks of the world’s libraries and the certainty that among them are masterpieces that no one has read in decades. Think of the many wonderful writers who haven’t earned a living by writing. Anyone who does earn a living by writing, and does not acknowledge the power of luck, has to be deluded
.

—TK

Sooner or later, all writers have to come to terms with the practical side of their efforts, with commercial success—achieving it or not achieving it, longing for it or scorning it, or simply trying to make an honest living in the literary marketplace. One contemporary writer, Lewis Hyde, in
The Gift
, has contemplated this topic in spacious terms.

Hyde argues that the artist, including the writer, is fundamentally at odds with the market economy. Many writers have
shared this flattering perception at one time or another, especially when their genius was invisible to editors or when the book-buying public was indifferent to their wares. But Hyde elevates what could be taken as resentment to an ennobling truth. He argues that art and creativity generally belong, or should be understood as belonging, to what anthropologists call the “gift economy,” an ethos that lies in plainer view in places like the South Pacific islands than in midtown Manhattan. Creativity, he says, proceeds from two gifts: the gift of talent and the gift of tradition, which informs and guides individual talent. And the act of creativity is itself a gift, which can’t be aimed at making money but must be freely given.

Hyde’s sanctification of the writer’s role can cause discomfort, especially to a writer with some experience in journalism. The newsroom and the magazine office both offer quick lessons in avoiding preciousness. Journalists aren’t likely to talk about “art” and “creativity.” If they dare to boast at all, they’re apt to talk about being “pros.” Norman Mailer defined a pro as someone who can work on a bad day. He was an artist who loved the sense of himself as a pro. The motto on the pro’s coat of arms would be the timeless wisdom of Dr. Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” A pro makes deadlines, and a pro makes compromises, too. A pro lives in real time in the real world and secretly relishes the constraints of the job. A pro’s greatest boast might be A. J. Liebling’s: “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”

When writers convene they tend to talk in general ways about the
business
of writing. Partly this is to avoid telling each other
what they really think of each other’s work. But they do also seem genuinely unhappy with the institution they depend on, griping to each other about the malfeasance of publishers. No ads. No books sent to reviewers, or books sent to the wrong reviewers. No publicity. Or great publicity but no books in the stores.

Lewis Hyde seems to suggest that all of this is beneath a writer’s dignity, that one should be suspicious of all marketplace success. But even ignoring such things as mortgages, it isn’t clear that a writer of prose can easily separate art from commerce. The great prose art forms grew up in concert with the publishing business. Books must not only be written but must also be made, and historically the people who could make them soon became more than manufacturers. Publishers became arbiters of taste, of aesthetic as well as commercial value. This role endures, even as books become easier to produce and, thanks to electronic publishing, easier to distribute. Indeed its reputation as a judge of literary worth is a publisher’s most valuable asset, which it is always in danger of squandering. Publishing is not an adjunct of culture but a part of culture, messy and venal as that culture sometimes is.

Traditional publishing depends on a basic triad of author, agent, and editor. For the intimidated young writer this relationship can seem nearly primal, yet another way to enact the classic family drama. The author, it goes without saying, is the child, the agent the supportive mother, and the publisher the father whose love must be won and won again by deeds alone.

For beginning writers the mystery of what happens inside publishing houses has for some time been preceded by the mystery
of the agent. These middlemen/brokers occupy a central place. They serve publishers by finding and screening new talent and by collaborating in marketing, and, when things get tense, by serving as buffers between authors and editors. Agents can do some things that writers can’t do for themselves. Most important, they can identify an editor who is apt to like a book. In publishing houses very few people have the power to say yes, but almost anyone can say no. So it is crucial to get a manuscript or proposal to an editor who is unlikely to shoot it down right away, who is likely instead to present it to colleagues with enthusiasm.

A young writer with a manuscript is often a bundle of apprehensions and ambitions, like a girl from the provinces coming to New York for the first time. (Sometimes the writer is exactly that person.) Braced for rejection, she can impute all sorts of qualities to the unseen powers. Why do some agents and publishers take so long to answer her e-mails and phone calls? Publishing is not an industry renowned for its efficiency. More than one writer has said ruefully, “The trouble with this business is that it’s run by English majors.” Which means of course that a lot of people in publishing resemble writers. This may be the beginning of wisdom. The people who write books actually have a lot in common with the people who produce and promote them. The sooner a writer can get inside the door and meet a few agents and editors, the sooner those people are revealed to be brothers and sisters—better dressed sometimes, though not always. Generally they are people who really do like books and are eager to make them better.

The book business is changing rapidly and unpredictably. For years it was accused of being old-fashioned, even ossified. Now
people who work in publishing say they have no idea what it will look like in even a few years. But one essential truth is likely to endure. About 80 percent of the books that are published lose money. It may be that 80 percent deserve to lose money. Only a fervent believer in the sanctity of the market would imagine that it is the same 80 percent, but it is hard to imagine a future in which financial success will not be the exception.

So publishing seems bound to remain a gambler’s business. Publishers, particularly of nonfiction books, are generally buying manuscripts that don’t yet exist. They are taking a chance. Some publishers have stood by authors for years while waiting for books that might never be written or that might turn into something quite different from what was promised. But publishers are apt to behave like gamblers in another way as well. When a book doesn’t sell, support for it in the publishing house tends to wane quickly. Editors cut their losses and turn their attention to other titles. Writers grieve when this happens, and sometimes they howl, sometimes with justice, crying, “If only, if only, they had tried a little harder to promote my book.” It is cold comfort, but always worth remembering, that the alternative was for the publisher not to have taken a chance at all.