Magic Hours (12 page)

If any of this sounds familiar, it is because I am cribbing from John Gardner's
On Becoming a Novelist
, the book that did, in fact, teach me how to write. It is probably the most important book I have ever read—or rather the most important book ever read by the aspiring writer who became the person writing this sentence. Gardner, an erratically brilliant novelist, solid short-story writer, underappreciated critic, legendary creative-writing teacher, habitual animadvert, massive hypocrite, and awe-inspiring pain in the ass, died in a motorcycle accident at the age of
49 in 1982, having written more than thirty books;
Novelist
is one of the last he completed. With the exception of
Grendel
, his genre-shattering masterpiece, most of his books are, today out of print. (I should disclose here that, as a young editor at W. W Norton, I was behind
Novelist
's restoration to print. I tried the same daring rescue op with some of his fiction. That mission failed.) Why is
Novelist
so good? “Either the reader [of this book] is a beginning novelist who wants to know whether the book is likely to be helpful,” Gardner writes in his preface, “or else the reader is a writing teacher hoping to figure out without too much wasted effort what kind of rip-off is being aimed this time at that favorite target of self-help fleecers.” Instantly we see the many virtues of Gardner's approach: honesty, an up-front acknowledgment of the typical how-to-write book's worth, and a forgiving awareness of human limitation: “More people fail at becoming businessmen than fail at becoming artists.” It was Gardner's unfakeable gift to write advice that feels laser-beamed into the cortex of each individual reader.
Me,
one thinks with amazement while reading.
He is talking to me.
Or so I felt, reading
Novelist
for the first time at a writer's workshop in Bennington, Vermont.

I was eighteen, had never been to a workshop before (and have, with a couple of exceptions, stayed away from them since), had never even been east before (I was then a community-college student in Michigan), and was surrounded, for the first time, by people crazy about writers and books. It was overwhelming, and after two days I wanted to go home. I did not have talent, was galactically outclassed by the Harvard students on their résumé-building summer vacations, and suddenly had no idea why I ever believed my deeply rural imagination would ever be capable of producing literary art. My teacher, sensing my distress, handed me
On Becoming a Novelist,
and by the end of the day I had nearly
conked out my highliter. One paragraph in particular saved my literary life, as I was then struggling with the demands of telling “the truth” about the asses and idiots every young man imagines living all around him. I remember the passage so vividly I scarcely need to consult the source:

Thunder! lightning! Read that again, please. These are the words of a fundamentally good man attempting to show the young writer one honest way in which to think, to
see
. (When I found out that the aesthetically conservative Gardner was actively loathed by many of his fellow writers—Joseph Heller called him “a pretentious young man”!—I loved him even more.) If I belabor the point with autobiography—and there will not be any more, or at least not very much—I do so to make a point. Most writers have thoughts about writing as an act, as a way of understanding oneself, or as a way of being, and they are often interesting. I have any number of thoughts about writing, all of which I find incomparably fascinating. How fascinating to others, though, might they be? A how-to-write book saved my life, then, but it did so existentially not instructively. Many of the best books about writing are only incidentally about writing. Instead, they are about how to live.

There are several types of how-to-write books. The first is the rigorous handbook-style guide that does not concern itself with creating interesting characters or crafting exciting scenes. Rather, it concentrates on how to write a decent sentence that means what one intends it to mean: a User's Manual to the English language. The most famous is William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's
The Elements of Style.
If one wishes to write
New Yorker
-style prose, this is the book to read. Of course, the
New Yorker
style is a fine style with which it is eminently worth getting acquainted, but it is not the only style. Nor is it, in every case, even the most preferable style. One truly interesting thing about the
New Yorker
style is that it can serve both as a hiding place for mediocrity and as the lacquered display table for masters rightfully confident in their powers. Used well, the
New Yorker
style is what one imagines the style of God might be, if there was any indication that God spoke English. Used poorly, the
New Yorker
style is all gutless understatement, decorous to a Fabergé extreme.

Composed of five parts (“Elementary Rules of Usage,” “Elementary Principles of Composition,” “A Few Matters of Form,” “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused,” and “An Approach to Style”),
Elements
is a handholding book, in the best sense. The first four parts are, as one might guess, almost ridiculously elementary, with brief and noticeably impatient advice as to how to punctuate (“A common error is to write
it's
for
its
,” “do not use periods for commas”) and employ basic literary logic (“As a rule, begin each paragraph either with a sentence that suggests the topic or with a sentence that helps the transition”). The last part, “An Approach to Style,” opens with Strunk and White admitting, “Here we leave solid ground,” and that “no key unlocks the door.” It must surely rank among the most winning and incisive
twenty pages on writing that have ever been published. “With some writers,”
Elements
tells us, “style not only reveals the spirit of the man but reveals his identity.... The beginner should approach style warily, realizing it is an expression of self, and should turn resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style.” In other words, when it comes to the most important stuff, kid, you are on your own.

Nevertheless, there is much within
Elements
to debate. Many have quibbled with Strunk and White's assertion to “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” In fact, the passage in which this advice appears is actually an apologia for the much-maligned adverb. “Use adverbs
well
” seems to be the actual, hidden point of this initially restrictive diktat. “Avoid fancy words,” Strunk and White tell us, and, if the wearisome battles I have had with copy editors and family members is any indication, the entire planet now agrees. “Anglo-Saxon,” we are informed, “is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words.” Well, according to whom? The “fancy words” Strunk and White unveil as examples—
beauteous
,
curvaceous,
and
discombobulate
—are less fancy words than incredibly dumb words. One thing a “fancy words” embargo does is squelch and stifle a certain kind of young writer—the kind of young writer who happens to love and cherish unusual words, and who can, more significantly, divine the appropriateness of a dumb word and a word of high contextual potential. “Do not inject opinion,”
Elements
goes on. Dear Lord in heaven, why not? “We all have opinions about almost everything, and the temptation to toss them in is great.... [T]o air one's views at an improper time may be in bad taste.” But good writing, like a good joke, is very rarely in good taste. It could be said—in fact, I will say it—that
all a writer has, in the end, is his or her opinions.
Hemingway believed that personal courage was the defining component of one's life; that is of course an opinion, and
his entire body of work is shot to the core with it. “Do not inject opinion” is itself an opinion! This is not advice for a young writer seeking a stately style. This is advice one receives in a Toastmasters public-speaking class.

I do not really believe that Strunk and White thought opinion had no place in writing, or believed “fancy words” were inherently ill-advised.
The Elements of Style
is not proscriptive, despite its many proscriptions. It is suggestive, and wisely so. It has made and will continue to make many people write better, and more clearly. So shouts out. But it seems unlikely to help anyone already on his or her way toward becoming an artist. If even this most ideal of books is read at the wrong time, it may actually damage (or at least discombobulate) the young artist.

What of the how-to-write books with more financially liberating titles? I speak, of course, of Daniel H. Jones's
How to Write a Best-seller While Keeping Your Day Job,
Judith Appelbaum's
How to Get Happily Published,
James N. Frey's
How to Write a Damn Good Novel,
James N. Frey's
How to Write
a
Damn Good Novel II,
and so on. Quite a few of these Golden Parachutes are penned by people who have rarely written anything
but
how-to-write books. They are usually hack books for hacks. Most are fairly, and forgivably straightforward about this. The self-aware hack is, after all, a pardonable literary colleague, largely because he poses no threat to an actual artist.

Artist. That is a grand word, and you might think that most of the Golden Parachute how-tos care little about the artier aspects of writing: integrity, truth, vision, and the like. You would be wrong. Many care deeply about art, as they care about advances and careers and publicity. Such books nanny every facet of writing equally, giving us a portrait of the artist as a fragile Hummel figurine.

Donald Maass's
Writing the Breakout
Novel is both a case in point and not. Maass, an established literary agent who, according to his biography, “is the author of fourteen pseudonymous novels,” does not at first blush appear to be the most sensitive minister to the literary soul. Take, for instance, some of his clients, such as the novelist Anne Perry, one of the two girls whose real-life matricidal crimes were the subject of Peter Jackson's film
Heavenly Creatures
. Indeed, Perry provides the book's foreword: “Put yourself on the page and all that you think and feel about life, but do it with discipline; do it with skill. Then the good agents and the good publishers will get your work into the hands of the good readers.” And then the good fairies and elves will approach your front door carrying bags of gold, and the leprechauns will come, and the gnomes, and the friendly talking monkeys will sing, oh sing! outside your window! Although Perry's is some of the most insincere advice I have ever read, it is not even her preface's silliest moment. That would be: “Good luck. There's room for us all. They'll just build bigger bookshops!”

Maass is much shrewder than all that.
Writing the Breakout Novel
is about just what it claims: breaking out. Intended mainly for the already published novelist marooned upon the Isles of Midlist,
Breakout
is largely a fiduciary affair, as breaking out has little to do with art and much to do with sweaty calculation. Maass acknowledges this, more or less. He also acknowledges that people in the publishing industry, most often, “do not have the foggiest idea” why some authors breakout and some do not. Authors who have broken out, Maass writes, “toss around wholesale numbers like baseball stats, and generally display the ease and confidence of someone who has made it big through long and dedicated effort.” Such writers are often called assholes. However, these assholes have learned something, namely “the methods [of] developing a feel for the breakout-level story” The breakout-level story is one
“in which lightning seems to strike on every page,” written by authors who “run free of the pack.” Writing a breakout novel “is to delve deeper, think harder, revise more, and commit to creating characters and plot that surpass one's previous accomplishments.” But! “I am not interested in punching out cookie-cutter best-sellers, so-called ‘blockbuster novels.”' Rest assured, “A true breakout is not an imitation but a breakthrough to a more profound individual expression.”

Cynics would not be blamed for suspecting that Maass is sleeping in both bunks, as it were. But the fact is, agents are not the brainless dollar-zombies routinely imagined by lit-biz chatterboxes. Virtually all of them know the difference between a work of art and a work of commerce, Maass included. Here is a man who can, in the space of one page, except from and discuss the work of both Nicholas Sparks (“You have probably noticed from these excerpts that the prose and dialogue in
The Notebook
is rudimentary”) and Colson Whitehead (“His fully developed premise meets all of my breakout criteria”). In his extremely good discussion of “Tension on Every Page” Maass holds up not, say, Robert Stone or Neal Stephenson, but John Grisham. Maass admits that “it is fashionable to put down [Grisham's] writing:
His prose is plain... his characters are cardboard cutouts.
There is some truth to those charges, but one cannot deny that Grisham compels his readers to turn the pages.” I have read two Grisham novels,
The Firm
and
A Time to Kill,
and though my eyes rolled skyward several dozen times, I did, indeed, finish them both. In the case of
The Firm,
I could scarcely turn the pages fast enough. There is that to learn from Grisham, as Maass notes, “even in the absence of artistic prose.”