Magic Hours (14 page)

There is such a thing as too-specific guidance, and I fear it will take some time for anyone who has read
Bird by Bird
to write about a birthday party
without
mentioning all the hair curlers and garter socks and Brownie uniforms. Lamott simply beats one to the writing. Also, for a writer of such shrewdness, Lamott allows herself to get lost among some awfully simple terrain. A longish section intended to inspire beginners who do not know what to write
about sees Lamott throwing out suggestions as unpromising as school lunches and carrot sticks. Yes, an ode to the carrot stick will get one writing, but
Bird by Bird
is not, I don't think, intended for children but reasonably intelligent adults interested in writing. The whole question is beneath Lamott, and her suggestion is beneath her readers. Norman Mailer once said that, if a writer does not know how to get a character across the room, he is dead. I would append that: If a writer does not know what to write about, has no idea where even to
begin
, he was never alive to begin with.

“I do not think novelists—good novelists, that is—are altogether like other people.” This insight comes fifteen lines into Norman Mailer's
The Spooky Art,
which was published on Mailer's eightieth birthday in January 2003. This sentence places us high upon the mountainside of a different sort of how-to-write book, the Olympus, which only rarely deigns to address the actual processes of solid fiction-making. Instead, it focuses on the philosophy of writing—again, how to live—enjoying frequent, rather stark expeditions into the joys and terrors of literature. Reading such books is not always easy; the mountain analogy is apt. One's pack is too heavy the snow is thick, the guide is unforgiving, self-involved, but far too knowledgeable to ignore. One constantly feels as though one has to prove oneself worthy of his or her company.

The Olympus is always the work of a highly esteemed writer who has elected—perhaps for money, perhaps because the writer believes he or she has something interesting to say—to set aside the scepter for a short while and share with fans and hopefuls how and why he or she writes and what a beginning writer can do to improve him- or herself. With their mandarin
tone and necessary overstatements, such books routinely annoy and worry beginners. Beginners are probably right to be worried and annoyed, and it is no coincidence that the typical Olympus is not usually read by aspiring writers but rather by their authors' fans and foes. The particles of their allure have altogether different electricity: the insights are less global and more personal, more spiritual and less emotional. Not surprisingly, the Olympus also tends to have a much longer shelf life than other how-to books, from E.M. Forster's
Aspects of the Novel to
Flannery O' Connor's
Mystery and Manners
to Margaret Atwood's
Negotiating with the Dead.
Joyce Carol Oates's recent (and excellent)
The Faith of a Writer
will, I suspect, outlast a good deal of her other work.

Mailer's
The Spooky
Art was greeted by notably hostile reviews. Many critics charged that it was simply one big microwaved potluck of Maileriana that contained only the stray spice of anything new. This charge was indisputably true, but some of us card-carrying Mailer fanatics are willing to read the man on topics as bleak as Madonna. (Indeed, some of us
have
read the man on Madonna.) Yes, Mailer devotees will be familiar with most of what appears in
The Spooky Art.
I will go perilously far out onto a limb, here, to say that, if only for its arrangement and augmentations, it is still very much worth perusal. Here is something:
This is a reversal of the mysticism one encounters in a book such as
Writing Down the Bones,
which promises that unlocking the inner writer will release only lemon-scented elation. Mailer suggests that the inner life of a writer is a vast, terrible ocean of doubt and despair. The former view will make for happier workshops and pleasanter emotional weather, certainly, but it is not likely to encourage a writer to “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” as Mailer summarized his own goals in 1958. (“And I certainly failed,” Mailer adds now, “didn't I?”) There is much in
The Spooky Art
that few writers would be willing to say. “You can write a very bad book,” Mailer tells us (and as anyone who has read
Marilyn
or
Ancient Evenings
or
Of Women and Their Elegance
or
An American Dream
can tell you, he would know), “but if the style is first-rate, then you've got something that will live—not forever, but for a decent time.... Style is half of a novel.” Of writing in the first person, Mailer says, with his characteristic mixture of wisdom and buffoonery “It is not easy to write in the first person about a man who's stronger or braver than yourself. It's too close to self—serving. All the same, you have to be able to do it.” As for novel writing (I will hopefully assume he really means writing, as Mailer's chief accomplishment lies in nonfiction, which is no small thing, whatever he may believe or wish to believe), “It may be that [writing] is not an experience. It may be more like a continuing relationship between a man and his wife. You can't necessarily speak of that as an experience, since it may consist of several experiences braided together; or of many experiences braided together; or indeed it may consist of two kinds of experiences that are antagonistic to one another.” If this sounds confused, one suspects it is supposed to, and it is inversely stirring to see a writer of Mailer's stature recklessly unable to come to terms with what, exactly, writing is.

In his bravely titled
How to Write: Advice and Reflections,
Richard Rhodes takes an opposite tack than that of his Olympian colleagues: “If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is.... You're a human being, with a unique story to tell.... We need stories to live, all of us.” Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of, among other books,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(a great work of nonfiction everyone should read) and
Making Love
(a queasy memoir of all the sex Rhodes has had that I do not advise reading), has written a decent, old-fashioned Olympus that honors writing and the writer equally. That does not mean he will brook any of the self-delaying measures to which writers routinely subject themselves:

One is not likely to encounter any advice in a how-to book as commendably intolerant of writerly self-delusion as that. One will find in Rhodes, though, goodly helpings of advice that sound awfully close to the advice of Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott and any number of other Tea & Angels writers. To the stalled writer, Rhodes offers this encouragement: “Everyone knows how to do something: describe a process. How do you tie your shoe? How do you brush your teeth? How do you plant a bulb, drive a car, read a map?” Perhaps this K-8 tone can be traced to Rhodes's early career as a Hallmark Card writer (about which he is unapologetic; he considers all types of writing, no matter how
cheap, another tool in the writer's box), but I do not believe it should be. Rather, many of these books sound so alike—from the atom-splitting concentration they bring to bear upon the minutiae of their authors' lives to their nakedly desperate implorations simply to write
anything
—because the questions the beginning writer needs answered are so depressingly similar: How do you start? What do you write about? How do you know if you are any good? Often you feel that these accomplished and famous writers are merely talking to themselves, since, in many ways, they still
are
that tremblingly starting-out scribbler. The how-to-write genre begins to feel less like an effort to instruct and more like a rear-guard action to reinforce the garrisons of their authors' own slaughtered confidence. Just about all how-to-write books have at least a little worth, and some, like Rhodes's, have great worth. For instance, Rhodes's discussion of the cardinal importance of “voice” in writing (“‘Natural' is a hopeless word; it has always meant and continues to mean whatever the speaker wants to exclude from discussion”) is as good as anything one can hope to find on the topic. But what begins to rise up from these pages is the iodine and lotions of self-healing. You start to wonder if you are responding not to the how-to writer who is least crazy, but the how-to writer who is crazy in the same way you are crazy. You want to be healed, too.

On its face, Stephen King's
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
is
primarily
about self-healing—written, as it was, in the wake of the nearly fatal accident King suffered while walking along a country road in the summer of 1999. (The man who ran King down, one Bryan Smith, was later found, in a very King-like twist, dead of undetermined causes in his trailer home.) Most of the how-to books I have elected to discuss in this essay are due to my familiarity with their authors' less subsidiary work. In King's case, I confess to having read everything from
Carrie
to
The
Tommyknockers.
(The latter's demonically murderous flying soda machine made me realize, with what I can only call the shock of unwanted maturity, that perhaps I had outgrown this sort of thing. It comes as no surprise in
On Writing
when we learn that King wrote
The Tommyknockers
with “cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding.”) In other words, I have read, by quick estimate, about 15,000 pages worth of Stephen King's prose—and I do not regret one folio of it. Whether because of his success (“I've made a great deal of dough from my fiction”), his profligacy (“there's one novel,
Cujo
, that I barely remember writing at all”), or the simple likeability of his voice (“Creative people probably
do
run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter”), there are not many living writers whose views on writing will be as enthusiastically received by hacks, would-be hacks, artists, would-be artists, and civilians alike. On King's Olympus, God walks alongside man.

“This is a short book,” King explains in the second of his three forewords, “because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.” This is fairly representative of
On Writing
's tone, though its anti-intellectualism is more akin to that of Abbie Hoffman than Rush Limbaugh. The approach results in some passages of wonderful bullshitlessness. For example, King's strident belief that a work of prose is about brutally controlled paragraphs rather than artful, free-flowing sentences (“If your master's thesis is no more organized than a high school essay titled ‘Why Shania Twain Turns Me On,' you're in big trouble”) seems that delightful thing: an insight that is both unexpected and true. His insistence that carefully placed fragments in a scene of action (King's example: “Big Tony sat down, lit a cigarette, ran a hand through his hair”) nail down the writing, giving it a kind of vivid breather, is advice good enough to pay for. But King's dirt-plain line of attack also
results in some massively wrong-headed counsel. “Remember,” he writes, “that the basic rule of vocabulary is
use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.
If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word... but it probably won't be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.” It seems to me that only willfully obtuse people don't realize that the mind very rarely says what it means to say in the heat of any given moment, writing included. One's first word or thought is usually imprecise, muddy, and wrong. Writing is seeing, but revision is reflecting on what one has seen. And the first word that comes to one's mind when one is writing about anything even remotely technical is all but
guaranteed
to be the wrong word. The same goes for characters whose professions or interests are unfamiliar to us: one
has
to go back and vivify those “dogs” and “trees” and “wiry-type things” that, in every first draft, exist lifelessly on the page. The many nuances of King's advice will be teased out by more advanced beginners, but to the less skilled one fears it will seem that King is giving prose permission to go AWOL from the interesting. “No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person,” King writes. No one, perhaps, but an incredibly defensive dumb person. King is the farthest imaginable thing from dumb, and it is unappetizing to watch him pretend that he is.

But we quickly come back to the good King, St. Stephen:

“Life,” King writes elsewhere, “isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.” Of course, the world is filled with those who will sniff at the notion of making good writers out of competent writers, who will despair at the prospect of these empowered good writers writing their good novels and stories and filling the world with competent, interesting writing. That is, in part, what I believe angers so many writers about the how-to-write genre—and I would be fibbing greatly if I did not admit to regarding it with a certain amount of skepticism myself. Every writer's road is hard, and lonely, and forever covered by night, and even the best how-to books splash the path with artificial spotlight and claim it is the sun.