On Becoming a Novelist (19 page)

Poems “write themselves” more visibly than short stories or novels do, since it’s a little difficult, though by no means impossible, to write a short story without some idea of the plot, and extremely difficult to write a novel without a carefully constructed, though tentative, plan. But the process I’ve been describing in relation to poetry does operate, and not just occasionally, in one’s writing of a novel. The following passage occurs near the end of one of my novels,
October Light.

The two ancient creatures stared at one another, both of them standing more or less upright—the bear considerably more upright than the man—the old man unable to do a thing to defend himself, too weak-kneed to try running or even jump for the gun, his heart so hammering at the root of his throat that he could not even make a sound. He often thought, going over it later, how that Britisher must have felt when he looked up at the top of the wall by the cliff, there at Fort Ticonderoga, and beheld that stone man Ethan Allen towering against the stars and gray dawn, filling the sky with his obscenities. He, the Britisher, had been an ordinary man, as James Page, here among his hives, was only an ordinary man. Ethan Allen had been put upon the earth, like Hercules, to show an impression of things beyond it. So it was with this enormous old bear that stood sniffing at the wind and studying him, uncertain what heaven had in mind. A full minute passed, and still the bear stood considering, as if baffled by where the old man had come from and what his purpose could be, creeping up on him. Then at last the bear went down on all fours again, turned to where the containers for the honeycombs sat, and began—as if he had all day and had forgotten James’ existence—to eat. James made for the gun and, despite the weakness of his legs, reached it. The bear turned, a low growl coming from low in his throat, then went back calmly to his business. James with wildly trembling hands raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the back of the bear’s head. What happened then he could not clearly remember afterward. As he was about to pull the trigger, something jerked the gun straight up—possibly, of course, his own arm. He fired at the sky, as if warning a burglar. The bear jumped three feet into the air and began shaking exactly as the old man was doing, snatched up an armload of honeycombs, and began to back off.

My analysis of the process behind this passage must of necessity be sketchy and brief. Given my tortuous way of working, revising and revising, such a passage, short as it is, may take weeks. A couple of points of background information: Throughout the novel, old man Page has more or less unconsciously associated bears with the otherworldly—with death and the possibility of divine retribution, forces no man can match; though, short of that final conflict, he has believed, stern courage like that of his earthly hero Ethan Allen can get a man through. Most of his life, James Page believed himself such a hero, but he has recently learned that his own stubborn meanness, his misapprehension of the heroic, lies behind his son’s suicide and much other grief. The point of view controlling the passage is more or less omniscient, the narration moving in and out of James Page’s consciousness.

Much here is simply a recording of the Active dream (the stooped bear and man, the gun leaning against a hive, out of reach, the old bear’s puzzled gaze), but language colors and helps determine events throughout. Calling the bear and man “ancient creatures” commits me to implications different from those involved in “old man and old bear”: to me, a frequent teacher of courses in the epic, “ancient” summons up ancient Greece (hence in a moment Hercules will show up, bringing with him a central idea in Homer, that the gods conceive an ideal for man, an ideal revealed in the human world by the actions of a model hero like Achilles and transmitted to future generations by the epic poet, or the muses, or memory, or “epic song”); and “creatures” in its root sense (things God created) commits me to a set of ideas faintly in conflict with the first, a vision of both the old man and the seemingly mystical bear as mortal, tragically vulnerable, ultimately a view of all human heroism as illusion (hence the popular Vermont legends of Ethan Allen, almost none of them based on fact, will enter James’s consciousness, specifically the legend that, dead drunk, leading a band of Indians, Ethan Allen climbed the unscalable cliff behind Ticonderoga and took the British guard by surprise). My comments on the relative uprightness of bear and man and the man’s sense of helplessness come partly from a need to make the scene vivid and specific, partly from linguistic considerations. To express the tension of the situation, especially James Page’s sense of panic, I need a long, rushing sentence: the rhythm appropriate to the mood helps call up phrases (looking at the picture in my mind, what can I say that will keep the sentence pounding?). Landing on the word “upright”—knowing the old man’s feeling of inferiority (physical and spiritual) to the bear as he mystically understands it—I find it shades toward “righteous,” as in “upright conduct,” and his helplessness takes on overtones: Who can defend himself before the final judge? His sense of impotence calls up in my mind (because I’m a medievalist) the once common image of heaven as a castle or fort, which instantly becomes Fort Ticonderoga, high in its stone cliff, and, seemingly from nowhere, comes the image of that “stone man” Ethan Allen, “towering.” From close recording of the fictive dream comes “the stars and gray dawn,” but from deeper in the novel comes the image that follows. Throughout the novel the vivid light of October skies has been associated with the clarity and sense of doom in the mind of a man near the end of his life’s season. Old man Page has been confident of his opinions, but now, understanding his guilt, knowing himself an “ordinary man,” as he says, not a hero, much less a god, his mental sky is not noble though doomed, but obscene, polluted: insofar as the sky is heroic or divine, it curses him. (Partly the image comes from history, of course. Ethan Allen, gang leader and barn burner, was not a man of careful phrases.) Now, closely watching the bear, Page becomes increasingly conscious of its creature nature. If it’s a Hercules—an epic model of heaven’s will—it no longer remembers what message it was to bring; and, like a mortal creature encountering the unearthly, it cannot figure out where James Page came from. In the lines that follow, the bear becomes more and more a thing of nature, such a creature as James Page is.

Let me make clear, in case it’s not, that I am not suggesting, by this analysis of how the passage came into being, that these subtleties of language and idea transformation are things the shrewd critic should or could point out. Many of them are private—for instance, my rapid association of Fort Ticonderoga with “stone man”—and others, like the allusion to Hercules and Homer’s idea of the epic model, are of trifling significance in terms of the novel’s larger meaning. I am describing only the way in which one choice of words leads to another, the way language actively influences the progress of events. When a writer finds himself stuck, it is not only because he cannot get down the fictive dream, that is, find the right words for it, but also because he’s unable to go with the linguistic flow, unable to adapt what he wants to say to what his words are suggesting that he
might
say. He’s like a sculptor so intent on the image in his mind that he’s unwilling to compromise with—take suggestions from—the grain of the marble.

What is the writer to do? I think the answer is, given the writer’s linguistic competence:
Have faith
. First, recognize that the art of writing is immensely more difficult than the beginning writer may at first believe but in the end can be mastered by anyone willing to do the work. Good writing involves the operation of many mental processes at once, and in the beginning one must deal with those many processes one at a time, breaking down the total job into its smallest segments: getting down roughly what one is trying to say; closely analyzing the words with which one has said it to see what they are saying (or refusing to say); then thinking about
(a)
how one can make the words stop saying what one does not want them to say and
(b)
how whatever it is that the words are saying might be turned to account. Second, trust that what works for other human activities will work for the activity of writing. Learning to ride a bicycle, one must learn to steer, learn to keep one’s balance, learn to push the pedals, learn to stop without falling—all separate processes requiring separate focuses of concentration. Eventually they become one process.

Where does the writer get faith? Partly, as we’ve seen, from community support. The steady encouragement of friends makes it easier to slip into the dream and easier to endure the drudgery of learning both to control and to listen to language. And partly from the writer’s selfless love of his art—a pleasure in writing, whether by other people or by himself, that makes him forget for the moment his limitations. This is why it is often helpful, when one cannot write, to read the fiction of some favorite writer. The older writer’s dream world and dance of language come bursting into the mind, and one’s own capacity for dreaming and playing with words comes unstuck. One starts writing, and if the dream is strong enough, and the words cooperative enough, the first-draft mistakes distract only as a fly in the corner of the room distracts, present and annoying but not overpowering as long as the writer is deeply involved in what he’s doing and convinced that the result will probably justify the labor.

Since the problem of the writer unable to concentrate on the fictive dream or respond flexibly to the impulses of language is essentially a problem of inhibition, or the mind defeating itself, all of the conventional forms of breaking inhibition can be employed to get things rolling—self-hypnosis, TM, drunkenness and smoking, or falling in love. None of them are effective in the absence of hard work and occasional successes.

Let me pause to say a word here about autohypnosis, since I myself have at times found it effective (unless I’m fooling myself, which I may well be). A simple method is to sit in a chair with comfortable arms—preferably in a fairly dark, quiet room—your arms flat on the arms of the chair, and tell yourself with firm conviction (it will prove justified) that although you will not move a muscle, your hand and forearm are going to rise. Concentrate on not moving the arm, but without resisting whatever may begin to happen to the arm, and concentrate, too, on the belief that the arm will rise. You will soon begin to feel an odd lightness in the hand, and eventually, independent of conscious volition, the arm will lift. Magic. (A hypnotically raised arm can hang suspended in air for hours without discomfort. A hand raised by conscious will tires in minutes.) In this light hypnotic trance, make to yourself positive (never negative) suggestions: Tonight I will write with ease; or, tonight I’ll feel no need to smoke so much. Most people discover that autohypnosis helps. Deep hypnosis by someone else, or more sophisticated forms of autohypnosis, may bring still greater benefit. If the trick doesn’t work, never mind; sitting for half an hour in a dimly lit, quiet room is good for the psyche.

In its extreme form, the inhibition I’ve been describing ends in writer’s block, not so much a failure of faith as a failure of will. The writer suffering writer’s block can think of good plots and characters, or anyway he can think of good starts, which is all a healthy writer needs, but he can’t persuade himself that they’re worth writing down or developing. It’s all been done before, he tells himself. And if he does, by a supreme effort, get down a few sentences, he finds the sentences disgustingly bad. In effect, a Platonic dream of what fiction ought to be has thrown its dark shadow not only over the actual rough draft the writer has begun, poisoning the writer’s eye and robbing him of the strength it takes to transform the crude rough draft into a polished work of art, but over the very possibility of creating art.

Part of the writer’s problem may be the wrong kind of appreciation: when he does work he knows to be less than he’s capable of, his friends praise precisely those things he knows to be weak or meretricious. The writer who cannot write because nothing he writes is good enough, by his own standards, and because no one around him seems to share his standards, is in a special sort of bind: the love of good fiction that got him started in the first place makes him scornful of the flawed writing he does (nearly all first-draft writing is flawed), and his sense that nobody cares about truly good fiction robs him of motivation. This dissatisfaction is one the unusually talented writer may be especially prone to. Driven by the imperative “Make it new,” he finds nothing he’s written sufficiently original. In effect, he has failed to notice that originality is normally a quality achieved by diligence, not a natural condition. A glance at Hawthorne’s first novel,
Fansbaw
, or any early piece by Melville, may prove instructive.

Another writer’s blockage—a more serious blockage—may arise from an excessive need for a success not actually related to good writing: an excessive need to please admirers (that is, to be loved), or prove himself vastly superior to others (that is, to be superhuman), or justify his existence against the too obstreperous cry of some old psychological wound (that is, to be redeemed). No amount of work can solve this writer’s problem, because nothing he writes satisfies the actual motive behind it.

It is probably true that in some cases writer’s block is incurable; but no useful purpose is served by making a great point of this, since one can never be sure whether a particular case will respond to treatment. As with all writer problems, it is usually a good idea for the writer to get as clear a notion as possible of just what is going wrong psychologically—whether on his own or with the help of someone trained in such things—and for the writer to understand that his problem, though perhaps uncommon, is not unheard of. In a given case, one or more of the following general observations may be helpful.

The writer should remind himself of how his writing went when he first began: tortuous labor and revision and gradual improvement, and first drafts at least as bad as the one he faces now—except that in those days he saw the faults less clearly, felt more excited by the possibilities, and was tricked by the exhilaration of new love. After the initial difficulties, the period of apprenticeship, writers have a tendency to think things ought to get easier. That rarely happens. As one learns more and more technical tricks, one finds oneself taking on more and more difficult projects. Instead of getting easier, one feels the work getting harder; or at any rate that’s my experience. The writer impatient with his story idea, and impatient with whatever writing he can get down, has forgotten how fiction actually gets written.