"Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel" by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Thousand Acres which updated King Lear and transported it to Iowa. In this book she reads a hundred novels, written over a thousand years, and tries to distil from her reading ideas of what makes a novel.

Are there 13 ways? I rather lost count. There are thirteen chapters but they include the Introduction and an explanation of how she set about her three year readathon. The clock that she imagines in chapter 9, the Circle of the Novel, lists 12 aspects of a novel. My notes on her ideas combine rather more than thirteen ideas. I must have missed the tabulation.

But some of her ideas are fascinating and inspiring to one who, like myself. aspires to write a novel (and to write worthwhile critiques of the novels I have read in this blog).

However, I would sound a note of caution. In the final analysis, Smiley appears to believe that the novel is fundamentally individualistic and stands up for the rights of the individual against the conformity-seeking group. For example, in her chapter on the art of the novel she asserts that “The novel is always about freedom” and argues that “societies have only a few basic categories of work, and four of them are government, religion, daily survival, and nurturing the next generation. Each of these functions requires group effort, and in each it is essential that the individual subordinate himself or herself to the discipline of the group. A fifth category, apparently present in almost every human society, is the making of art (including the telling of stories). In this category, idiosyncrasy is prized, in part because art is perceived as play and is supposed to be ... fun.” Her arguments are persuasive; her examples all suggest that this is so. I just wondered whether Smiley would have been quite so certain of this thesis if she hadn't been brought up in the USA with its emphasis on the individual and freedom and the rights of the individual against the state, and was brought up instead in a society such as China and Japan where the needs of the group may be paramount. The history of western literature may support Smiley, and of course she could define the novel as quintessentially an artistic work within the canon of western literature, but perhaps there is another way of looking at extended prose fictions outside of that particular box.

She starts by defining the novel as “a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” Each of these aspects affects what novels are and what they can do. For example, prose becomes possible because the novel is written; lengthy oral traditions such as epic require poetry as an aid to memory. Prose, she says later, "is for exploring what is unique about situations and characters - we might say that prose is ‘Aristotelian’. Poetry is for exploring what incidents and persons typify - it is ‘Platonic’.” The length also enables in-depth studies of characters within contexts.

She identifies twelves styles of discourse that a novel may contain, and she suggests that the great novels contain many of these styles: Travel, History, Biography, Tale, Joke, Gossip, Diary or letter, Confession, Polemic, Essay, Epic, and Romance.

Plots, she says, come in four bits:

• Exposition in the first 10%
• Rising action during which “Something that seems implausible at the time of the exposition - the climax - is being prepared for. ... The novel becomes more and more different from life.”
• Climax (at the 90% point). This is where, for example, Tom Jones is about to be hanged and Madame Bovary poisons herself
• Denouement.

But she also points out that (and here she is very precise) “Almost every novel gathers itself at the 62% 

mark, changes strategy, and freshens. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Bob Ewell lies on the stand about seeing Tom and his daughter having sex. ... In Madame Bovary Emma ... goes to see her first opera ... which quickens her romantic yearnings.”

It is interesting to compare these ideas with, for example, The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler, Inside Story by Dara Marks, and Into the Woods by John Yorke which borrow from film the idea of a three-act structure in which the turning points come at the 25%, 50% and 75% points.

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking book about novels.

Some great lines:

• “My philosophical stance was one of not knowing any answers and not believing that there were any answers.” (Introduction)
• “It was like dating someone new who was nice enough but not nearly as exciting as the old boyfriend who had moved to Europe.” (Introduction)
• “The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give up accuracy in the pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact.” (What is a novel?)
• “The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence - verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm).” (Who is a novelist?)
• “A novel is a hypothesis. A novelist shares with a scientist the wish to observe. The novelist also shares with the scientist a partial and imperfect knowledge of the phenomenon he wishes to observe. And so both novelist and scientist say ‘what if?’” (Who is a novelist?)
• “The novel ... is a theory of being. A novel proposes that the world has a certain mode of existing. It doesn't propose this by asserting it explicitly, but by depicting it implicitly.” (Who is a novelist?)
• “The novelist has many pleasures to offer - the unusual pleasure of the exotic, the intellectual pleasure of historical understanding, the humane pleasure of psychological insight into one or more characters, the simple pleasure of entertainment and suspense, the exuberant pleasure of laughter and trickery, the guilty pleasure of gossip, the tempting pleasure of secrecy and intimacy, the confessional pleasure of acknowledged sin and attempted redemption, the polemical pleasure of indignation, the rigorous pleasure of intellectual analysis, the reassuring pleasure of identification with one's nation or people, and the vicarious pleasure of romance.” (The psychology of the novel)
• “Heathcliff is rude by choice. Since charm is one of the qualities that keeps readers reading, Heathcliff's rudeness has to be compensated for, and it never is.” (Morality and the novel)
• "When the literary culture at large tries to impose an answer by insisting that ‘authenticity’ resides in the sex or the ethnic or national origin or biographical experience of the author, it kills the very thing that makes the literary culture vibrant, which is the sense of freedom, vitality, and power the author feels while he is creating his work.” (The art of the novel)
• “The underlying assertion of almost every novel is that meaning exists and can be understood because it can be arranged in a sequence that then takes on some sort of logic.” (The novel and history)
• “We seem to live in a world now where all thoughts are focused on the idea of prevailing, of imposing one's beliefs on others, and no thoughts, no thoughts are given to the costs of prevailing, or even what it means. Have these people never read Moby-Dick? well, no, they haven’t.” (The novel and history)
• “Those who don't read novels are condemned to repeat the oldest mistakes in literature - the mistake of hubris, a Greek mistake, and the mistake of attributing one's own emotions to God, a Judeo-Christian-Islamic mistake.” (The novel and history)
• “If the novel has died for the bureaucrats who run our country, then they are more likely not to pause before engaging in arrogant, narcissistic, and foolish policies.” (The novel and history)
• “Freud maintained that the two great human endeavours are love and work. ... In many novels work exists more as furniture than motivation.” (The circle of the novel)
• “Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.” (A novel of your own (I))

August 2019; 570 pages

"Ernest Hemingway on Writing" edited by Larry W Phillips

In this short book Phillips has collected quotes from Hemingway about writing, culled from his letters, his newspaper articles and interviews and his short stories and novels. These have then been arranged into thirteen chapters. It gives an insight into Hemingway, a man always trying to "write truly". There is little practical advice to aspiring writers (such as myself) but mostly exhortations. In this world where authors are mostly told to concentrate on technical details such as plot or character it is refreshing to see that Heningway (like Lamott in Bird by Bird or Prose in Reading Like a Writer) focuses so strongly on the words.

Some great quotes (this gentleman certainly had a gift for words):

• “I am trying to make ... a picture of the whole world ... boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.” (C 1)
• “The secret is that it is poetry written into prose” (C 1)
• “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” (C 2)
• “If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the knowledge of life that he has.” (C 2)
• “You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.” (C 3)
• “When you're in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars.” (C 5)
• “You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a licence to bring in your own improvements.” (C 5)
• “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” (C 6)
• "Keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.” (C 7)
• “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” (C 7)
• “Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.” (C 8)
• “Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company ... All these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language. Nor would you gather they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice, dry, clean minds.” (C 11)
• “It has always been much more exciting to write them to be paid for it.” (C 13)
• “I only think about writing truly. Posterity can take care of herself.” (C 13)
• “Some gents when they are working on a novel may be social assets but I am just about as pleasant to be around as a bear with sore toenails.” (C 13)
• “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” (C 13)

July 2019; 140 pages

"Reading like a writer" by Francine Prose

The title of this book is a little misleading. True, chapter one explains that you have to read closely (and slowly) to fully appreciate the brilliance of good writers but the purpose of the rest of the book is to carefully analyse extracts from the masters in order to show a wannabe writer like myself how to write.

There were moments of wonder as this book discovered for me how great authors write. There were moments of terror when I realised, with her, that “Some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light.” But I have taken the bait and ingested the gateway drug and I am now hooked. Prose says at the end:  “The compulsion to spend long hours writing can deform a ‘normal’ life.” That should have been written over the doorway to hell. The trouble is that you never quite abandon hope and so you keep on going. Oh well. What else did I learn?

A selection of what else I learnt:

• “In the ongoing process of becoming a writer ... I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required was a friend calls ‘putting every word on trial for its life’: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.”
• “You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resurrect a zombie army of dead white males.”
• “Reading quickly - for plot, for ideas, even for the psychological truths that a story reveals - can be a hindrance when the crucial revelations are in the spaces between words”
• “It's necessary to hold the concept clarity as an even higher ideal than grammatical correctness.”
• “Rhythm is nearly as important in prose as it is in poetry. I have heard a number of writers say that they would rather choose the slightly wrong word that made their sentence more musical than the precisely right one that made it more awkward and clumsy.”
• “It's helpful to consider the parallels to music, the way that, at the end of a symphony, the tempo slows down and chords become more sustained or dramatic, with overtones that reverberate and echo after the musicians have stopped playing.”
• “Considering how frequently people get sick, it's strange that writers don't write about illness more often.”
• “A new paragraph ... lets you quietly change the rhythm ... and ... shows the same landscape from a different aspect.”
• “Paragraphs ... end with little climaxes”
• “A one-sentence paragraph feels like a punch.” “If the writer is going to draw attention to the stand-alone sentence, the sentence had better be worth it.”
• “Most conversations involve a sort of sophisticated multitasking ... We are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal. And sometimes we are hoping to prevent the listener from noticing what we are not saying ... As a result, dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext as text.”
• “Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth” but not too many; “Liars know that it's the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story.”
• “Great writers painstakingly construct their fiction with small but significant details that, brushstroke by brushstroke, paint the pictures the artists hope to portray.”
• “Often a well-chosen detail can tell us more about a character ... then a long explanatory passage.”
• “A true description of nature should be very brief ... commonplaces one ought to abandon ... seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such a way that, in reading, when you shut your eyes you get the picture.”
• "If a character is going to light a cigarette ... it should mean something.”
• “The wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interestingly and truthfully you will write.”
• “As the world drops away in stages, as it does for the dying, we move deeper into its hero’s psyche.”

A superb manual on how to write. May 2019; 268 pages

"The Art of Fiction" by David Lodge

Novelist and literary critic David Lodge offers fifty bite-sized chapter, each dealing with one aspect of the art of writing a novel. Each chapter is introduced by a well-chosen excerpt from Lodge's extensive reading.

The only trouble is that there is so much great advice I felt a little overwhelmed. How dare one presume to write a novel when there is so much to think about? The second problem (because when a writer starts a paragraph with 'the only trouble' you can be sure that there is more than one, them coming not single spies but in battalions to misquote Claudius) is that the examples he gives are drawn from the masters (Jane Austen, James Joyce etc) so that one feels that one feels intimidated by the seemingly effortless brilliance displayed.

Even his analyses suggest that an expert reads books at a deeper level than I can. I hadn't realised that “Orwell himself echoes the story of Adam and Eve in his treatment of the love affair between Winston and Julia, secretly monitored and finally punished by Big Brother”. To give another example, Lodge analyses what he calls 'skaz' which is "A type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word ... an illusion that can create a powerful effect of authenticity and sincerity” and which he shows involves repetition, exaggeration, short uncomplicated sentences, and sentence fragments, and in which "clauses are strung together as they seem to occur to the speaker, rather than being subordinated to each other in complex structures.” !!!

There are so many wonderful pieces of advice that all I could do was make a tiny, representative (I hope) selection of a few:

• “The stream-of-consciousness novel is the literary expression of solipsism ... but we could equally well argue that it offers us some relief from that daunting hypothesis by offering us imaginative access to the inner lives of other human beings, even if they are fictions.”
• “The essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in an unfamiliar way.”
• “What do we mean that ... when we say that a book is ‘original’? Not, usually, that's the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us ‘perceive’ what we already ... ‘know’.”
• “All description in fiction is highly selective; its basically rhetorical technique is synecdoche, the part standing for the whole.”
• “Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, the belief that ‘God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died’.”
• “The crucially important last word-space in the paragraph.”
• “One of the difficulties in writing truthfully about working-class life in fiction ... is that the novel itself is inherently a middle-class form, and its narrative voice is apt to betray this bias in every turn of phrase.”
• “A characteristic of comedy in fiction: a combination of surprise ... and conformity to pattern.”
• “It is only superficially paradoxical that most novels about the future are narrated in the past tense.”
• “Popular science fiction ... is a curious mixture of invented gadgetry and archetypal narrative motifs very obviously derived from folk tale, fairy tale, and Scripture, recycling the myths of Creation, Fall, Flood and a Divine Saviour, for a secular but still superstitious age.”
• “There is always a trade-off in the writing of fiction between the achievement of structure, pattern and closure on the one hand, and the imitation of life's randomness, inconsequentiality and openness on the other.”
• “It has been said that all novels are essentially about the passage from innocence to experience, about discovering the reality that underlies appearances. It is not surprising, therefore, that stylistic and dramatic irony are all-pervasive in this form of literature.”
• “The explicit treatment of sexual acts is certainly another challenge to the novelist artistry ... how to defamiliarize the inherently limited repertoire of sexual acts”
• “Classic tales of the uncanny invariably use ‘I’ narrators, and imitate documentary forms of discourse like confessions, letters and depositions to make the events more credible.”

This is a book for every wannabe novelist to keep on the nearest shelf to the writing desk. I will!

It also contains a bibliography so I have another seven books to add to the must-read list.

The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock and Aspects of the Novel by E M Forster are works of literary criticism which also provide a wannabe novelist like myself with guidance as to how to write a novel.

Write Away by Elizabeth George and On Writing by Stephen King are also well worth reading although they are more focused on the craft of story-telling than on analysing literary classics.

May 2019; 230 pages

"Write Away" by Elizabeth George

This is a brilliant little guide to the craft of writing novels by the author of the Inspector Lynley series of novels of which she has written twenty as well as seven other fiction books. Clearly a prolific writer she suggests that her success is due to 'bum glue': when she is writing she writes five pages a day on the first draft and fifty (!) pages a day on the second draft.

But this is not an inspirational 'you too can be like me' book; rather it is a manual of tips and techniques. She is superb when she tells how to create characters:

• “Real people have flaws. We're all works in progress on planet Earth ... No one wants to read about flawless characters ... Would anyone want a person like that as a friend, tediously wonderful in every way? ... A character possessing perfection one area should possess imperfection in another.” (p 9)
• “As individuals we're all riddled with issues of self doubt ... So, in literature, we want to see characters who make mistakes, who have lapses of judgement, who experience weakness from time to time.” (p 10)
• “Characters learn something from the unfolding events, and the reader learns something too, has the character is revealed slowly by the writer, who peels away a layer at a time.” (p 11)
• “Make certain you are putting them into conflict.” (p 12)
• “When I'm designing a character, I begin with a name ... it's impossible to create a character without one.” (p 12)
• “You cannot bring a character to life in a book unless he or she is alive before the book begins.” (p 13)
• “The creation of characters allows me to understand how each will talk - what his actual dialogue will be like - as well as how his narrative voice will sound ... The words a character uses, the syntax he employs, and his diction thus become another tool to reveal him to the reader.” (p 14)

She also is careful to distinguish between setting, place and landscape:

• Landscape is “the broad vista into which the writer actually places the individual settings of the novel, sort of like the canvas” (p 34)
• “What I generally do is begin by going to the place ... I consider the land itself ... what grows upon it ... its shape and its texture ... the marks that succeeding cultures have left upon it ... its buildings and how they alter from one area to another.” (p 37) The sky: “clouds ... deep colour ... moisture ... the stars” (p 38) The climate and the weather. “The sounds and scents of a place” (p 38) “Wildlife or the lack of wildlife” (p 38) “What people do there or are not able to do there” (p 38)

She points out that characters have internal landscapes:

• “What a character looks like, how he dresses, the house in which he lives, his office, his car, his bicycle, his boat, his apartment ...” (p 39)
• “The simplest way to achieve landscape of a person is to use specific and telling details.” (p 39) Start with stereotypes and tweak them. (p 40)
• "We all possess emotions, psyches, and souls. We have wants and needs. We engage in reflections, speculations, obsessions ...” (p 41)
• “I’ll attempt to choose an incident or a topic that, reflected upon [by the character], can serve as a metaphor for the state of a character’s soul.” (p 41)

She is also very interesting on plot and offers a number of possible plot maps:

• The Seven-Step Story Line
• The Hero’s Journey
• Gustav Freitag’s Pyramid
• Three Act Structure
• Double Plot: two interwoven plots
• Hourglass: two plots which run separately until they converge in the middle and then separate again
• Picaresque: separate events related by theme and by characters.

There is also a great many really useful practical tips in this superb book. If I can't write after reading this I can't write. For example, she lists "eight ways to wield the hook" and considers the pros and cons of different narrations. Her fundamental attitude is that the writer must "seduce the reader to continue the story.”

It is quite brilliant.

And by the way, “What Agatha Christie did was to fashion her scenes so that the clue was present but so was the red herring. And the scene pivoted around the red herring, not around the clue.”

Other books about how to write include

• The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock 
• Aspects of the Novel by E M Forster 
• On Writing by Stephen King 
• The Art of Fiction by David Lodge

February 2019; 285 pages