"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

"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

“Aspects of the Novel” by E M Forster

The writer of classic novels including A Passage to India, Howard's End, Room With a View, Maurice, and Where Angels Fear to Tread, eloquently explains his understanding of this art-form.

He professes difficulty in defining the novel, citing works as diverse as Tristram Shandy, Emma, War and Peace, Moby-Dick, and The White Peacock. This is a man who has read widely! He settles for the novel being “a fiction in prose” of at least 50,000 words. (p 25)

“The novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.” (p 40) “A story is a narrative of events arranged in time-sequence.” (p 44) The secret is to keep the reader turning the pages. “Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense - the only literate tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.” (p 41) Therefore a story “can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” (p 42) “Telling a story ... shock-headed public gaping around the camp-fire and only kept awake by suspense ... storyteller needn't pick up loose threads. As long as he keeps his shock-heads excited he needs no plot.” (p 160) However, a novelist aspiring to be an artist should “Interest the reader in people - not in what happens next.” (p 174)

Novels are about characters. But here he distinguishes fiction from memoir or biography or history because “A historian ... is quite as much concerned with character as a novelist, but he can only know of its existence when it shows on the surface.” (p 55)

He points out that novelists tend to ignore many of the facts of life such as " birth, food, sleep, love and death.” (p 57) In novels most babies “come into the world more like parcels than human beings. When a baby arrives a novel it usually has the air of having been posted ... one of the elder characters goes and picks it up and shows it to the reader, after which it is usually laid in cold storage until it can talk or otherwise assist in the action.” (p 60) “The treatment of death, on the other hand, is nourished much more on observation, and has a variety about it which suggests that the novelist finds it congenial. He does, for the reason that death ends a book neatly.” (p 61) Furthermore “Food in fiction is mainly social. It draws characters together, but they seldom require it physiologically, seldom enjoy it, and never digest it unless specially asked to do so.” (p 61) Sleep is useful when dreams can be recounted but a character “is never conceived as a creature, a third of whose time is spent in the darkness.” (p 62) And novels are obsessed with relationships. “The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other ... is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure.” (p 62) Thus “Homo Fictus ... is generally born off, he is capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And - most importantly - we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.” (p 63)

He distinguishes between flat and round characters. “Flat characters were called ‘humours’ in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures ... They are constructed around a single idea or quality ... Really flat characters can be expressed in one sentence.” (p 73) “One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized ... they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere.” (p 74) “A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards.” “Dickens’s people are nearly all flat ... Nearly every one can be summed up in a sentence ... Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognise the instant they re-enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow.Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad. ... His immense success with types suggests that there may be more to flatness than the severer critics admit.” (p 76)

He is sceptical about the idea of point of view pointing out that both Dickens in Bleak House and Tolstoy in War and Peace shift viewpoints “A novelist can shift his viewpoint if it comes off ... Indeed this power to expand and contract perception ... this right to intermittent knowledge - I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life.” (p 83)

He explains how plot can be distinguished from story: “A plot is ... a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” (p 87) And what is essential about a plot? “This element of surprise or mystery - the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called - is of great importance in a plot ... Mystery is essential to a plot ... To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.” (p 88) However, “Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up.” (p 93 - 94) “Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake now have to contribute to the denouement.” (p 94)

Some plots have patterns eg: the shape of an hour-glass in a cross-over plot or the shape of a circle or a chain which binds “the scattered incidents together with a thread woven out of their own substance.” (p 136) However, he warns that "A rigid pattern ... may externalise the atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on life, and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing room. Beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise. ... tyranny as it grows powerful grows petty.” (p 145) He cites Henry James.

He has many more insights, beautifully (and sometimes confrontationally) expressed:

• “Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.” (p 30 - 31)
• “The world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.” (p 34)
• “We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like ... but it is all from the outside.” (p 57) 
• “Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.” (p 58)
• “Food the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, ... taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.” (p 58) 
• “When human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep.” (p 59)
• “One of the illusions attached to love is that it will be permanent. Not has been - will be.” (p 63) 
• “All our experience teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance it like jugglers if it is to remain.” (p 63) 
• “All this we know, yet we cannot bear to apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity for alertness. We are to be happy or even perhaps miserable for ever and ever.” (p 63)
• “If God could tell the story of the universe, the universe would become fictitious.” (p 64)
• “You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.” (p 87)
• “For two inquisitive people to be friends must be impossible.” (p 88)
• “Perhaps our subject ... has stolen away from us while we theorize, like a shadow from an ascending bird. The bird is all right - it climbs, it is consistent and eminent. The shadow is all right - it has flickered across roads and gardens. But the two things resemble one another less and less, they do not touch as they did when the bird rested its toes on the ground.” (p 101)
• “The saying of St Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea.” (p 122)
• “The fantasist ... manipulates a beam of light which occasionally touches the objects so sedulously dusted by the hand of common sense, and renders them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity. ... It characterizes these novels and gives them ... roughness of surface.” (p 124)
• “As a rule, evil has been feebly envisaged in fiction, which seldom soars about misconduct or avoids the clouds of mysteriousness. Evil to most novelists is either sexual and social, or something very vague ... they want it to exist, in order that it may help them on with the plot, and evil, not being kind, generally hampers them with a villain.” (p 128)
• “Immediate Past is like a stuffy room, and the succeeding generation waste their time in trying to tolerate it. All they can do is to go out leaving the door open behind them. The door may be spacious, witty, harmonious, friendly, but it smells, and there is no getting around this.” (p 161)
• “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” (p 165)
• “H.J. in The Turn Of The Screw is merely declining to think about homosex, and the knowledge that he is declining throws him into the necessary fluster.” (p 171)
• “Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.” (p 171)
• “Time bears all its son's away unless they look sharp.” (p 173)

Stupendous and eye-opening. October 2018; 187 pages

Another similar book of literary criticism is The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"On writing" by Stephen King

Stephen King is the best selling American novelist of horror classics such as Carrie, Misery and The Shining; one of his stories became the film The Shawshank Redemption which is at the top of many people's list of all-time best movies. Although I have never read one of his books (I don't like horror as a genre) his success suggests that he is an excellent wordsmith. This book reinforces that belief.

Subtitled "A memoir of the craft” this book is indeed part memoir and part textbook. Thus, the introduction gives way to a substantial CV in which he describes his early life and how he tried to keep writing while married with two children and working all hours to afford food on the table, medicine when they were unwell and parts for the car. The final section, "On living" describes how he began writing again after a nearly fatal road accident. In between these parts "Toolbox" lists the things that a writer, any writer, needs to know (mostly things to avoid such as long words, the passive voice, and adverbs) while "On Writing" describes how he works from characters and a situation to create a story.

It is excellent.

In passing he also shows that he is a master of prose. I really ought to read at least some of his fiction.

A small selection of his brilliance:

• "When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.” (p 17)
• “When you're still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.” (p 34)
• “When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story ... When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” (p 56)
• “Good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven. If stone sober people can fuck like they're out of their minds ... why shouldn't writers be able to go bonkers and still stay sane?” (p 65)
• “For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.” (p 80)
• “I went to school with kids who wore the same neck dirt for months.” (p 85)
• “By then I was no longer within shouting distance of my right mind.” (p 107)
• “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you are maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.” (p 129)
• “One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose.” (p 165)
• “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.” (p 168)
• “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. the writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” (p 188)
• “No one is ‘the bad guy’ or ‘the best friend’ or ‘the whore with a heart of gold’ in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us baby.” (p 224)
• “I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones.” (p 324)
• “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” (p 325)
• “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.” (p 327)

Fabulous. September 2018; 327 pages