mind seems tightened like a muscle, fierce with concentration. Anyway, if one is lucky the lightning strikes, and the madness at the core of the fictional idea for a moment glows on the page.
4
After verbal sensitivity, accuracy of eye, and a measure of the special intelligence of the storyteller, what the writer probably needs most is an almost daemonic compulsiveness. No novelist is hurt (at least as an artist) by a natural inclination to go to extremes, driving himself too hard, dissatisfied with himself and the world around him and driven to improve on both if he can.
A psychological wound is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven. Some fatal childhood accident for which one feels responsible and can never fully forgive oneself; a sense that one never quite earned one’s parents’ love; shame about one’s origins—belligerent defensive guilt about one’s race or country upbringing or the physical handicaps of one’s parents—or embarrassment about one’s own physical appearance: all these are promising signs. It may or may not be true that happy, well-adjusted children can become great novelists, but insofar as guilt or shame bend the soul inward they are likely, under the right conditions (neither too little discomfort nor too much), to serve the writer’s project. By the nature of his work it is important that one way or another the novelist learn to depend primarily on himself, not others, that he love without too much need and dependency, and look inward (or toward some private standard) for approval and support. Often one finds novelists are people who learned in childhood to turn, in times of distress, to their own fantasies or to fiction, the voice of some comforting writer, not to human beings near at hand. This is not to deny that it also helps if a novelist finds himself with one or more loved ones who believe in his gift and work.
The novelist is in a fundamentally different situation from the writer of short stories or the poet. Generally speaking, if he wins, he wins more handsomely than they do: a commercially successful artistic novel—especially a third or fourth one—may bring in upwards of a hundred thousand dollars (no real win by businesspeople’s standards; it may have taken him ten years to write) and in addition may bring stature, honor, maybe love letters from photogenic strangers. None of that is—or ought to be—the reason the novelist chose the genre he works in. He is the particular kind of writer he is, what William Gass has called a “big-breath writer,” and in effect he does what is most natural for him. He has, unlike the poet or short story writer, the endurance and pace of a marathon runner. As Fitzgerald put it, there is a peasant in every good novelist. And he has, besides, the kind of ambition peculiar to novelists—a taste for the monumental. He may begin as a short story writer; most novelists do. But he quickly comes to find himself too narrowly caged: he needs more space, more characters, more world. So he writes his large book and, as I began by saying, if he wins, he wins handsomely. The trouble is (and this is the point I’ve been struggling toward), the novelist does not win nearly as often as do poets and writers of short stories. That is why he needs to be a driven man, or at any rate directed by inner forces, not daily or monthly bursts of applause. A good poem takes a couple of days, maybe a week, to write. A good short story takes about the same. A novel may take years. All writers thrive on praise and publication; the novelist is the writer who makes the huge, long-term investment, one that may or may not pay off.
A writer’s successes bring him more than praise, publication, or money: they also help him toward confidence. With each success, writers, like stunt riders and ballet dancers, learn to dare more: they take on riskier projects and become more exacting in their standards. They get better. Here the
4
After verbal sensitivity, accuracy of eye, and a measure of the special intelligence of the storyteller, what the writer probably needs most is an almost daemonic compulsiveness. No novelist is hurt (at least as an artist) by a natural inclination to go to extremes, driving himself too hard, dissatisfied with himself and the world around him and driven to improve on both if he can.
A psychological wound is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven. Some fatal childhood accident for which one feels responsible and can never fully forgive oneself; a sense that one never quite earned one’s parents’ love; shame about one’s origins—belligerent defensive guilt about one’s race or country upbringing or the physical handicaps of one’s parents—or embarrassment about one’s own physical appearance: all these are promising signs. It may or may not be true that happy, well-adjusted children can become great novelists, but insofar as guilt or shame bend the soul inward they are likely, under the right conditions (neither too little discomfort nor too much), to serve the writer’s project. By the nature of his work it is important that one way or another the novelist learn to depend primarily on himself, not others, that he love without too much need and dependency, and look inward (or toward some private standard) for approval and support. Often one finds novelists are people who learned in childhood to turn, in times of distress, to their own fantasies or to fiction, the voice of some comforting writer, not to human beings near at hand. This is not to deny that it also helps if a novelist finds himself with one or more loved ones who believe in his gift and work.
The novelist is in a fundamentally different situation from the writer of short stories or the poet. Generally speaking, if he wins, he wins more handsomely than they do: a commercially successful artistic novel—especially a third or fourth one—may bring in upwards of a hundred thousand dollars (no real win by businesspeople’s standards; it may have taken him ten years to write) and in addition may bring stature, honor, maybe love letters from photogenic strangers. None of that is—or ought to be—the reason the novelist chose the genre he works in. He is the particular kind of writer he is, what William Gass has called a “big-breath writer,” and in effect he does what is most natural for him. He has, unlike the poet or short story writer, the endurance and pace of a marathon runner. As Fitzgerald put it, there is a peasant in every good novelist. And he has, besides, the kind of ambition peculiar to novelists—a taste for the monumental. He may begin as a short story writer; most novelists do. But he quickly comes to find himself too narrowly caged: he needs more space, more characters, more world. So he writes his large book and, as I began by saying, if he wins, he wins handsomely. The trouble is (and this is the point I’ve been struggling toward), the novelist does not win nearly as often as do poets and writers of short stories. That is why he needs to be a driven man, or at any rate directed by inner forces, not daily or monthly bursts of applause. A good poem takes a couple of days, maybe a week, to write. A good short story takes about the same. A novel may take years. All writers thrive on praise and publication; the novelist is the writer who makes the huge, long-term investment, one that may or may not pay off.
A writer’s successes bring him more than praise, publication, or money: they also help him toward confidence. With each success, writers, like stunt riders and ballet dancers, learn to dare more: they take on riskier projects and become more exacting in their standards. They get better. Here the
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