merciless.
I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again, work some more, month after month, year after year, and then one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it’s published and you read the printed book you see a thousand.) This tortuous process is not necessary, I suspect, for the writing of a popular novel in which the characters are not meant to have depth and complexity, where character A is consistently stingy and character B is consistently openhearted and nobody is a mass of contradictions, as are real human beings. But for a true novel there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking. We’ve all heard the stories of Tolstoy’s pains over Anna Karenina , Jane Austen’s over Emma , or even Dostoevsky’s over Crime and Punishment , a novel he grieved at having to publish prematurely, though he had worked at it much longer than most popular-fiction writers work at their novels.
So by the nature of the novelist’s artistic process, success comes rarely. The worst result of this is that the novelist has a hard time achieving what I’ve called “authority,” by which I do not mean confidence—the habit of believing one can do whatever one’s art requires—but, rather, something visible on the page, or audible in the author’s voice, an impression we get, and immediately trust, that this is a man who knows what he’s doing—the same impression we get from great paintings or musical compositions. Nothing seems wasted, or labored, or tentative. We do not get the slightest sense that the writer is struggling to hear in his mind what he’s saying, the rhythm with which he’s saying it, and how it relates to something later in the book. As if without effort, he does it all at once. He snaps into the trance state as if nothing were easier. Probably only examples can suggest what I mean.
Notice the careful, tentative quality of the opening paragraph of Melville’s Omoo:
It was in the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that we made good our escape from the bay. The vessel we sought lay with her main-topsail aback about a league from the land, and was the only object that broke the broad expanse of the ocean.
There is, I think, nothing actively bad about this writing; but we get no sense of the speaker’s character, no clear mood from the rhythm (we cannot tell how seriously to take the word “escape”), certainly no sense of prose invading the domain of poetry. If you’re musical you will notice that the sentences fall naturally into 4/4 time. That is:*
Compare what the same writer can do once he’s found his booming, authoritative voice:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.….
That is what I mean by authority. No further comment is necessary, but notice how flowing, tricky, and finely balanced the music is. (Needless to say, another reader might analyze the rhythms differently. My notation reflects my own hearing of the sentences.)
In Omoo the rhythms plod and dully echo each other:
In Moby Dick the rhythms lift and roll, pause, gather, roll again. A few figures establish the basic pattern. For example, note the permutations of
Melville, we may be sure, did not sit down and score his rhythms like a composer, but his ear found them—found brilliantly subtle rhythmic variations, poetically functional alliteration (compare “broke the broad expanse of the ocean,” in Omoo , with “watery part of the world. It is a way I have,” in Moby Dick ), and at the same time found orbicular rhetoric like a nineteenth-century congressman’s or a Presbyterian minister’s (as Mark Twain might say), and a compressed, energetic way of going for meaning. He reached
I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again, work some more, month after month, year after year, and then one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it’s published and you read the printed book you see a thousand.) This tortuous process is not necessary, I suspect, for the writing of a popular novel in which the characters are not meant to have depth and complexity, where character A is consistently stingy and character B is consistently openhearted and nobody is a mass of contradictions, as are real human beings. But for a true novel there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking. We’ve all heard the stories of Tolstoy’s pains over Anna Karenina , Jane Austen’s over Emma , or even Dostoevsky’s over Crime and Punishment , a novel he grieved at having to publish prematurely, though he had worked at it much longer than most popular-fiction writers work at their novels.
So by the nature of the novelist’s artistic process, success comes rarely. The worst result of this is that the novelist has a hard time achieving what I’ve called “authority,” by which I do not mean confidence—the habit of believing one can do whatever one’s art requires—but, rather, something visible on the page, or audible in the author’s voice, an impression we get, and immediately trust, that this is a man who knows what he’s doing—the same impression we get from great paintings or musical compositions. Nothing seems wasted, or labored, or tentative. We do not get the slightest sense that the writer is struggling to hear in his mind what he’s saying, the rhythm with which he’s saying it, and how it relates to something later in the book. As if without effort, he does it all at once. He snaps into the trance state as if nothing were easier. Probably only examples can suggest what I mean.
Notice the careful, tentative quality of the opening paragraph of Melville’s Omoo:
It was in the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that we made good our escape from the bay. The vessel we sought lay with her main-topsail aback about a league from the land, and was the only object that broke the broad expanse of the ocean.
There is, I think, nothing actively bad about this writing; but we get no sense of the speaker’s character, no clear mood from the rhythm (we cannot tell how seriously to take the word “escape”), certainly no sense of prose invading the domain of poetry. If you’re musical you will notice that the sentences fall naturally into 4/4 time. That is:*
Compare what the same writer can do once he’s found his booming, authoritative voice:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.….
That is what I mean by authority. No further comment is necessary, but notice how flowing, tricky, and finely balanced the music is. (Needless to say, another reader might analyze the rhythms differently. My notation reflects my own hearing of the sentences.)
In Omoo the rhythms plod and dully echo each other:
In Moby Dick the rhythms lift and roll, pause, gather, roll again. A few figures establish the basic pattern. For example, note the permutations of
Melville, we may be sure, did not sit down and score his rhythms like a composer, but his ear found them—found brilliantly subtle rhythmic variations, poetically functional alliteration (compare “broke the broad expanse of the ocean,” in Omoo , with “watery part of the world. It is a way I have,” in Moby Dick ), and at the same time found orbicular rhetoric like a nineteenth-century congressman’s or a Presbyterian minister’s (as Mark Twain might say), and a compressed, energetic way of going for meaning. He reached
Similar Books
