∗
There are three impersonal forces – three guardian spirits – hovering over the theme park of fiction; they are there to help you; they are your friends.
First: genre. If you write Westerns, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to Westerns. If you write historical romance, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to historical romance. If you write social realism, you will have the tacit support of all those attracted to society and reality – a rather larger quorum. And you have the ballast of the familiar and the everyday; you have the ballast of human interaction and the way we live now.
Second: structure. If it has energy, fictional prose will tend to be headstrong. Structure is there to keep it in line. It’s a question of chopping up the narrative and parcelling it out in a satisfying pattern. Once the pattern is formed, you can be confident that the building won’t fall apart overnight; the scaffolds are in place.
Third: the subconscious.
On this subject I hesitate to say too much – because I don’t want to spook you. The mysterious contribution of the subconscious, in particular, is spooky (it’s why Norman Mailer called his collection of his very perceptive ‘thoughts on writing’ The Spooky Art). The business of compiling a novel puts you in near-daily contact with a force that feels supernatural (and duly gives rise to superstitions).
I’d been writing fiction for twenty years before I was personally aware of its existence, let alone its power. In the old days when I was young, if I came up against a difficulty, a stretch of prose that bloodymindedly went on resisting me, I would simply redouble my attack on it; after a nasty couple of weeks I would grind out something that never satisfied me (a little later I came to recognise these dead bits and to jettison them, after only a couple of wasted days). If I can spare you one such session of pointless struggle, then…
No one will ever understand the subconscious; but you can learn to humour it. Nowadays, when the obstruction announces itself, I don’t bang my head against the wall; rather, I stroll off and do something else. This has become instinctual and even crudely physical: my legs straighten up and bear me away from the desk, usually from hard chair to easy chair, where I sit and read while I let time pass. It may take an hour, it may take a day, a night, two days, three nights, until I find myself again in the hard chair, because my legs have delivered me there, just as my legs, earlier on, drew me away. It means that the path is now clear.
A sinister process, but benign: a type of holistic white magic (and I’m convinced, incidentally, that ‘writer’s block’ simply describes a failure in the transmission belt: an internal power cut). One of the several hindrances in life-writing is that it gives the subconscious so little to do. With fiction, you often have to sleep on it – to rejoin the world of dreams and death, from which, many believe, all human energy comes. Life-writing (the facts, the linear reality of things that went ahead and happened) doesn’t leave much room for the subliminal. And this cannot be anything but a loss.
Most fictions, including short stories, have their origin in the subconscious. Very often you can feel them arrive. It is an exquisite sensation. Nabokov called it ‘a throb’, Updike ‘a shiver’: the sense of pregnant arrest. The subconscious is putting you on notice: you have been brooding about something without knowing it. Fiction comes from there – from silent anxiety. And now it has given you a novel to write.
∗
A few minor points.
Dialogue should be very sparely punctuated. Just use the comma, the dash, and – above all – the full stop. People talk in short sentences (however many of them they string together). For centuries it was a convention to represent (say) rural labourers as saying things like Arr, the master lived over there: beyond them hillocks; he used to loik coming over the…Despite what some novelists still seem to believe, no one talks with colons and semicolons – not farmers, and not phoneticians.
If you want to show a moment of hesitation, use the ellipsis, the dot-dot-dot (which has many other very civilised uses); it will save you the indignity of typing out such makeweight formulations as ‘She paused for thought, and then continued’. Otherwise, in dialogue, confine yourself to those marks that have some kind of aural equivalent: the comma (a short pause), the full stop (a rounded-off statement followed by a longer pause), and the dash.
The dash is a versatile little customer – but a word of warning. A single dash will do as an informal colon (among many other functions). Two dashes signal a parenthesis, like brackets (though without their slight sotto voce effect). But never present your reader with three dashes in the same sentence (as some highly distinguished writers persist in doing), typically with two serving as brackets and one as a colon. This is a sure formula for syntactical chaos.
Last and also least (so far as I’m concerned), there is the subjunctive, the verbal mood that deals in conjecture (‘if I were a carpenter’). Well, I’m pleased to report that it’s on its way out. The subjunctive, in English, used to swan around the place with some freedom. No verb was safe from it. If she have a fault. I recommend that Mrs Jones face a sentence of no less than…But for some time the subjunctive has been confined to one verb and one verb only: to be. Yes, to be is the last man standing (note too those rusting trinkets as it were and albeit). So for a little while longer it’s just a question of if she were or if she was.
And which is it?…That question
