How Fiction Works by James Woods

I've been reading the new book by James Woods, How Fiction Works. I'm enjoying it a lot--enjoying the act of engaging with it and thinking about what he's saying. It's good old fashioned literary criticism that is challenging but accessible. I've seen a lot of hostile reviews of it, mostly complaining that he's too fancy pants. But I don't mind that he refers to books I haven't read or uses words I don't know. I don't feel shown up or made insecure by it. I'm a grown up and have access to dictionaries and libraries.

That said, I know that there is a theory of literature that is being laid out which I might or might not agree with if I had it laid out clearly for me, but I haven't been reading closely enough to tease it out. I've just been going along for the ride. More on that I hope, after I finish it.

One quibble. In the intro he surveys other guides in this genre and how his project is justified by its difference from all the rest, but in doing that he doesn't acknowledge L. Rust Hills, whose book his probably most resembles.

Edith Wharton on character development

The other difficulty is that of communicating the effect of the gradual passage of time in such a way that the modifying and maturing of the characters shall seem not an arbitrary sleight-of-hand but the natural result of growth in age and experience. This is the great mystery of the art of fiction. The secret seems incommunicable; one can only conjecture that it has to do with the novelist's own deep belief in his characters and what he is telling about them. He know that this and that befell them, and that in the interval between this and that the months and years have continued their slow task of erosion or accretion; and he conveys this knowledge by some subterranean process as hard to seize in action as the growth of a plant. a study of the great novelists . . . will show that ssuch changes are suggested, are arrived at, in the inconspicuous transitional pages of narrative that lead from climax to climax. One of the means by which the effect is produced is certainly that of not fearing to go slowly, to keep down the tone of the narrative, to be as colourless and quiet as life often is in the intervals between its high moments.

Another difficulty connected with this one is that of keeping so firm a hold on the main lines of one's characters that they emerge modified and yet themselves from the ripening or disintegrating years. Tolstoy had this gift to a supreme degree. . . .

. . . with what sure and patient touches their growth and decline are set forth! And how mysteriously yet unmistakably, as they reappear after each interval, the sense is conveyed that there has been an interval, not in moral experience only but in the actual lapse of the seasons! The producing of this impression is indeed the central mystery of the art. To its making go patience, meditation, concentration . . . .
--Edith Wharton

Again, I'm quoting from The Writing of Fiction. This is from the chapter on "Constructing a Novel" in which she discusses some of the central difficulties that a novelist has to grapple with. When I came to this section I started underlining like crazy, because it's a problem that I'm very conscious of in my story. The character in my book has to change--in response to the events of the plot--and at the same time has to remain himself, so that whatever action he takes at the end has to feel like it was inherent in the character that was presented at the beginning of the story. Otherwise the reader will feel gypped. Another discussion of this idea that has helped me is in L. Rust Hills book Writing In General and the Short Story in Particular. He calls it the "inevitability of retrospect," and he has a neat little drawing to illustrate the idea.

What I don't like about this passage from Wharton is she doesn't give any practical advice! Well, not much anyway--meditate, concentrate, go slowly. But overall she makes it sound like it takes an act of grace to pull it off.

Copyediting

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
--George Orwell

When I teach freshman comp I often talk to students about how writing is a recursive process—a series of steps that can circle back and repeat itself endlessly.

And in the meantime I’ve been influenced by writers like L. Rust Hills who describe the “integration” of all the elements of fiction.

That quote from Orwell reminds me to anticipate those qualities. If we take sincerity in fiction to be the result of fully knowing and respecting your characters, honestly and deeply imagining the situation they’re in and how they would feel about it and respond to it, then sincerity is presumably handled in early drafts of a book.

However, neglecting to do that and the insincerity that would seem to result in a given episode might only have its first symptom in the language refusing to be clear—something that presumably a writer would pay the closest attention to late in the process. An abstraction refusing to be made concrete, a tangled sentence refusing to come unknotted—I expect these to be wonderful hints that the story itself is incomplete and that I’ve taken emotional shortcuts. I expect the copyediting process to send me back wearily to try again to develop the story and make it more honest, seemingly endlessly.

Or to put it as Joseph Williams does in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, “When you revise your early confusion into something clearer you better understand your own ideas. And when you understand your ideas better, you express them more clearly, and when you express them more clearly, you understand them even better . . . and so it goes.”

Old journal entries--Sept. 7, 2007--Outline finished

Before I started posting to this blog, I kept some journal entries on paper--logs without the web. Some of those original pieces were never posted, and occasionally I circle back to post some of interest.

This one is a little discouraging to see since it's 7 months later now and I'm still working on basically the same problems I describe here.

September 7, 2007—Outline finished

This morning I finished the outline that I started a few weeks ago. It was tedious!

The result is 33 typed pages of notes on what the book is doing and not doing, broken out into action, character development and thematic development, chapter by chapter.

My intention next is just to study it and figure out how to address all the problems that became apparent during the process of outlining it. I’ll print it out, spread it out all out over the dining room table and start marking it up.

Roughly put, there are two major categories of effort needed next, I think.

One, I need to understand the characters a lot better—who they are in general, how they would feel at a given moment, and how they are changing. In a sense, I know all that; it was necessary to know that to write the first draft. But I don’t know it well enough to do the rewrite.

Two, I need to make a lot of decisions about what happens. What jackpots the characters are going to get into and then what they do, so that it leads to a conclusion.

Obviously, these two tasks are intimately related—what happens will depend on who the characters are and who the characters become will depend on what happens. But then, everything in a literary fiction is related. The story will succeed when I can create unity of action, character and theme. That’s from L. Rust Hills and a million other observers of this maddening endeavor.

Books I Read This Year To Help Me Write My Novel

When I was in college and for many years after I kept a list of all the books I read. For several years I lost the habit and renewed it earlier this year. The rule was always that it had to be a book that I read cover to cover, so books that I don't finish are usually not on the list. I figure I start about four times as many books as I finish--it's not uncommon for me to get a hundred pages or more into a book and give up on it, which I do with a lot of regret because I can be pretty OCD about adding titles to my list. I also have a lot of anxiety about how slow a reader I am--about half as fast as my wife.

But I'm good about making time for reading, so even with my slow pace and my tendency to abandon a lot of books part way through, I'm able to finish more than one book/week. I'm looking at my 2007 list now, and I have 65 titles on it, and I expect to add one more.

I'm not going to list them all, but I thought it would interesting to list all of them that had something to do with my thinking about my own novel, which I started working on April 22. These are books that I turned to for models, guidance, instruction, inspiration, moral support, research and relief.

1. The Runaway -- Alice Munro*
2. Writing In General and The Short Story In Particular -- L. Rust Hills*
3. A Farewell To Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
4. The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
5. For Whom The Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway
6. To Kill A Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
7. The Blues Eye -- Toni Morrison
8. This Year You Will Write Your Novel -- Walter Mosley
9. Kafka On the Shore-- Haruki Murakami
10. On Writing and Publishing -- Mark Twain
11. Why Does He Do That? -- Lundy Bancroft
12. Speak -- Laurie Halse Anderson
13. The Pesthouse -- Jim Crace
14. Suite Francaise -- Irene Nemirovsky*
15. The Singular Mark Twain -- Fred Kaplan*
16. Reading Like A Writer -- Francine Prose
17. Journal of a Novel -- John Steinbeck (recommended for aspiring writers and hard-core fans.)
    
18. On Writing and Publishing -- Mark Twain
19. In Country -- Bobbie Ann Mason*
20. Living By Fiction -- Annie Dillard
21. Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interview (a few from each volume, probably adding up to about the equivalent of two volumes)*
22. The Echo Maker -- Richard Powers*
23. Winter Numbers: Poems -- Marilyn Hacker*
24. Style: 10 Lessons In Clarity and Grace -- Joseph Williams (recommended for any working writer)
    
25. Conversations With Toni Morrison -- ed. by Danilee Taylor-Guthrie*
26. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997 -- June Jordan
28. A Light In August -- William Faulkner
29. Waiting -- Ha Jin*
30. Fathers and Sons -- Ivan Turgenev
31. A Peculiar Grace -- Jeffrey Lent
32. Fire In the Blood -- Irene Nemirovsky
33. The Book of Daniel -- E. L. Doctorow*
34. On the Road: The Original Scroll -- Jack Kerouac*
35. Run -- Ann Patchett
36. The View From Castle Rock -- Alice Munro
37. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert

In addition, preceding and during that period, I read other books about writing (Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Novel*), books related to my travels in Vietnam, books on economics (Three Billions New Capitalists, The World Is Flat), books on WWII History (Joe Keegan, Joseph Persico) and several volumes of biography inspired by my driving tour of American historical sites last summer (Lincoln, John Brown, Lewis and Clark).

*I'm marking with an asterisk lesser-known books that I recommend to most readers interested in good writing (regardless of whether or not you are working on a novel.) I'm not bothering to mark the classics/canonical books that most people are already familiar with.