On writing

I most likely will never write a novel or even a short story, but this post on Kate's Book Blog tempts me just the tiniest bit to give it a try -- not because I think I can write a good novel or story, but because it makes me realize just how much I'd learn from the attempt. If I did it (which I almost certainly won't -- I'm just playing with ideas here), I wouldn't show it to anybody, but would do it solely for my own educational purposes. Because Kate's post makes me realize how little I pay attention to the technical details of what I read. I'm aware of some things like plot structure, point of view, creating scenes, showing vs. telling, etc., but I don't really get into the nitty-gritty of it. If I tried creating my own scenes, though, or if I had to worry about how to get characters from one place to another or had to choose what details to include and what ones not or if I had to struggle to get the point of view right, I'd be seeing the matter in another way entirely. I'm a believer in the value of learning by doing; don't you think this would be a fabulous learning experience?

Kate is writing about Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, which I haven't been interested in up until now, because I'm not that kind of a writer, but now I'm intrigued. Perhaps I'd learn a lot about reading even if I'm not exactly Prose's intended audience, although Prose's subtitle, "A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write them," leaves open the issue of audience, implying that the two groups of people mentioned might not necessarily overlap completely.

The Hobgoblin is writing a novel, of course, and I've got a good friend who's a novelist, and I read other bloggers who write fiction, and I'm interested in the insights they have into the craft of fiction and I find myself wanting those insights too.

And one more point about writing, unrelated to the above: I've been thinking about Litlove's post on the way we compare ourselves to others and how easy it is to get jealous of what other writers can do. I don't get jealous of fiction writers or poets, as I don't write in those genres, and although I write academic criticism now and then, I don't get jealous of other people's ability to write that sort of thing, maybe because I don't feel like that kind of writing is all that important to me, but I sometimes get jealous of what other bloggers can do. When I began blogging and spending a significant amount of time reading other people's blogs, I'd get overwhelmed sometimes because I found so much good writing of the type I could never do myself. I really don't understand those who think there's no good writing on blogs, because if you look around just a little bit, you'll find tons of it.

Blogging has been interesting for me because I've found I care about my writing in a way I haven't before. I've had moments of feeling so inadequate as a writer that I've thought to myself, either you stop writing entirely to get rid of the bad feelings or you accept that you will never be able to do what those other people do and instead begin to enjoy their ability. And it's possible, at least in moments, to accept that some people are just outrageously talented and to appreciate that rather than get jealous. As I wrote in a comment over at Litlove's, surrounding oneself with fabulously talented people makes it easier to get to the point of no longer wanting to compete because the effort is just too exhausting. And it's probably at that point that a person can do their best work.

Spare language?

I keep coming back in my mind to a passage from Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree about writing that gets praised for being "spare":

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress. What's that chinking noise? It's the sound of the assiduous creative-writing student hitting bone.

Hornby uses J.M. Coetzee to illustrate what he means by the "spare tradition" and it turns out that while he admires Coetzee, he's actually not a fan of super-pared-down language. The passage above comes at the beginning of a long celebration of Dickens, the most un-spare writer there is, and Dickens clearly comes out ahead in the comparison. Here's what he says about pared-down writing:

There's some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words -- entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that?

As I was typing this passage, I realized that I don't like it, although I think I share Hornby's taste for wordy, talkative fiction. Working toward spare, pared-down language doesn't mean one is working toward nothingness, of course. This is Hornby being churlish and unfair.

But I do love long novels and digressive, wordy prose; while I also admire writers in the "spare tradition," I tend not to love them. Prose that begins to veer toward poetry begins to feel like work to me, and while I'm often happy to do that work, I'm not going to get absorbed in the story. Here's what it is -- I often read novels with that spare, poetic, pared-down prose and I enjoy the experience, but it's not quite as visceral or thrilling as a novel that isn't overtly drawing attention to its own language.

But then Hornby gets even more annoying:

The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming or logging.

The first line is fine; I agree that fiction isn't utilitarian in the least. But then we're back to the gendered language I've complained about before. Okay, he's joking, but still -- writing as wussy? My feeling is that people's desire to write in a simple, pared-down manner has nothing to do with whether writing is a "real job" or not. Hornby seems to be reading his own uncertainties about the seriousness and manliness of writing into other people's aesthetic tastes.

But I really didn't mean to turn this into a pick-on-Hornby post. I'm interested in these passages because I've felt ambivalently about the "spare tradition," which leads me to thoughts about what I look for in a novel. Am I looking for a story so absorbing it makes me forget I'm reading, or do I want to be immersed in language itself, aware of the ways an author is using it? Do I want a flood of words on the page, or do I want carefully-measured, crafted prose that suggests more than it actually says? All of these things, obviously, at different times and to suit different moods. But I feel most comfortable with the Dickensian tradition, and I wonder what that says about me as a reader.