Craftsmanship

An Element of Fiction

Yes, you are a cabinetmaker, a skilled carpenter, for while writing is a large part inspiration, a larger part is craft.

Good writers and teachers sooner or later conclude that writing truly is a craft, and when they do they usually share their insights. I have collected some of these under this heading.

I will let Eudora Welty break the ice, “What we know about writing the novel is the novel.”

Some brilliant words of wisdom from Philip Gerard, “A writing project begins not just in doubt but also in faith — that if your passion is genuine if you have mastered the elements of your craft, in the act of writing you will learn the rest of what you need to know to do justice to your subject.”

As for Maya Angelou, “If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.”

Quips Madison Smartt Bell, “Why study craftsmanship at all? First of all, because it can be studied.”

Jacques Barzun suggests, “Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.”

John Steinbeck muses illustratively on his craft, “I don’t think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.”

As for Ursula K. Le Guin, “Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.”

And Elizabeth Bowen, “The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.”

William Zinsser makes some great points, “My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

“There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

“They [writers] sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind the tension.”

“The disciplines of fiction are few in number,” says William Sloane, “but they are all basic, and not one of them is thoroughly accepted or understood by unsuccessful writers of fiction. Among these unsuccessful writers are many who are published. Publication is not necessarily a sign of success.

“Any writer or would-be writer would be well advised to reflect that mastery of craft is just exactly that and has nothing to do with greatness or power except to enhance it.

“The craft of writing serves the art of writing and sharpens it.”

John Gardner reflects, pretty brilliantly, that, “All writers, given adequate technique — technique that communicates — can stir our interest in their special subject matter.

“Working element by element through the necessary parts of fiction, he should make the essential techniques second nature, so that he can use them with increasing dexterity and subtlety, until at last, as if effortlessly, he can construct imaginary worlds — huge thoughts made up of concrete detail — so rich and complex, and so awesomely simple, that we are astounded, as we’re always astounded by great art.”

“Techniques in themselves are always reducible to sciences, that is, to learnability,” muses John Fowles. “Once Joyce has written, Picasso painted, Webern composed, it requires only a minimal gift, besides patience and practice, to copy their technique exactly; yet we all know why this kind of technique-copy, even when it is so painstakingly done — for instance, in painting — that it deceives museum and auction-house experts, is counted worthless beside the work of the original artist. It is not of him or her; it is not art, but imitation.”

Flannery O’Connor shares some amazing wisdom, “Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

“It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

“If the Holy Ghost dictated a novel, I doubt very much that all would be flow. I doubt that the writer would be relieved of his capacity for taking pains (which is all that technique is in the end); I doubt that he would lose the habit of art. I think it would only be perfected. The greater the love, the greater the pains he would take.

“The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then to try to discover what you have done. The time to think of technique is when you’ve actually got the story in front of you. The teacher can help the student by looking at his individual work and trying to help him decide if he has written a complete story, one in which the action fully illuminates the meaning.

“What personal problems are worked out in stories must be unconscious. My preoccupations are technical. My preoccupation is how am I going to get this bull’s horn into this woman’s ribs.”

John Gardner is more or less responsible for me collecting all these quotes on elements of fiction, partially by this statement, “There are techniques — hundreds of them — that, like carpenter’s tricks, can be studied and taught.”

Then he goes on to say, “The writer’s business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves and reveal themselves to the reader. For that one needs no schooling. But it’s by training — by studying great books and by writing — that one learns to present one’s fictions, giving them their due. Through the study of technique — not canoeing or logging or slinging hash — one learns the best, most efficient ways of making characters come alive, learns to know the difference between emotions and sentimentality, learns to discern, in the planning stages, the difference between the better dramatic action and the worse. It is this kind of knowledge that leads to mastery.

“What the beginning writer needs, discouraging as it may be to hear, is not a set of rules but mastery — among other things, mastery of the art of breaking so-called rules.

“Mastery — not a full mental catalog of the rules — must be the writer’s goal. He must get the art of fiction, in all its complexity — the whole tradition and all its technical options — down through the wrinkles and tricky wiring of his brain into his blood.

“Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

“Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronted with a problem in a novel he’s writing he does not consult his literary background. He feels his way to the solution; rather than drawing back from the fictional dream to look at what he’s doing, he solves the problem by plunging deeper into the dream.

“It’s the sheer act of writing, more than anything else, that makes a writer.

“Recognize that the art of writing is immensely more difficult than the beginning writer may at first believe but in the end can be mastered by anyone willing to do the work.”

Ernest Hemingway sums his view up, “The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.”

“I admire craftsmanship,” says John Fowles. “I like to see a literary job well done at whatever level. I go back to Chandler and Hammett. Chandler, especially, is marvelous; his best paragraphs are absolutely tight and hard. Like good furniture.

“The other day I asked a well-known editor to define the general fault in all the books she’d rejected, and she said, ‘Too much imagination, not enough technique.’ But this is the prime source of why people write novels, I think; it’s trying to make the one behind, the technique, catch up. It sounds like a negative thing as she put it, but I don’t think it is really. All of us know that our technique is never good enough for our imagination. We can always imagine more beautifully, more precisely, more cleverly, more romantically — more than we can ever get it down on paper. This lack haunts all novel writing.”

As for S.I. Hayakawa, “This business of abstracting (selecting) events and organizing them so that they bear some meaningful relationship to each other and to the central ‘theme’ of a novel or play constitutes the ‘story-teller’s art.’ Plot construction, development of character, narrative structure, climax, denouement, and all the other things one talks about in technical literary criticism have reference to this organizing of symbolic experiences so that the whole complex of symbolic experiences (i.e., the finished story or play) will have the desired impact on the reader.”

William Zinsser, brilliantly, “Writing is a craft, not an art … the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.”

“Imaginative writing,” says Madison Smartt Bell, “has always been a solitary and indeed a somewhat antisocial activity. Apprenticeship existed, no doubt, but it was an apprenticeship to books and not to living masters of the craft.

“Once fully known, these elements of craftsmanship become reflexive. They are not the property of either the conscious or unconscious mind but of both. Once the tools of craftsmanship have been mastered to that extent, you can use them without thinking about them, to make your imagination more mobile and ultimately more free.”

Pat Conroy suggests, “Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.”

“Learn to write by writing, says Ann Patchett. “Learn the sea by sailing it.”

Philip Gerard’s take, “You have to roll up your sleeves and be a stonecutter before you can become a sculptor — command of craft always precedes art: apprentice, journeyman, master.

“When watching a movie, more than half the time viewers are watching utter darkness. Nothingness. An absence of image and light. As writers, we work in another kind of illusion and we create another brand of persistence of vision in the imagination: We create an interior ‘movie’ in the reader’s head through words on the page. Even in nonfiction narratives, we create the fiction that we are delivering characters’ continuous, whole experiences, when in fact we are pasting together collages of a very few selected scenes connected tenuously by summary and transitional exposition — narrative sleight of hand — and leaving out far more than we can ever include. Like all those frames of darkness.” (My italics).

Maxwell Perkins offers this piece of advice, “I think it would be much better to read that book [War and Peace] over and over, to the neglect of books on the art of fiction.”

As for Raymon Chandler, “I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.”

“Read! Read! Read!,” says W.P. Kinsella. “And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.”

Marie Arana echoes that sentiment, “Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers. From reading.”

In other words: read, read, read, and then write, write, write.

© Wolfstuff