By Jim Kunstler
Written for Metroland, the Capital District's arts weekly
First you have to write a few long manuscripts that suck so badly they will never become books. At least that's how it worked for me starting thirty years ago when I was a reporter for the old Albany evening paper, the Knickerbocker News, and was afflicted with what quaintly used to be called literary ambitions.
A few years later I dropped out of salaried journalism for good and produced a manuscript that a New York literary agent flogged to Doubleday, who published the goshdarned thing -- my first novel, The Wampanaki Tales, a dark comedy about kids at a summer camp. After that, I began to actually understand how to write books, and about twelve more followed.
Where fiction is concerned, there are three sets of principles that actually govern this enterprise: logistical, technical, and aesthetic. Among the first is the idea that a book is a self-informing work. You needn't know all about the characters and everything that will happen to them, which is to say the story. They will inform you who they are as the pages pile up and they will behave accordingly. You will become acquainted with them just as you would with new friends or colleagues. Your first sentence will inform you what the second should be, and the first page the next, and so on.
Momentum helps a lot, meaning the more regular your work habits, the the more dependably the work will inform you what it is shaping up to be, and the more confident you will become in the process itself. Show up at least a few hours a day. Bear in mind Flaubert's dictum: "If you want to be wild in your art, be bourgeois in your habits." (So take weekends off, just as though you were still a salary mule.) My longstanding measure of accomplishment is to turn out two pages a day.
The technical matters are as follows. A novel consists of two basic ingredients: dramatic scenes and narrative exposition -- showing and telling. It's that simple. The purpose of dramatic scenes ought to be self-evident. Things happen. Characters engage in action and talk to each other. The story moves forward. The dramatic scenes are interspersed with chunks of narrative exposition, which has several jobs: to introduce characters, to comment on action that is about to be played out (also called setting a scene), and to comment on scenes that have already occurred,
There is no particular formula for the proportion of dramatic scenes to narrative expostion in any given novel. Great novels have been written that employ way more of one than the other or a balance of the two. These days, after nearly a century of conditioning by movies and television, novels tend to go heavier on the dramatic scenes and lighter on the exposition,
A further technical matter: in writing fiction it is not necessary to be correct, only plausible. The author's job is to construct a believable world and characters who behave congruently with it. The objective is suspension of the reader's disbelief not journalistic accuracy. Feel free to make stuff up.
A final technical point: do not trash your protagonist. The reader wants to identify with the hero of the story, and invests some emotion in the process, so to humiliate or ridicule such a character cheats the reader and turns him off. The otherwise brilliant Tom Wolfe is guilty of this strategic error, first with Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities and then with Charlie Crocker in A Man in Full. Both of them ended up shredded.
Now to the aesthetic principles. It is in the narrative exposition that a writer is most likely to establish a distinctive voice, which is to say a style of delivering the goods. This is the place where a point-of-view to the story and its characters develops, and hence where a writer can exercise his or her special attitudes, tastes, prejudices, passions, beliefs, and most particularly where the author stands along the transect of comedy and tragedy. The composition of dramatic scenes entails stylistic artistry too, of course, but largely depends on the writer's inherent grasp of behavioral psychology.
A non-fiction book, on the other hand, is just a long job of journalism, which is to say heavy lifting, like loading cinder blocks on a truck. A lively imagination helps, meaning not that one makes up history or facts -- it is essential to be correct in non-fiction -- but that one be able to imagine how other people might have felt in different eras, foreign places, strange circumstances, and so on.
That is all you need to know to write a book. Getting it published is another story.Jim Kunstler's novel, "Maggie Darling, A Modern Romance" will be published by Grove / Atlantic Books this coming fall.
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