Faulkner on a "formula to follow to be a good novelist"

Faulkner's advice to those working to become a good novelist is taken from a 1956 interview for The Paris Review:

Interviewer: Is there any possible formula to follow in order to be a good novelist?

Faulkner: Ninety-nine per cent talent . . . 99 per cent discipline . . . 99 per cent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Interviewer: Do you mean the writer should be completely ruthless?

Faulkner: The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

In what ways must we be "ruthless" for our art? I know when I was teaching I had nothing in me to give at the end of the day for my writing. I became content to watch my students learn and advance and create while I stood at the sidelines, cheering them on. Although my "only responsibility" cannot be solely to my art, I will know no peace until my book is written.

steps for staying "tuned in" for what you need

"Once you're into a story everything seems to apply -- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized." - Eudora Welty

Good source material for our writing is around us all the time. I think we are most "tuned in" to it when we are actively working on a writing piece. The following steps may help you stay "tuned in" for what you need for a writing project:

1. Make and stick to a writing schedule as much as possible. Neglecting your writing work leads to distraction and lack of focus. When we are not focused on our work, it's harder to "tune in" to the fabulous source material that surrounds us every day.

2. Be observant. Watch others and be attune to your surroundings. What does the day feel like? How does someone react to stimuli, to others around him or her, to conflict?

3. Listen carefully and with purpose. Catch and write down as soon as you can overheard conversations you think you can use later. Note an interesting or provocative turn of phrase. Notice the construction and syntax of spoken language.

4. Keep your writing project in mind as you go through your daily routine and living obligations. Working through scenes in your mind ahead of time will make it easier for you to write and to incorporate the source material you've encountered as it fits into your work.

5. Keep a notebook for each writing project, as well as a general notebook or journal to keep ideas and scraps of phrases and observations from your surroundings. Don't worry if you'll ever use anything you record or when you'll use it: just get it down. Write it down as soon as possible. We always think we'll remember that cool phrase or idea the next day, the next week, the next month. How soon we forget when we fail to write it down.

Keep the literary faith, friends. And keep writing!

what young writers can learn from writing a novel

"If you start a novel before you're ready, it's exactly as if you are a young athlete out in a contest with professionals who are far beyond you. Not ready, you get clobbered. You receive a painful lesson in identity. One does well to build up a little literary experience before trying a long piece of work. On the other hand, if you can accept in advance the likelihood of ending in failure, a young writer can learn a good deal by daring to embark on the long voyage that is a novel." - Norman Mailer from The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

Read a review of Mailer's The Spooky Art at salon.com.

My short list of what a young writer can learn from writing a novel:
Note: To all "young" and "more-seasoned" writers, please feel free to add to this list.

1. Humility. What can be more humbling than realizing your years of pent-up angst and untapped creative juice got spent and dried up by chapter three?

2. Character development. Writing a novel, you'll soon find out if you've got what it takes to develop a fully-realized character. One that isn't just a caricature of your mother (or father, spouse, lover, etc.)or thinly disguised version of yourself.

3. Plot structure. If you don't grab onto the three-act plot structure, you'll fold quickly. Or, you'll write a brilliant experimental novel no one will want to publish.

4. Not to look down on your audience. No one likes a know-it-all writer. Trust me on this one.

5. Be emotionally honest. False emotions jump off the page and scream insecurity(on the part of the characters and the writer). Writing a novel forces you at some point to get real with your characters and yourself about where the story is going and what meaning can be found there.

6. Time management skills. Writing a novel takes focus and sacrifice. You'll learn to structure your time to include daily writing or you won't finish the novel.

7. It's okay to cut what doesn't work. This point is difficult for the young writer who believes his or her words are inspired and can never be revised or deleted. If you don't learn to edit ruthlessly, you'll likely get bogged down in your own sludge of word fancy and unnecessary plot points.

8. It's harder than it looks. You'll certainly come to appreciate how hard good writing can be, which brings me back to number one: humility.

Thought for the Day

Go with your instinct -- even if it may turn out to be wrong later. Learning to trust yourself can be difficult, but it is vital if you are to develop your own voice. Second-guessing yourself isn't the same as thoughtful editing and revision.

significant fiction versus trivial pursuits

"If the young writer is to achieve intellectual and emotional significance in his fiction, he must have the common sense to tell foolish ideas from interesting ones and important emotions from trivial ones. These abilities can be guided a little, for instance by the teacher's pointing out, as I've done above, that stories beginning in character and conflict are bound to be more interesting than stories that do not -- a principle applicable even to thrillers, sodbusters, and horror stories. And the writer's sense of what questions are really interesting and what ones aren't worth bothering with may be heightened a little by wide reading, by conversation with intelligent people, and by the conscious attempt to, as James said, 'be someone on whom nothing is lost.'"

There's a weighty idea, "intellectual and emotional significance." I can imagine the young writer confusing significant fiction with "serious" or "literary" or, more misleading, "classic." This notion of "foolish ideas," of which I'll grant contemporary fiction is full of, can be misleading. Gardner warns the young writer not to be "carried away by fads." Sound advice by any means. But I would caution the young writer not to be handcuffed by the precepts of an traditional style or accepted subject matter. What may seem faddish, or even foolish, at first glance may have significance (something to say) lurking beneath, waiting for the hands of the daring, and perhaps novice, writer to pull from it elements that elevate it to the level of "significant fiction." Three novelist come to mind.

In the 90's Douglas Coupland depicted the nature and struggles of young adults in such groundbreaking novels as Generation X and Microserfs. I assigned Microserfs as a novel study for my sophomore high school students in 1997, two years after its release. My creative writing class studied excerpts from Generation X. I wanted my students to know that good writing could be reflective of the age in which they lived and, at once, entertaining, hip, and "intellectual and emotional significant."

The second writer is the new phenom Joshua Ferris, whose 2007 publication Then We Came To The End takes a funny and poignant look at modern office life and the effects of group think. Written in first person plural, while bordering on gimmicky, the point of view feels perfect for this tale of the American workplace.

Likewise does Jay McInerney's use of second person in Bright Lights, Big City , which captures perfectly the protagonist's need to psychologically distance himself from his own destructive behaviors. Not only is McInerney's daring use of second person fresh and reflective of the times, he takes what, by all accounts, is the height of trivial and self-indulgent, club-life in the 1980's, and creates a modern backdrop for a significant novel about human frailty, weakness, and the universal desire to be loved and nurtured.

It is precisely these risks Coupland, Ferris, and McInnery take (stylistic risks the average workshop and some writing programs would likely frown upon) that elevates their work and creates the intellectual and emotional punch they deliver. No, Gardner isn't wrong about trivial pursuits, but there is something, I believe, residing deeper in the seemingly trivial pursuits of society. It will take that daring, keen-sighted writer to reveal it to us.


By the way: For an interesting look at Jay McInerney, read Victoria Lautman's Writers on the Record.

turn on the headlights

E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." Today, turn on the headlights and travel the distance you can. Maybe it's just 15 mintes of editing. Maybe it's writing a short scene or a bit of dialogue. Maybe you write the dialogue first, then turn on the headlights tomorrow and write the scene around that dialogue. If you need to turn on the brights to see better, don't worry; you're the only one out on that stretch of road.

Happy traveling, writers.

the ether of ideas

"This is the first important lesson that the writer must learn. Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It's an excursion into the ether of ideas. There's no time to waste. You must work with that idea as well as you can, jotting down notes and dialogue."

- Walter Mosley, from "For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day"

I feel "the ether of ideas." It is that dreamy place in the gentle quiet just before falling asleep or having just awoken, that long car ride, that booth at the back of the diner, that space between where we are and where we'll be next. Call it "the zone" or "the void" or "our inner world." In the ether thoughts and ideas float around us. Voices speak, grab hold our hand, pull us aside to whisper stories into our tender ears.

Everyone feels the ether, hears the whispers, smells the smoke. The writer is the lucky (or unlucky) fool who feels compelled to gather the smoke of those ideas and voices and write them down. They slip through the fingers so easily.

The "dream" of the novel is quick to dissolve, which is why we must write every day. And, why, even when to others it may seem as if we are doing nothing, visit that place, in the ether, amidst the smoke, as often as we may.

when you're strange . . .

John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist, "The Writer's Nature":

"As for the quality of strangeness, it is hard to know what can be said. There can be no great art, according to the poet Coleridge, without a certain strangeness. Most readers will recognize at once that he's right. There come moments in every great novel when we are startled by some development that is at once perfectly fitting and completely unexpected -- for instance, the late, surprising entrance of Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, Mr. Rochester's disguise in Jane Eyre, the rooftop scene in Nicholas Nickleby, Tommy's stumbling upon the funeral in Seize the Day, the recognition moment in Emma, or those moments we experience in many novels when the ordinary and the extraordinary briefly interpenetrate, or things common suddenly show, if only for an instant, a different face. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd pats of one's being to take over the work from time to time. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then to the deep craziness of life itself -- as when in Anna Karenina Levin proposes to Kitty in the same weird way Tolstoy himself proposed to his wife. Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked."

A friend once told me I was "white socks with a black suit." At first, I was angry. Since then, I've come to appreciate and embrace his description of me. I think it fits me to a "T." And I'm okay with that.

I agree with Gardner that the best writers are a bit strange, which is to say they see the world, engage with the world in an atypical way. Generally, they are not group-joiners and don't necessarily play well with others. Too much strangeness, however, doesn't lend itself to good writing. Batshit crazy only produces work that rambles, rants, and reeks of ego.

So, be strange. Be white socks with a black suit. "When you're strange, people come out of the rain." Say "hi." Introduce yourself. Sit and talk a spell. It's okay if no one else can see them. If they make good characters, write their stories.

finding your writing springboard

From editor Malcolm Cowley's introduction to
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
The Viking Press, 1959

"Apparently the hardest problem for almost any writer, whatever his medium, is getting to work in the morining (or in the afternoon, if he is a late riser like Styron, or even at night). Thornton Wilder says, 'Many writers have told me that they have built up mnemonic devices to start them off on each day's writing task. Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa Cather that she read a passage from the Bible -- not from piety, she was quick to add, but to get in touch with fine prose; she also regretted that she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of. My spring-board has always been long walks.' Those long walks alone are a fairly common device; Thomas Wolfe would sometimes roam through the streets of Brooklyn all night. Reading from the Bible before writing is a much less common practice, and, in spite of Miss Cather's disclaimer, I suspect that it did involve a touch of piety. Dependent for success on forces partly beyond his control, an author may try to propitiate the unknown powers. I knew one novelist, an agnostic, who said he often got down on his knees and started the working day with prayer."

I haven't tried prayer. Maybe I should. What seems to work for me, as my springboard for writing, is reading interviews by writers on writing or finding words of inspiration from writers and those who love the writing life. I think it's that I need to feel both hopeful and empowered. I need to be reassured that producing work, even when it's not what I feel is my best effort, is better than not producing at all.

Teacher and novelist John Gardner writes about how every writer, no matter how many writing courses and workshops taken, no matter how many critique groups attended, is, in the end, on his or her own. Finding your way as a writer is partly about finding your springboard: that walk, that moment of prayer or meditation, that inspirational passage powerful enough to launch you into your working day.

What is your springboard for writing or other creative task?

Advice for the Beginning Writer

After my blog yesterday on all the "helpful" (really confusing) advice for beginning writers available in the multitude of writing magazines and manuals, I ran across this bit of sage advice from John Gardner in his classic The Art of Fiction:

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.

How does one achieve mastery? According to John Gardner one must both read widely and write not only "carefully but continually."

Here's a thought: In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, reporting findings on why some people succeed more than others, Gladwell asserts that mastery in a craft is likely attained by reaching a number measurement. When do we reach mastery? Gladwell claims it comes with 10,000 hours of practice.

Okay, I've taken liberty with his research and simplified what Gladwell reports, but it's reassuring to know that "mastery" is not some unattainable, unquantifiable, nebulous thing. We're not talking "perfection," we're talking "mastery." I can handle that notion. I can practice writing a certain number of hours, with Gardner's carefulness and consideration, "assessing and reassessing" what I write. That's doable.

So, today I got some good advice I can grasp onto and use. Just thought I'd pass it along. Let me know your advice for the beginning writer.