Notes on Writing a Novel

I am excerpting from an essay by Elizabeth Bowen found on the Narrative magazine site. Read the whole thing, it is that interesting  for it is not  abstract  nor is limpid. Too long for easy digesting but here is my good college try. If I can get you to read it in full, then I have accomplished something.

PLOT.—Essential. The Pre-Essential. Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way.

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Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action.

Plot is story. It is also ‘a story’ in the nursery sense = lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

Action by whom? The Characters (see  characters). Action in view of what, and because of what? The ‘what is to be said.’

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Great novelists write without pre-assumption. They write from outside their own nationality, class or sex.

To write thus should be the ambition of any novelist who wishes to state poetic truth.

Does this mean he must have no angle, no moral view-point? No, surely. Without these, he would be (a) incapable of maintaining the conviction necessary for the novel; (b) incapable of lighting the characters, who to be seen at all must necessarily be seen in a moral light.

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Much irrelevance is introduced into novels by the writer’s vague hope that at least some of this may turn out to be relevant, after all. A good deal of what might be called provisional writing goes to the first drafts of first chapters of most novels. At a point in the novel’s progress, relevance becomes clearer. The provisional chapters are then recast.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance—due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author’s attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful—and possibly the only—help that can be given.

And when I finished her essay I had one question: just who was this woman?