Writing Novels - Style

 After KH advised me to get back to writing, after Joel C encouraged me to tell my Indiana stories, I went to work trying to learn what was a novel, what made a short story, and catching up on the writers I had ignored for 40 years. Finding the time for reading is short these days, I had an email this morning from KH lamenting the lack of time for reading and I responded with there was time in prison. I do not suggest anyone follow that advice - my tongue was firmly placed in my cheek. But I do give this advice most sincerely: write to please yourself. Tell the story as you want to tell it. If it does not satisfy, then revise until it does. It helped me that I had shattered my previous life into a complete ruin, I had nothing to lose, no way to further embarrass myself in public. So far, I find the publishers are not so keen on what I have done, but that only makes me work harder at what I have done.

I find echoes of the preceding - barring the references to prison - in When Writing a Novel, Forget the How and Focus on the What:

This presented a problem. I love novels. But after twenty years in the business and thousands of Final Draft files on my hard drive, I was pretty sure writing television was, for better or worse, my craft. I had spent my allotted 10,000 hours, and was too old, and too much a father of three young children, to spend another 10,000 on anything else, aside from The New York Times Spelling Bee, and assembling my children’s Christmas presents.

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When someone opens a book, of course they want pretty melodious sentences laid out like strings of pearls. Who doesn’t? But more than that, they’re there for the substance of what you have to say. The Great Gatsby is as ornately decorated as any book ever was, but it’s the doomed love, the details of Jazz Age excess, and the concrete observations about the way we all live in the past that keeps us ceaselessly coming back. Readers want you to tell them What. So tell them What! That’s your first job, How be damned!

Stop worrying about whether you’re doing it the way you’re supposed to be doing it, describing someone’s eyes in a way no one’s ever described eyes before. Don’t write anything just because you think you’re supposed to. Write the parts you want to write, and skip everything else. Just tell the story. And at the end of it, when you read it back over, you’re going to see all the little Hows you stressed out over, and all the places where you thought you were doing it wrong. And guess what? Turns out, that wasn’t you doing it wrong at all.

That was just your style.

Style! Figuring that out was a breakthrough. As soon as I internalized this idea that I’m allowed to have a style, it unlocked everything. Writing a novel wasn’t about squeezing through the eye of some needle. It was a leisurely drive on a freeway with infinite lanes.

Do you hate writing descriptions of things, and just want to write dialogue? Great! That’s your style! Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments is mostly a string of conversations, but what conversations they are! You can tell that the cadences and rhythms of human speech is where Doyle really gets his kicks, so that’s what he puts on paper. And besides, working class Dubliners starting a soul band? That’s a great What, no matter How you tell it.

Or maybe you like focusing on the details! You’re here for the décor, the food, what the characters wear…great! That’s your style. Your reader will get on board. Five pages into Crazy Rich Asians I found myself wondering, “So wait, every time a character walks in the room we’re going to stop the action and describe every stitch of clothing they’re wearing?” And by the end of the third book in the series, I was hungrily gobbling up every delicious detail about the hem of Astrid’s gown or the piping on Bernard’s jacket, because Kevin Kwan clearly has fun writing it, and that makes me have fun reading it.

I found three books on writing to be helpful: Stephen King's On Writing, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird (which King refers to in his book), and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel.  The last one opened my eyes that the novel can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. From Kundera's book (and by Carlos Fuentes in his This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life) I was pointed to one novel to read, the one that showed all that might be done in a modern novel: Don Quixote.

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