About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
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distracted by thinking only about tone. But as a reader, I find the second more interesting.
As I said, the vocal approach I can also find interesting:
He stepped into the room—Jesus, it was so white—but Karola was sitting there. If you’d asked him, later, what he’d been thinking right then, he would have answered, “I don’t know what to tell you. I thought she was beautiful. I did, really. It’s stupid, yeah. But I thought about flowers. You think about flowers, you think about butterflies. That’s just what’s going to happen with some guys. And waterfalls in the forests, that kind of thing—I thought about them, too.” But then—right then—standing just inside the door, a dozen memories flickering in and out of his consciousness, he thought only: “She’s beautiful.”
Here, in terms of direct information about the scene described, this third writer is giving no more than the first one. But what it lacks in specific detail and associative richness, it starts to compensate for by giving a sense of a person, with a voice, that lets us know a fair amount about the character, either as it infects the narrative voice (“Jesus, it was so white!”) or directly (“I don’t know what to tell you. I thought she was beautiful. I did, really”).
Personally I find the tone and the mood of the second and third examples much more interesting than the tone and mood of the first. In all three cases, tone and mood would be things not to violate, as the story—or at least the scene—progresses. With number 3 (“He stepped into the room—Jesus, it was so white—”), I’d probably want something to start happening on Forster’s “pure story” level faster than I would with number 2. (In number 1, I’d want something to happen almost by the next sentence, or the tale would lose me.) Too much of number 3’s foot shuffling and embarrassment grows quickly tiresome though. Soon I’d want some proof that this personality, this sensibility, this observer was worth my time to stay with. He’s got perhaps another three sentences in which to observe something interesting and tell it to me in an interesting way. Almost certainly I’d have more patience with the second narrator—because what he gives me is informatively richer. I’m more willing to let the second narrator take time to build up my picture of where these people are, who they are, what their relationship is, and suggest how, in the course of the tale, it’s going to develop. So the second narrator has about five more sentences in which to let me know a lot more about the woman at the table (or let me know why the narrator doesn’t know it). Wouldn’t it be interesting if, say, in either example 2 or 3, Karola turned out to be a Palestinian and six or seven years older than our narrator? As soon as her hair began to turn white, she bleached it platinum. There, in France, with her current young New Zealander, who finds her so fascinating, she’s working on a book about her country’s archaeology …
Still, with examples two and three I have more trust in the writer than I do with example I—a trust that, in terms ranging from mood to plot, either writer 2 or 3 may still betray with the next sentence. However promising I find their openings, both tales could dissolve, equally and easily, into clutter. Unless the writer is really setting us up for a very conscious effect, number I telegraphs a general thinness that is the hallmark of contemporary dullness. And if the narrator doesn’t win my trust soon, I’m likely to enjoy only a narrator whose tone and character I personally like. And if the narrator never gains my trust, however much I personally like the narrator or sympathize with his or her politics or recognize the situation, for me the work remains—if I keep reading, and most of the time I don’t—an entertainment, rather than a work of art. Finally, I want all this information—whether sensual or tonal—given me economically. If, after even three, five, seven sentences, I have not gotten one or the other of these orders of information, and I find myself spotting extraneous words and phrases that tell me nothing of interest, phrases that withhold information rather than present it, expressive clumsinesses and general lack of writerly skill, then I am disgruntled. (Vast amounts of fine literature wait to be read. Many more skilled writers exist than I can read in a lifetime. Unskilled writers don’t hold much interest for me. Bad writing makes me angry.) If the elements of the sentence could be better arranged so as to give the information more swiftly, logically, forcefully, I am equally unhappy. (I don’t particularly enjoy having to rewrite the writers I read, sentence by sentence. I want the writer to have done that work for me.) In my experience, three such clumsy sentences in a row usually indicate that the text will be littered with them. Despite whatever talent is manifested, they signal that the imaginative force needed to develop an idea clearly and explore it richly is likely lacking. In turn this means that even should I enjoy the story, I am not likely to point it out as an exemplum of one idea or another (unless it’s an example of what not to do); nor am I likely to sketch out the development of its idea as praiseworthy in any of my own critical writing. (As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Nothing survives except fine execution.”) While any of the information I enjoy might be worked up to form what might easily be called a good story, if I don’t enjoy the economy and force of
the presentation (the word for this level of presentation is “style”), from experience I know the tale will simply not be worth the time and energy I must put into reading it. These are the books—the nineteen out of twenty—I put down and rarely come back to.
Fortunately there are other readers who read—no less critically than I—for a different order of writerly and readerly priorities and pleasures. In their critical writing, such readers are always guiding me to things I might have missed, as I hope, in turn, now and again I can guide them to something interesting. Of course what is likely the case is not absolutely the case. Three dull, bland, or clumsy sentences don’t always mean an impoverished work. I would have missed out entirely on the considerable pleasures of Leonid Tsypkin or W. G. Sebald had I only read the opening page or pages of either, under my own critical regime—not to mention Theodore Dreiser, a great novelist (for many readers, including me) despite his style.
Nevertheless, the above represents my own priorities. It outlines my own aesthetic gamble, if you will, in the greater process of working to sediment the new or revised discourses that stabilize the systems of the world and make them better. (The purpose of fiction in particular and art in general is not to make the world better, directly and per se. But, despite the protests of all the apolitical critics, they [art and fiction] still help, if only because, as critics from Pater to Foucault have acknowledged, they do make life more enjoyable—specifically the time we spend reading them. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t bother.) In pursuit of such ends, the above gives the parameters around which my own set of dos and don’ts for fiction are organized—and thus suggests where their limits lie. Unless another critic has alerted me to pleasures that will only come after 50, 75, 150 pages, these are the texts I’m likely to abandon after a few thousand words or so—if not a few hundred.
Although I believe thirty-five years of teaching creative writing have helped me become more articulate about my readerly responses than I might have been without them, and while there are many other good readers of types different from mine, I do not think I am all that uncommon. I believe the kind of reader I am has a contribution to make in the contestatory wrangle producing that social construct, literary quality. But because human beings are a multiplicity, there can be no fixed and final canon, despite whatever appearance of stability any given view of the canon suggests. This is why no single book can tell folks how to write fiction that will join the canon. Having seen the canon change as much as it has in the years between my adolescence and the (I hope) forward edge of my dotage, I’m content with the forces that retard that change as much as they do.
Balzac, Dreiser, and Sebald; Lawrence, Barthelme, and Bukowski are all extraordinary writers, for extraordinarily different reasons. All are writers who at one time or another I’ve gorged on; but all are writers about whom I end up feeling, finally, that a little goes a long way. To enjoy any and all of them requires a fertile and lively mind; fertile and lively minds find things of interest, and thus may also find greater or lesser amounts of what’s in this book interesting. They may also find some things here painful, if not crashingly irrelevant, even as they marvel that someone could go on at such lengths as I do about fiction while spending so little time on fiction’s oh-so-necessary social content.
Because in the realm of art all absolute statements are suspect, the most I can say is that I am still willing to gamble on