Copyright © Carmel
Bird June 1999.
All rights reserved.
If there is one advertisement you will probably never see in the Positions Vacant it's: 'Novelist. Must have own PC, thick skin, soft heart.' Nobody is asking you to be a novelist; it is something you decide for yourself, and you take the consequences. Nobody can really tell you how to do it either. I have wanted to write novels since I was about eight, and have been experimenting with writing them since about then too.
There are probably as many ways of writing a novel as there are novels. Of course there are formulas, found in a number of how-to manuals, which can be followed, but even these will fail unless there is some special spin on things brought to the work by the writer. You can listen to lectures and go to workshops and read books about writing as much as you like, but the basic act is the act of getting the words down. If you work best in life by following a plan, then you might find it useful to plan out your novel. However, many novelists allow their story to develop organically, with only the slightest of plans. It can help to write up dossiers on the characters, and sometimes there is some research for you to do.
Simenon wrote at great speed and produced something like a novel a month, but such people are rare. Most of us proceed fairly slowly, but if we also proceed steadily, in due course the novel will be finished. If you write 100 words a day for two years you will have a small novel. That is if every word you write is useful to the novel. It's probable that hundreds of these words will have to be discarded and re-written. So your novel, at that rate, would take three years. Maybe you should write three hundred words a day.
I present the suggestion of writing a certain number of words as nothing more than one way of doing things. I do recall that at a writers' festival a few years ago Margaret Attwood had to spend a certain amount of time working in her hotel room because she always wrote (so it was said) five hundred words every day.
The notion that arises of course is that of discipline. A novelist needs to have in his or her life some kind of discipline that is going to rule the production of the work. This discipline may not necessarily be imposed from the outside; it can and often does come from within the writer. The desire, the compulsion, the drive to write the novel is so strong that it designs its own discipline. And that discipline grows out of a writer's belief in the importance and validity of what is being said - even if the novel is not grand, is a light-hearted popular one, this belief is still there to sustain the writing.
To ask how a novel gets written is, ultimately to ask how can it be that a novelist is seized by the need to express in words and at length a particular world view, a particular vision. I do not believe there is any answer to that question. I think we can explore the work and explore the life and listen to the replies the writer gives to a range of questions, but I think that in the end there is something mysterious at work.
It is the mystery of creativity, and whereas it is interesting and to an extent instructive to examine the mystery, the secret is really the point of the process, and it is an undiscoverable secret. From the workings of this creative process come such wonders as the novels of Nabokov or Marquez. I name these two; other people would name a whole range of different writers.
I say don't worry too much about seeking out the mystery, about uncovering the secret of writing novels; if you think you want to write a novel, just write a novel. It will take time and effort and money and dedication and perseverance and sacrifice and risk. Especially risk. You are about to expose your thoughts and ideas to the scrutiny of the world. Are you really prepared to do that? You will need a thick skin at the same time as needing a sensitive heart. You will spend hours and hours and hours at the keyboard or whatever. You will be alone. From beginning to end the novelist is alone. It is your vision; they are your words; it is your responsibility. And you are in charge. You are in charge of a world in which things happen to the characters and you structure the telling of these things so as to make the whole business interesting to readers. If there is one rule I should say that it is: do not be boring. You are trying to get people to pay attention and they won't do this if what you write is too boring.
One of the first elements in any novel I read is that of the narrative voice. Who is telling me this story and why should I listen. And the narrative voice is one of the first questions I set about solving when I write a novel. Another preoccupation of mine is the tense and its relation to time. I think a novelist needs to have a good grip on the narrative voice and on the sense of time in the work.
Until I have discovered or realised where the narrative voice is placed, the work can not really proceed to my satisfaction. A story I wrote in 1989 ('The Golden Moment') never seemed to me to be right until I rewrote it entirely in 1995, with what I believe to be its natural voice and point of view. I am searching for a kind of authority in the voice; I know when I have found it, although it is not easy to explain how I know. I have to say that I just know when I am working as the storyteller, and when the story is working as a narrative.
So much about writing fiction returns to the realm of mystery, and I think that a writer must constantly place himself or herself before this mystery and work along with it. It's not very fashionable to speak of mystery in a world where often we seem to expect ourselves to be able to take just about everything apart and see how it works. If writing comes down to anything, it comes down to integrity, and to a faith in the work itself.
Maybe the sense of time is so important in writing fiction because in some ways fiction, and the novel in particular, is a vehicle designed to suspend time, a means of putting off the end, of cheating death. The principal themes of fiction are love and death, and narrative time is engaged to bring about love and repel death and decay. So a writer has to be conscious of the narrative's attititude to time, and has to work within the rules that time might impose. This can be as simple as getting your tenses right, or as complex as you want to be. Spelling the past participles of irregular verbs correctly can be a great help if you are writing in English. My favourite novel of 1997 was Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a thrilling demonstration of what I am saying here.
To get the voice right and to get the tense right a writer must be very alert and conscious of what he or she is doing. There is a bit of a trick to this, since much of what you are dealing with is below the surface of consciousness, is developing in your unconscious mind, is relying on your imagination. I keep coming back to the simple truth that the only thing to do is to practise, to write and write and write until the words take you where you need to go. This may not be where you expected to go. You are both in control and not in control, and this is a wonderful feeling, as you are constantly on the brink of discovery. It's like being god and giving your creation freewill.
So the novelist is god, and a novel needs a careful and vigilant god. The creator looks to the creation day and night until the work is complete; the novelist lives constantly with the novel and its progress all the time from beginning to end. In my own case this makes me unsociable and impossible as a member of human society. The writing is always somehow at the front and back of my mind. Perhaps this is not necessary for all writers, but in my case it is so. I gave myself the job of novelist. It is a lowly job in our society, but it is very satisfying and enjoyable.