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Ooof.
A few days back, I wrote about style and routine. I concluded that post by saying: “The habits that matter most to a writer’s development are not writing habits, but living habits: do you put yourself in the way of situations worth writing about?” Oh man. Let me clarify and qualify that.
I do not believe that a writer needs fight in a war, or even be a soldier, to write a good war story. Do I think it helps? Absolutely. Stories are made compelling by their details. Descriptive detail is what puts the reader in the story; it creates the world. Like continuity errors in a film, unnecessary, inconsistent, or overly generic descriptions of characters, settings, events, etc., are like puppet strings, drawing the audience’s eyes away from the show, to the hands pulling the strings. They destroy the audience’s necessary illusion of “being there”. Instead of thinking about the story, we start thinking about the writer. This can be used by the writer to self-referential effect, but that’s a topic for another time.
So if the story’s in the details, where do the details come from? In my experience? Experience. The old saw applies: “Write what you know.” The way a character does something, whether they move this thing with their left or right hand, if their hands are dirty afterwards, etc., these details come from the experience of the writer. Observation is a useful tool, more useful to some than others. I learn best by doing, and I certainly can’t “show” someone else how something is done without doing it first. Experience matters.
But not if you can’t put it on paper. It’s an old joke for the downsized that now they’ve finally time to write that novel. There are millions of books lolling around in heads, waiting to be written. There’s probably a million more books half finished, or half begun, in desk drawers all over, destined for incompletion. So what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Hemingway and the countless others wounded in his wars? All the faceless others who fought and fucked through the same country? Maybe some didn’t want to talk about it. But I’ll bet most couldn’t write.
We’re always writing our own stories in our mind. We’re usually the hero, but sometimes the villain, and sometimes the damsel in distress. It seems like it would be so easy to simply transcribe this mental narrative. But our mind’s style is terrible! What details do we include in our stories? Those most pertinent to ourselves, to our interpretation of the story. What would those wounded soldiers write about? My pain, my hunger, where I was wounded, the name of the man who held my hand as I lay shot and bleeding. They would be exciting stories, to be sure, because they would be true stories of dangerous things. But they would not all be good stories, they would not all move us like Hemingway’s story about blowing up a Spanish bridge, or Vonnegut’s story about hiding in a basement while Dresden burns.
The great stories, Vonnegut’s stories, Hemingway’s stories, move us because they are that rare synthesis of experience and craft. Each writer’s stories are compelling because he captures the details: the movements, the accents, the fears. His stories are remembered because he spent enough time writing them to whittle the details into their own stories.
March 17, 2009
meringue style
What is style? What constitutes an author’s style? Vocabulary? Syntax? Subject matter? Certainly, obviously, all of that and more. What about process? It seems unsporting almost to consider process in examining literature. After all, it’s on the page, or it isn’t. But we, as writers, as readers, as critics, are clearly interested in the writing habits of our literary heroes. I somehow know that Thornton Wilder would write correspondence or a journal entry before beginning work on his novel or play each day, as a warm-up of sorts. I know other famous writers had this routine as well. Hemingway wouldn’t drink while he was writing.
So what is to be gleaned from this arcana? What do we hope to learn? How to write, of course. We hope that picking up these little habits, mimicking the motions of the titans, will imbue us with the ability to craft winning prose, or at least cleaver conceits. In Little League, I used to wave my bat around in circles like I saw the big leaguers do on TV. As a young man desperate to “become a writer”, I sat in cafes and scribbled in moleskins, as Hemingway had done.
But the deficiency was the same in both instances: all the mannerism, none of the substance. I hadn’t spent my life in a batting cage yet, I hadn’t earned the arrogance implied by waving my bat around like Daryl Strawberry. And all the cafes in the world wouldn’t give me the material to write For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway had to go to war for that. I loved the affectation, just hold the nonsense about blistered hands and bombed bridges. My view of process was too minimal, is still too minimal. The habits that matter most to a writer’s development are not writing habits, but living habits: do you put yourself in the way of situations worth writing about?
March 11, 2009
Andrea gave me A Moveable Feast for Christmas. It seeped into my brain to leak out in my first post, yesterday. I can’t help aping the style. Those short taut sentences are like Alexander’s blade through the Gordian knot that is modern life. They are simple in structure and lean heavily towards physical action. In the book, Hemingway says that writing hungry gave his characters great focus: they were always hungry too, always knew what they needed. Their actions and speech always represent this clarity of vision. There are no Focault-esque baroque oddities, spirals of abstraction, clause draped upon clause, endlessly supplementing, clarifying, hedging. The conventional thinking has Hemingway’s style as a product of its times, a counterpoint to the disorienting horrors of the first war fought with the full technological bounty of the Industrial Revolution, to the relativism of appocalypse. I think what makes that style so appealing today is the new universality of its application.
We live today in a continuous state of upheaval. New technologies supplant old faster than ever before. World changing innovations are on tips of tongues in labs and on campuses, not only across the country, but across the globe. Breakthroughs are shared at near the speed of light and critiqued, corrected and expounded upon nearly as fast. But the sword cuts both ways, and let us not forget, is a sword. War becomes smaller, faster and more deadly to the innocent, it seems everyday. Soldiers die less and less often, more and more return home wounded or changed or both. Industries emerge and collapse in fruit fly cycles. Today’s “conflicts” may not be “World Wars”, but the specter of their violence and confusion covers the globe.
So it feels good for me, like I’m sure it felt good for him, to put something in black and white, to cut through a knot I could never untie, to present my version of events and say simply: this is how it happened for me. Excise lengthy digressions on subjectivity and Heisenberg: writing is presenting an answer to a problem whose solution is unknowable. Every good piece of writing is a religion, presenting a universe within our own, with rules and norms askew or realigned to our own, varying assumptions about the nature of reality suggesting varying modes of life. Hemingway’s voice is authoritative as Moses’. He hedges no bets, makes no disclaimers on his prognostications. That’s a welcome relief in a deconstructed world and it’s the reason he’s the embodiment of American literature. Who could help ripping that off?
