the letters and interviews here, I consider these last two questions—the writer’s world and the writer’s reputation—from the point of view of the writer who strives after high quality and who wants to be known for what she or he actually accomplishes. (I am not interested in reputations that develop when publishers decide they’ve found a “money-making” idea that they can flog into profit through advertising and publicity.) Frankly, I know of no other book on writing that treats all three (the art of fiction, how that art fits into the world today, and the nature of the writer’s reputation), or shows the ways they interrelate. But I have tried to write one—because they do.
II
The essays here were written to stand alone. More or less, they introduce themselves. The letters and interviews following them—if only because it’s somewhat unusual to include such documents in such a book—may need some intellectual context.
The first letter makes a point only in passing that is nevertheless fundamental. So I stress it now.
Though they have things in common, good writing and talented writing are not the same.
The principles of good writing can be listed. Many people learn them:
(1) Use simple words with clear meanings whenever possible. (Despite the way it sounds, this is a call for clarity, not a bid for simplicity.)
(2) Use the precise word. Don’t say “gaze” when you mean “look.” Don’t say “ambled” or “sauntered” or “stalked” when you mean “walked.” (And don’t say “walked” when you mean one of the others.) As far as the creative writer goes, the concept of synonyms should be a fiction for high school and first- and second-year college students to encourage them to improve their vocabularies. The fact is (as writers from Georg Christoff Lichtenberg [1742–99] in the eighteenth century to Alfred Bester [1913–87] in the twentieth have written), “There are no synonyms.”
(3) Whenever reasonable, avoid the passive voice.
(4) Omit unnecessary modifiers. As a rule of thumb, nouns can stand up to one modifier each; thus, if you use two—or more!—have a good reason.
(5) For strong sentences, put your subject directly against the verb. Preferably, when possible, move adverbial baggage to the beginning of the sentence—or to the end, less preferably. Don’t let it fall between subject and verb. Except for very special cases (usually having to do with the intent to sound old-fashioned), do not write “He then sat,” “She suddenly stood,” or “He at once rose.” Write “Then he sat,” “Suddenly she stood,” or “He rose at once.”
(6) Omit unnecessary chunks of received language: “From our discussion so far it is clearly evident that …” If it’s that evident, you needn’t tell us. “Surely we can all understand that if …” If we can, ditto. “In the course of our considerations up till now clearly we can all see that …” If it follows that clearly and we can all see it, we’ll get the connection without your telling us we’ll get it. If the connection is obscure, explain it. “It goes without saying that …” If it does, don’t. “Almost without exception …” If the exceptions are important enough to mention, say what they are; if they’re not, skip them and omit the phrase mentioning them. Make your statements clearly and simply. If you need to include qualifications of any complexity, don’t put them in awkward clauses. Give them separate sentences.
(7) Avoid stock expressions such as “the rolling hills,” “a flash of lightning,” “the raging sea.” “Hills,” “lightning,” and “sea” are perfectly good words by themselves. Good writers don’t use such phrases. Talented writers find new ways to say them that have never been said before, ways that highlight aspects we have all seen but have rarely noted.
(8) Good writing rarely uses “be” or “being” as a separate verb. Don’t use “be” or “being” when you mean either “becoming” (not “It had started to be stormy,” but “A storm had started”) or “acting” (Not “She was being very unpleasant,” but “She was unpleasant”), except in dialogue or in very colloquial English. By the same token, avoid “There are” and “There were” whenever possible. Except in colloquial situations, don’t write “There were five kids standing in line at the counter.” Write “At the counter five kids stood in line.”
(9) Don’t weigh down the end of clauses or sentences with terminal prepositional phrases reiterating information the beginning already implies.
Here’s an example of that last: “I turned from my keyboard to stack the papers on the desk.” Since the vast majority of keyboards sit on desks, you don’t need that terminal prepositional phrase “on the desk.” If you turned from the keyboard to stack some papers “on the floor” or even “on the kitchen table,” that “on the floor” or “on the kitchen table” would add meaningful information to the visualization. But, in the context of the last three hundred years of office work, “on the desk” is superfluous.
You can consider this next a tenth rule, or just a general principle for good style: use a variety of sentence forms. Try to avoid strings of three or more sentences with the same subject—especially “I.” While you want to avoid clutter, you also want to avoid thinness. Variety and specificity are the ways to achieve this. The rules for good writing are largely a set of things not to do. Basically good writing is a matter of avoiding unnecessary clutter. (Again, this is not the same as avoiding complexity.)
You can program many of these rules into a computer. Applied to pretty much any first draft, these rules will point to where you’re slipping. If you revise accordingly, clarity, readability, and liveliness will improve.
Here again we come up with an unhappy truth about those various creative writing and MFA programs. If you start with a confused, unclear, and badly written story, and apply the rules of good writing to it, you can probably turn it into a simple, logical, clearly written story. It will still not be a good one. The major fault of eighty-five to ninety-five percent of all fiction is that it is banal and dull.
Now old stories can always be told with new language. You can even add new characters to them; you can use them to dramatize new ideas. But eventually even the new language, characters, and ideas lose their ability to invigorate.
Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the writing is good and nothing more) produces most bad fiction. On one level or another, the realization of this is finally what turns most writers away from writing.
Talented writing is, however, something else. You need talent to write fiction.
Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic.
Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind—vividly, forcefully—that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.
Talent appears in many forms. Some forms are diametric to each other, even mutually exclusive. (In The Dyer’s Hand, W. H. Auden [1907–73] says most successful writers overestimate their intelligence and underestimate their talent. Often they have to do this to preserve sanity; still they do it.) The talented writer often uses specifics and avoids generalities—generalities that his or her specifics suggest. Because they are suggested, rather than stated, they may register with the reader far more forcefully than if they were articulated. Using specifics to imply generalities—whether they are general emotions we all know or ideas we have all vaguely sensed—is dramatic writing. A trickier proposition that takes just as much talent requires
