Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [65]
Other writers have the opposite problem. A friend of mine has an extraordinary natural sense of story, coupled with an enthusiasm for his plots and characters which communicates itself in the drive of his narrative. From a technical standpoint, however, he’s almost numbingly maladroit. His first novel was rewritten several times prior to publication, and received extensive textual editing from his publisher; even so, it remained a crude book. He has improved considerably since then, but to this day, ten books later, he is still very much the heavy-handed writer. Nevertheless, his books are almost invariably best sellers because of the particular strengths they do possess.
My point here is that someone like my friend, who has had to teach himself so much about the nuts-and-bolts side of writing, might well be better equipped than I to discuss the subject. It’s harder to discourse effectively upon something when one’s approach to it has always been intuitive.
That said, perhaps we can have a look at a handful of subjects which fit under the general umbrella of style. Perhaps you’ll find something here of some value, whether you yourself are a natural literary athlete or whether you have to work very hard to make it look easy.
Grammar, Diction and Usage
A fiction writer doesn’t have to be the strictest grammarian around. He can get by without a clear understanding of the subjunctive. Indeed, the sort of slavish devotion to the rules of grammar that might gladden the heart of an old-fashioned English teacher can get in the way of the novelist, giving his prose a stilted quality and leading his characters to talk not as people speak but as they ought to.
In my own case, I’m aware that I make certain grammatical errors, some of them deliberate, others through sheer ignorance. I have a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a book I unhesitatingly recommend, and yet months pass without my referring to it. When I’m hammering away a the typewriter keys, trying to get a scene written and to get it right, I’m not remotely inclined to interrupt the flow for the sake of what Churchill called “the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
In first-person writing, I would maintain that the writer is fully justified in breaking grammatical rules and regulations at will. How the narrator expresses himself, the words he uses and the way he puts them together, is part of the manner in which his character is defined. I will argue further that a first-person narrator may follow a particular precept on one page and violate it on another. If our characters are to be lifelike, we can hardly demand absolute consistency of them.
The same principle applies, and rather more obviously, in dialogue. Most people don’t express themselves the way English teachers wish they would, and it’s part of the novelist’s license to make their speech as grammatical or ungrammatical as suits his purpose.
You’d think this would go without saying. I’ve far too often had my characters’ grammar corrected by overzealous copyeditors to believe that anything in this area goes without saying.
Copyeditors are even more of a nuisance when it comes to punctuation. Various rules for punctuation have grown up over the years, but it’s a moot point whether they apply to fiction, where punctuation may be properly regarded as a device the writer can use to obtain the effect he desires. You can choose to write this sentence:
She was angry, and not a little frightened.
Or you can write it this way:
She was angry and not a little frightened.
The decision, I maintain, is personal. The presence or absence of a comma in this sentence determines the rhythm of its reading, and that’s a choice the author is fully entitled to make.