A Novel Way to Write One

Oakley Hall says his new book, “The Art and Craft of Novel Writing,” is the kind of book that he would like to have had when he started writing.

“I wish I had known how to look at other people’s writing the way this book shows how to look at other people’s writing, to see how it works,” said Hall, director of the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at UC Irvine and the author of 19 novels.

For more than 30 years, Hall said, “I’ve been collecting little snippets of things I thought worked or didn’t work from all over the place--Gothics and junk novels and everything. So much a part of writing is reading. All these rules and models and things are passed down from generation to generation of writers: You steal ideas and learn from other writers the way those writers stole ideas and learned from other writers before them.”

In “The Art and Craft of Novel Writing” (Writer’s Digest Books; $16.95), Hall serves as guide for what his publisher describes as an “armchair tutorial, a novel-writing ‘symposium,’ where the guest tutors are some of literature’s timeless talents.”

If you want to learn how to provide action to an essentially static scene, you can read how F. Scott Fitzgerald did it in a scene from “The Great Gatsby.”

If you want to know how a character can be produced on the page, “whole and alive, his breath congealing on the air,” you can read how Anne Tyler did it in “The Accidental Tourist.”

Or if you want to learn how to write realistic dialogue that conveys character and moves the action forward, you can read how Philip Roth did it in “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

In the process, Hall explains why something works or doesn’t work.

Hall’s hard-bound writer’s workshop is chock-full of author quotations that he has accumulated over the years--from Joseph Campbell’s definition of the mythological hero to Henry James on “The Art of the Novel.”

By the end of the book, Hall has taken the reader though the entire process of writing a novel--from “the first stirrings of the idea to the delightful drudgery and happy torture of the writing.”

Hall also discusses the rewards and sacrifices of novel writing, stating that you’ll “have the inevitable bad days when you discover that the plot has gone completely awry versus the good times, when writing seizes the hand.”

The goal of the book is to demonstrate how to use all the elements of fiction--point of view, characterization, plotting, dialogue and detail--to bring writing to life. And the overriding principle to all writing, Hall says, is “show, don’t tell.”

“The first thing you learn in our (undergraduate) writing class is to try to make it appear before the reader rather than telling about it: rendering instead of reporting. In fiction, rendering is making it happen. Reporting is telling about it after the fact. This is one of the things you can teach. Some people know this automatically and never have to be told. For some, it comes as a terrific revelation.”

“The Art and Craft of Novel Writing” is Hall’s first book on writing and, he said, “it is the only one (of mine) there’s ever going to be. I used it all up in one book. I had an enormous bunch of stuff and I finally boiled it down. I had maybe 1,000 pages of quotes. A lot were very long.”

One of the most effective devices in the book is the incorporation of Hall’s comments in the page margins. In his chapter on dramatization, for example, Hall notes where a passage from a novel is deadened by “abstractions” and “generalities” or enlivened by “sense impressions,” “specific details,” “color” and “motion.”

The margin notes were Hall’s idea.

“And it took a lot of argument at Writer’s Digest,” he said. “They hadn’t done any other books where they had done that, but I had a nice editor there who took my side.”

He did, however, make one compromise: In those passages illustrating undramatic and lifeless passages, his margin comments read, “boring.” He originally had used the word “snore.” “They made me change that,” he said with a laugh.

“The Art and Craft of Novel Writing” comes at an appropriate time in Hall’s life as he winds down 22 years of teaching writing at UCI.

Now 68, he is on phased retirement and teaches only during the winter and spring quarters. Next year he will cut down to only the spring quarter. As he puts it, “I’m kind of detaching.” He said he is looking forward to retirement in 1990 with a sense of “pain and eagerness: I say, ‘Let me out. . . . But I’ll be sorry to go.’ ”

Hall said that what he will miss most about teaching is the students. “If you’ve done it for 20 years, you’ve been involved with the careers of a lot of people. A lot of them have been very successful. That’s very rewarding.” (His book, in fact, is dedicated to his writing students).

A partial list of the authors whose writing Hall and colleague Donald Heiney have helped guide in the early stages includes such names as Richard Ford, Michael Chabon, Kem Nunn, Barbara Haas, Pat Geary, Roberta Smoodin, Jill Ciment and Jay Gummerman (whose collection of short stories will be published this spring).

Another former student on the cusp of publishing is Louis B. Jones, who was in the same workshop as Chabon and Gummerman, and whose first novel will be published by Viking next January. Jones, a Mill Valley resident, holds another distinction: He is now Hall’s son-in-law. Jokes Hall: “To curry favor, he married my daughter.”

As the author of 19 published novels “and a couple of failures that didn’t get published,” Hall is best known for “Corpus of Joe Bailey” and his two novels that were made into motion pictures, “Warlock” and “The Downhill Racers.” Hall also wrote the libretto for the opera “Angle of Repose,” which was produced by the San Francisco Opera Company. And his short story “Horseman,” which won a Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award, appears in the new “Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.”

A San Diego native, Hall began writing fiction during World War II while stationed on the island of Maui where his amphibian tank battalion was preparing for the invasion of Japan.

“I was the adjutant and had a lot of time to sit in my tent and write,” recalled Hall, whose literary heroes at the time were Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. “What I wanted to do was write mystery stories for Black Mask magazine (but) during the war I got to reading Hemingway and Faulkner and my horizons were widened.”

After the war, Hall entered the writing program at Columbia University on the GI Bill, where his first teacher was Carolyn Gordon, a respected Southern novelist and short-story writer.

“She was very tough,” he said. “She made a lot of rules and you were supposed to adhere to those rules: Things like, it usually takes two details to make anything come to life--that was her chief one--and you shouldn’t have more than two sentences to a line of dialogue. They’re nonsense, but rules are kind of useful when you start.”

Hall does not, however, view “The Art and Craft of Novel Writing” as a book of writing “rules.”

“I guess it’s ‘heavy advice,’ ” he said with a laugh. “Whatever works, works. Really, the important thing to know as a writer is to start reading in this way, to see what worked and how it worked.” With another laugh, he added, “You don’t get to read for fun anymore.”

When he is working at UCI, Hall divides his time between staying with friends on Bay Island during the week and his vintage 1852 house on Russian Hill in San Francisco on weekends. He and his photographer wife, Barbara, also have a house in Squaw Valley where Hall directs the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a weeklong writers conference held each August.

Although he will be retiring from UCI, Hall will continue his involvement with writers through the Squaw Valley conference. He said plans call for expanding the conference by offering a manuscript-reading service, which he would supervise. And once retired, he said, “I’m also going to pursue my career as an artist.”

Hall said he is nearing completion of a new novel “and trying to decide whether I have to do another draft or not.” Titled “Burning Issues,” it is set in San Diego during the first 6 months of World War II. It’s about a young man who wants to be a writer.

Hall has traveled far since he was a young man in San Diego, dreaming of one day becoming a writer himself.

And if he has one piece of advice for novice novelists, he said, it is this:

“The most important thing a writer should do is read. I just think that when you find out what other people did that worked, then maybe you can raise the level of your own game.”