Who Says Any Writer Can’t Try Fiction?

When Elia Kazan turned from drama to fiction, several critics raised questions: Has he written fiction before? Why does he think he can make the big jump to a novel?

What makes these questions not just curious but specious is that Kazan was not disqualified from fiction-writing just because his main experience was in drama. People do not criticize a cab driver or a grandmother for publishing a novel, but writers who have made their reputations in one field can expect to be scorned for venturing into another. Every novelist has had to write a novel for the first time, yet the absence of a prior novel was not considered a disadvantage in itself. Yet, let someone who has been a journalist or an essayist attempt a novel for the first time and the wolves start to howl.

The fallacy of these reactions is that there isn’t that much difference between one form of writing and another. A nonfiction writer--say, someone whose experience has been in biography or reportage of events--is practiced in the skillful use of words to convey ideas or to describe human behavior. In writing a novel, that writer will use the same skills to describe characters or scenes he has created in his imagination.

George Santayana’s eminence as philosopher was well established when he wrote one of the truly distinguished novels of his day. “The Last Puritan” profited from the sustained and systematic thought he had given to life’s elusive questions. The style was not exactly Hemingwayesque: The paragraphs were not confined to a sentence or two, and the conversational exchanges were not clipped or rapid-fire. But “The Last Puritan” was a respectable novel and achieved in its main purpose, which was to remind us that we are connected to a long procession of lives and historical situations.

The ability to scrutinize human lives and to describe them with interest and excitement is a reasonable expectation of professional writers--whatever the genre with which they are identified. People who have lived or observed unusual experiences are justified in sharing their insights. For example, some physicians whose writing on prescription pads may be difficult to fathom have done rather well in advanced literary forms, whether poetry or fiction.

Historically, names that come to mind would include Chekhov, Rabelais, Celine and Keats (who was a trained apothecary). Among the more contemporary names, writers who have gone to medical school or who have actually practiced medicine would include Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, A. J. Cronin, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy and Richard Selzer. Their books bear witness to the ability of some doctors to know at least as much about the totality of a human being as they do about a disease. They see beyond the symptoms to the inner torment that can manifest itself in illness.

For this reason, perhaps, many writers have been fascinated with the art and practice of medicine. Literature would be a lot thinner if writers were not attracted to the mystique of physicians and the exercise of their powers, implicit or explicit. Voltaire reminds us, however, that even the most vaunted physician is vulnerable to human feelings. Alexander Pope, while expressing high respect for physicians, questions the God-like veneration in which they are held. Pasternak regards the physician as the repository of both the highest virtues and deepest flaws of human beings. Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner, who dominated American fiction for more than three decades, all were drawn to medical themes.

Encounters in living generally precede and do not follow the development of writing skills. Having something to write about is both the initial qualifier and the great motivator.

The greatest writers did not enroll in writing classes. A writing instructor may define the principles of novel writing and may offer specific criticisms of submitted literary materials, but the wise teacher advises students to read as many novels as possible, saturating themselves in the rhythms and sequences of creative language.

If someone who has won a reputation as an essayist or critic or biographer or journalist turns to novel writing, the least responsible question to ask is not whether he or she has had prior experience in fiction. Far more relevant is whether the new work has something important to say and whether it says it in a way that engages the creative imagination of the reader.