Craft and Craftiness

When writers or editors write about craft, I’m reminded of lean-hipped boys with muscled arms in ribbed, tight T-shirts who took the mysterious Vocational Course in Midwood High School in Brooklyn in the 1950s. They were said to be Learning a Trade. They were Picking Up Skills. Which meant they did craft. Which meant being tougher than I, and from the other side of Bedford Ave. It meant being able to fix faucets or fashion kitchen cabinets for middle-class Flatbush householders like my parents.

When my grades looked too low for me to graduate, much less get into a college, my high school college adviser, a man whose disdain for me in that school filled with smarties was exceeded only by my own, suggested that I learn a craft. Clearly, I would never enter college and--apparently, unlike the Bachelors of Arts from whose ranks I was excluded--would have to earn a living. The terror with which I viewed a life of more or less honest labor achieved with my privileged hands drove me back to my studies.

So when I think of craft, I think at first of jobs I haven’t the skills to perform. Apparently a lot of other people think of themselves as uncrafty, for our bookstore and library shelves are bent beneath the weight of books on how to succeed as a writer, books on how to be happy while failing as a writer, books on how to think about writers’ block, books on how to thrive in writing workshops, and books that give advice on such matters as writing the Western novel for young adults. We are a nation that takes its pulse as it strives to become better; we are a nation of improvers of the self. And the talk always comes around to craft.

Here’s a moment that seems to be about some or all of that: It’s an early autumn afternoon, and Cynthia Ozick stands before a large classroom of Colgate University students. She has been invited to visit the Living Writers course to talk about her work. “You want to know,” she acknowledges, “how I dot my i’s and cross my t’s.” She talks a very little about Henry James, once--and maybe still--a literary hero of hers. She moves with no warning and with no hesitation from the scrupulosities of James to the seething story of the birth and struggle of Israel, and from there she stands, and the class stands with her, before the vast complexities of what we might call being a Jew.

The students begin by taking notes--there will be a final exam--and they conclude in stillness, the kind of hypnotized awe that parents witness when they read a remarkable story to a child. She speaks to them about embattlement, about actual life and death, about the marrow-deep requirement of a writer that she somehow bear witness to what may at last be unutterable. And when she concludes her talk, she is shaking--or do I recall the passion that shook her language? Am I remembering that I was shaken by it? She lifts her arm a little, then she drops it to her side. She says, “That is how I dot my i’s, and that is how I cross my t’s.”

When I work at my own fiction, I don’t think of such matters. I work hard and pray for luck. But when I address the idea of craft on behalf of the luck of others, I think first of Cynthia Ozick’s hand as it rose and then fell. I think of the rise and fall of her voice. They are emblems to me of a fact you ought to learn very early as a writer and usually (because, I guess, it’s too early) cannot: energy--whether born of love or hatred or need, whether it is driven by what others call good or whether profound in its selfishness, whether the writer who possesses or is possessed by it may seem, at last, indecent or heroic--energy (call it passion, call it focus, say intensity or drive ) is huger than craft and is what will matter most in the lives of readers.

With that caveat, let me offer one more: I am in two of the six books about craft that I’ll discuss--”Writing for Your Life” (Miriam Berkley interviews me and makes me sound a good deal pleasanter than I am) and “Writing Fiction” (Janet Burroway includes a story by me and quotes from another).

I think the most readable book here, the one that will appeal to both writers and civilians, is “Writing for Your Life: 92 Contemporary Authors Talk About the Art of Writing and the Job of Publishing.” These interviews, from Publishers Weekly, are sometimes edifying and usually at least amusing. From Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser detective series, you learn that “(b)eing a celebrity writer is not so intrusive that you can’t stand it . . . it’s like getting a rash from drinking champagne.” James Dickey, that estimable poet and novelist, remembers a day when, working at an ad agency early in his career, he heard his boss tell a meeting, “Dickey writes poetry as a hobby.”’ Dickey reports slamming his hand on the table and crying, “Advertising is the hobby!”

Allan Gurganus (author of “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All”) claims that “there is a great appetite, and a great need, for Stories with a capital S. And a great longing for sentences full of sensation, full of stained-glass colors and shaded by the time of day.” And you can learn that Susan Fromberg Schaeffer (“Buffalo Afternoon”) doesn’t start to write a novel until she knows “what the book is about from beginning to end, scene by scene,” while Pete Dexter (“Paris Trout”) says that his writing process “changes from day to day.” And there is great language from wonderful writers--for example, Paula Fox’s “As a child I was very wary of adults. They tended to leave you behind in train stations.”

My favorites among books about writing fiction are by the late John Gardner (“The Art of Fiction”) and by Janet Burroway (“Writing Fiction”). The Gardner is discursive, theoretical, as well as practical and brilliant in its restless ranging; I read it as I read his fiction, to engage his irreplaceable mind.

Janet Burroway’s “Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft,” now in its third edition, strikes me as the best of the craft books. It is scrupulously written by a first-rate novelist who includes a large number of stories for new writers to read and who gives tips, offers sensitive commentary and exceptions to what may pass for “rules” in writing. Her writing assignments and questions about anthologized stories are useful, her sense of humor is perceptible, and her section on rewriting excellent.

An entire book on correcting what you’ve written is “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers,” which comes from professional editors who know their stuff. They’re not fiction writers, and that’s a problem: They speak sensitively and happily from the outside of the process. Inevitably, anything an editor says about fiction, no matter how smart and kind, is at best (unless the editor is a writer) a translation of the original process. Still, there’s lots of practical advice here. As with all writing advice, every word can, at one time or another, profitably be ignored. And even if these useful words are faithfully followed, an untalented writer will follow them with bad results.

Sylvia Burack’s “The Writer” is the source of the more than 500 pages of craft articles from various writers in “The Writer’s Handbook.” From them you can learn “What we are after is a way to create writing that has what, for want of a better word, I call sparkle.”You might choose to skip the well-intended but so often nebulous or fatuous advice in the craft section and use the section about markets. It will provide you with about 300 pages of descriptions of and addresses for agents, associations, magazines, book publishers, etc.

If you’re flush, you can spend the $148 it will cost for a 1993 Literary Market Place (LMP), a major tool of the trade. That directory gives you far more information than “The Writer’s Handbook” and can be exceedingly useful. You can learn which book publishers will read unsolicited (unagented) manuscripts. You can then select a name, in the trade department, of someone to whom you can address the book and who might even look at it--rather than sending your book to a company’s mail room where it will, more than likely, languish. (The reference section of any large library should contain LMP.)

Life is long and art is hard, and craft is the harmonica hummed at by critics. Craft is the xylophone made from something’s ribcage and played on with sticks in dissertations. Craft of course does matter. Like the bones and cartilage of ribs, it keeps the flesh of fiction from folding in and draping itself damply over the lungs, the heart. But the heart is invented, and required to beat, by talent and by energy and no one can give or teach either.

In discussions of craft, writers often worry aloud about the simplest motions, for simple matters can be terribly tough to write. How do you make your character open a door? One version may have it that “He strode to the door, then collected himself. He grasped the knob and, taking a deep breath, turned it.” Good will requires that you do not ask--though a frayed temper might require that you pose the question--whether it was the door knob or the protagonist’s breath that was taken and turned. Another version: “He didn’t want to open the door. But he did. He had to.” Another: “He opened the door.” Another: “She said, ‘Please open the door.’ So of course he did.”

If the damned door is at last to be opened, there must be a good reason for showing it to us. If the reason’s large, and if it matters, then the character whose reason it is matters too. And if that’s the case, then the story is about the character and the reason, not the knob or the door. Fiction focused on the character, driven by her or his passions, and born therefore of the author’s passions (whether served up cold or hot), will use the door as a way of offering those passions. By kicking in the door or ignoring it, the author will make us feel the space between the characters on each side.

None of us can teach the other of us how to write. No one can teach us how to love. One can buy those manuals about placing that part of your body here , so your lovemaking partner can place her whatchamacallit thus --but, so very obviously, you cannot get her to love you that way, and neither of you may be able to sleep with gladness afterward. Technique is so very far from love; narrative passion is the same long distance from craft.

Of course, I would lie if I were to portray any artist of any significance as a noble savage, ignorant of the workings of clear prose and incapable of worrying about how to worry the reader, frighten the reader, force the reader to see and hear and smell the events of the story, require that the reader honor the life of the characters any reader would rather leave on the page than embrace. That is our work, and we want--for all the greedy reasons--to do our work well.

So we rewrite, we revise, we re-imagine. We ferret out facts, the accuracy of which few readers will know to evaluate. We listen to the music of our lines in despair because we do not get the sound right. We torture a hand to a door knob, then off it. We listen to hear if we have told but not shown, or shown but not told, whichever it is; we try to write only what we know--or is it what we can pretend to know? We write from experience and we write from speculation and we write about the political--or are we supposed to write the domestic? Shall we celebrate women as we write? Ought we to make at least one character a color other than our own? Shall we show our manuscript to friends or to a workshop? Should we send the work out? Move to New York and have lunch a lot? Should we first refine our craft? With whom shall we study? For how many years? And we stand, at last, on the top of some chalky cliff someplace and try to fly off it into the air. Or we stand someplace high and consider hurling ourselves down because we know or fear we know we cannot fly. Or we study the techniques of flight.

The simple, horrible, and undeniable fact is that no one can teach us to be good writers. Other writers’ example and their vision and their skill can be studied and we can learn from them. The books under review can possibly help. Needing to be a writer is, alas, an ailment, and many have it. The ability to be a writer is another kind of curse, and many seek it. The writers, meanwhile--they can never tell you how, precisely--write.

LITERARY MARKET PLACE 1993 (R.R. Bowker: $148) THE WRITER’S HANDBOOK 1992

Edited by Sylvia K. Burack

(The Writer, Inc., 120 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 02116, 617/423-3157: $29.95) WRITING FOR YOUR LIFE

92 Contemporary Authors Talk About the Art of Writing and the Job of Publishing

Edited by Sybil Steinberg (The Pushcart Press, distributed by W.W. Norton: $30, cloth, $15.50 paper) SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS

By Renni Browne and Dave King (HarperCollins: $20) WRITING FICTION

A Guide to Narrative Craft

By Janet Burroway (HarperCollege: $23)

THE ART OF FICTION

Notes on Craft for Young Writers

By John Gardner (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95, cloth ; Random House: $9, paper)