Forget about the plot
“Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash” –Vladimir Nabokov
But how do you do it? Plot or character first? Idea or image? Computer or Biro? Day or night? Do you know how it’s going to end? How do you know the beginning really is the beginning? What does it all mean? When did you know you were a writer? How can I be like you?
Novelists suffer for their art. They suffer on book tours and at literary festivals; they suffer when journalists ask them dumb questions; they suffer when the Paris Review asks to interview them for its “Art of Fiction” slot. Their fictions aren’t enough; we want the facts. Having ceased to rely on theologians, we now look to writers to personify “the word”.
In the launch issue of Craig Raine’s enterprising literary journal Areté, Ian McEwan bravely publishes a chapter from his new novel. Bravely, because the novel is not yet written. It is work in progress and will not be completed until the end of next year. The fact that he can excise a chunk from an embryonic book and show it to the world provides an interesting insight into the mind and methods of the writer. So how do you do it? McEwan is obliging, even though he is halfway up an alp on a skiing holiday. “The novel I’m writing at present is a novel with a slow gestation period,” he explains. “Certain chapters fall satisfyingly into the category of being almost complete in themselves. The same thing happened with Enduring Love. I published a couple of chapters in the New Yorker, though what I thought was an early chapter ended up as chapter 19 in the novel.”
McEwan, clearly, is satisfied to be judged by what he has written, by this discrete chapter, even though he does not necessarily know where it will fit in the novel which eventually emerges. His approach reflects the fluidity and open-endedness of the writing process; at times it is not a search for definition but a flight from definition. “When I have an idea for a book,” he says, “I buy an A4 notepad and carry that around with me, writing down themes or messages to myself. But I rarely read them later – they are an expression of gathering intent. For months I have a dull, hesitant feeling that prevents me from writing, but then I feel a sudden urgency. Often some detail helps you in and then you’re off. I write slowly, with a lot of gaps and pauses. I hope to get 400-700 words a day. I need to get into a rhythm – it’s an emotional thing. I have to become a different person when I write.”
McEwan says he writes slowly, but all things are relative. While Joyce thought three sentences a good day’s work, Trollope used to gallop along at 250 words every quarter of an hour. He wrote more than 40 novels, hunted four days a week, edited literary magazines and invented the letter box. It probably helped that he didn’t do book signings, author tours or magazine interviews.
Trollope, Dickens and Thackeray were masters of serial publication: their novels were written in monthly numbers, usually to deadline. They wrote, of necessity, sequentially; they plotted carefully, although in Thackeray’s case, adapting and adding topical references right up to deadline. Theirs is the antithesis of the approach of the modern writer of “literary” novels, who, on the whole, is not seeking to address a social problem or expose a moral ill but respond to some inner demon.
“I regard all novels as journeys,” says McEwan. “They have the quality of an investigation, and the investigation changes as the material changes.” Victorian writers would have thought in terms of exposition; contemporary writers think in terms of revelation. And their role in the process of revelation is oddly passive.
Martin Amis talks about a novel “accreting”; it appears to happen almost autonomously. He faced the tape recorders of the Paris Review last year and described the process of beginning a novel: “The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer’s block. In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he’s sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes and a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements. In fact, it’s never like that. What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer’s part.”
John Updike once described a similar process. “I think the subconscious picks at it and occasionally a worrisome sentence or image will straighten itself out and then you make a note of it. A few places are specially conducive to inspiration – automobiles, churches – private places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church – little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the programme, and carry down to the office [on] Monday.”
I asked several writers to describe their working methods, convinced that at least one would refuse – deconstructing artistic impulses could be seen as dangerous, like over-analysing a golf swing. But all were happy to co-operate in the attempt to reduce the irreducible.
Whereas McEwan might be seen as a plunger, eager to start writing and finding his rhythm once he has begun, the novelist Hilary Mantel approaches the water cautiously. “I usually live with an idea for five years or more before writing,” she says. “The book has to change over the course of that time – and you have to change too.
“A novel is like a jigsaw, except that you don’t have a picture to work with. I write in notebooks and on postcards which I pin on noticeboards. The idea is to keep everything as fluid as possible. When I start to write, I may have some virtually completed chapters, a set of notes for other parts, and some postcards with key words on them. But once I start writing, it comes very quickly because I have spent so long thinking about it.
“The key thing to find is the note of the book. Once I have that, even for just half a page, the rest will follow. That note is the background hum which runs through the book; it is the tone, the characteristic sound of the book. Everything else is up for grabs.”
Mantel neatly encapsulates the view of many literary novelists: plotting is not their central concern; the key is mood, atmosphere, that Nabokovian “style and structure”. Amis is entirely dismissive of plot – “plots really matter only in thrillers” – and sees “voice” as both the starting point and defining characteristic of a novel. “What gives the voice its own timbre and its own resonance is what interests me… [The voice] is all he’s got. It’s not the flashy twist or the seamless sequence of events that characterises a writer and makes him unique. It’s a tone, it’s a way of looking at things. It’s a rhythm.”
Giles Foden, winner of the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award for The Last King of Scotland, is less willing to dismiss plot, but still believes the mainspring of a novel lies elsewhere. “I think of a book as a shape, or a territory, something that corresponds to whatever’s happening in my psychology while, or just before, I’m writing. Ideally, the pattern of the plot will correspond with it too. In other words, the plot itself would be expressive.”
Mood, voice, shape – these authors are describing an artful process that would have been foreign to the thinking of the Victorian social problem novelists. Writers before George Meredith had nothing that could be termed an aesthetic theory; they were practical writers who wrote for a wide public. It is Meredith, the poet-novelist unwilling to bend before popular taste, who is the prototype for today’s literary novelists, and who developed a sense of the writer as artist that, by the end of the century, was fully formed in the work of Henry James.
James’s biographer, Leon Edel, described the novelist’s notebooks as “a continuing conversation with himself”. They are sourcebook, call to arms, critical apparatus, “a discourse on the tribulations as well as the blessings of art”. Edel summarises how they demonstrate James’s method. “Many of his pages deal strictly with the business of story-telling, but hardly ever with the necessities of plot; the characters provide the plot, not the plot the characters. We are taken from the germ of a story, some brief incident or anecdote, into human behaviour and human motivation.
“We watch James in his workshop building narratives with a kind of Olympian mastery. Often he is impatient about the details; he will set up some trite machinery as a substitute for plot. Reading these notes we say to ourselves, ‘Isn’t he taking an easy way out?’, only to find, in the finished story, that much has been changed, the clutter swept away, the proper meaning, the delicate touch applied. Many of the notes are skeletal. It is obvious he carries so much more in his imagination than he can begin to set down.”
A generation later, Virginia Woolf went even further than James in developing the notion of the self-conscious artist, living to write rather than writing to live. She also acted as the midwife to modernism, developing her own aesthetic theory to set against what she saw as the mechanical plotting of the “Edwardians”. Her brilliantly suggestive essay, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, pulled no punches. Writing of the work of Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and HG Wells, she wrote: “What odd books they are… they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something – to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque. That done, the restlessness is laid, the book finished; it can be put upon the shelf, and never be read again.
“But with the work of other novelists it is different. Tristram Shandy or Pride and Prejudice is complete in itself; it is self-contained; it leaves one with no desire to do anything, except indeed to read the book again, and to understand it better. The difference perhaps is that both Sterne and Jane Austen were interested in things in themselves; in character in itself; in the book in itself. Therefore everything was inside the book, nothing outside.”
Seventy years later, Woolf’s view that books can have an internal truth, that “everything was inside the book”, has triumphed. Writers now see their task as being true to their artistic impulse, not true to life or some notion of social utility. There is no imperative to explain or resolve. “It is the difference between writing a thesis and a novel,” says Malcolm Bradbury, who co-founded the highly successful creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. “If I have a student who is writing a thesis, I press him until his argument is absolutely clear. With a novelist the opposite is true – it mustn’t be too clear. You don’t necessarily start at the beginning; in fact, you might not even know where the beginning is.”
Shena Mackay, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Orchard on Fire in 1996, also stresses fluidity. “The writing is part of the thinking process. I plot mainly in my head. I don’t make a chart and I wouldn’t want to do that. There has to be organic growth; I have to surprise myself.”
Maureen Freely, who combines writing with teaching creative writing at the University of Warwick, says that her work draws to a great extent on her own experiences, but that she has learned to transform them into fiction. The book is a literary artefact, not a raw slice of life. “You take your own experience and turn it into something that you don’t understand. You’re looking at a situation that you know from a point of view that you do not know.”
Writing, as Hilary Mantel says, demands “patience, arrogance and mental toughness – you have to have faith in yourself. You have to be able to deal with indifference and rejection.” For every Rushdie or McEwan – feted, sought after, wealthy – there are a dozen Peter Everetts. Everett, who died recently, wrote all his life, always struggling to win recognition. In 1996, after three decades spent facing the indignities of the writer’s life, he was still resolute. “I’m a good writer and I have never known any other destiny or happenstance.”
Conrad defined art as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe”. Good writers try to meet that imperious injunction. Hence the gnawing and nagging in their heads, the scraps of paper with one-word messages from their subconscious on noticeboards, the quest for mood, shape, voice, melody.
Nabokov again: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.” The book, some writers would say, already exists; the task is not to write it but to find it.
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