How much of novel-writing is craft, how much ineffable mystery? Charlotte Wood in ‘The Writer’s Room’.

I so relate to the desire for . . . mess. Personally, I feel I’ve spent so much time trying to learn how to write a proper book. And then after a while I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got some skills in controlling a narrative and all that stuff, none of which I had when I began. But now I’ve got some of that control, I just want to blow it all up.’

— Charlotte Wood, interviewing Emily Perkins in The Writer’s Room

Cast your eyes down the list of courses and workshops offered by organisations like Writers Victoria, Australian Writing Centre or Writing NSW and you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that writing a novel is essentially a craft. Thus we see workshop titles like:

• Character, Plot and Dialog
• Sentences That Work
• Five Secrets of Compelling Fiction
• Writing Your Way Through: Plotting, Momentum and Redrafting
• Novel Writing Essentials
• Maintaining Narrative Tension
• How to End Your Story
• Fiction Essentials: Point of View
• The Story Doctor, with Kate Forsyth

And of course there are any number of how-to texts whose titles create a similar impression. Here are a few I’ve got on my own Kindle right now:

• Plot and Structure: Techniques and exercises for crafting a plot that grips readers from start to finish
• Write Your Novel From the Middle
• Scene and Structure

One would have to be deaf and blind, though, not to have noticed that some writers are pretty sceptical of such approaches.

For example, Ursula Le Guin, posting on Book View Café in July 2015, wrote:

Inexperienced writers tend to seek the recipes for writing well. You buy the cookbook, you take the list of ingredients, you follow the directions, and behold! A masterpiece! The Never-Falling Soufflé!

Wouldn’t it be nice? But alas, there are no recipes. We have no Julia Child. Successful professional writers are not withholding mysterious secrets from eager beginners. The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time…

There are “secrets” to making a story work — but they apply only to that particular writer and that particular story. You find out how to make the thing work by working at it — coming back to it, testing it, seeing where it sticks or wobbles or cheats, and figuring out how to make it go where it has to go.

If Le Guin is right, all those how-to texts and workshops with their promising-sounding titles are probably of relatively little value.

Le Guin’s thoughts on novel-writing re-surface in Charlotte Wood’s The Writer’s Room — a record of twelve interviews Wood conducted with respected Australian and New Zealand novelists — when author James Bradley remarks:

Ursula Le Guin says somewhere that although Hollywood and writing workshops have lulled us all into believing fiction is necessarily about conflict and opposition , that’s an extremely patriarchal way of thinking about it — and that it’s equally possible to analyse stories in terms of moments of connection and disconnection.

Overall, Wood and the novelists she talks with in The Writer’s Room show little interest in discussing the ‘craft’ side of writing a novel (if there is one), preferring to focus their discussions largely on the psychology of the writing life as experienced by established authors.

Wood shows considerable interest in the daily work habits of her interviewees, and is curious about where they write, when, and what kinds of word count targets they set themselves. Beyond this, though, there is rarely any sense that Wood or her subjects have found much of value in the kinds of workshops and texts whose titles I cited above.

About as close as Wood gets to questioning her writers on ‘craft’ is when she asks Emily Perkins and Kim Scott where they would place themselves as writers on a spectrum with intuition at one end and rational, deliberate decision-making at the other.

Emily Perkins replies:

Hmm, God. Probably at the intuitive end. Control comes and goes. It’s vital to have control, but also to let go of it. This is not to say that intuition is always right because it’s not. But . . . it’s about listening. In drama training the essence of the learning is to move with your instincts. Don’t block, don’t second-guess, follow your impulse, react, make something happen. Something honest, not something calculated. You’ve got to lose yourself enough to have the intuition, and then the control—the useful, good control—can only come from really listening to that.

Kim Scott’s response is similarly mixed, with perhaps a little more emphasis on the technical:

It moves. I like the intuition part, and I think stuff that’s come from there gives me the most pleasure. And enables me to build upon it. But also I do diagrams, and I think about character—not plot, I need to keep working on that. But then there is a rational, technical point of view too. I think about it in quite a technical sort of way, about voice and so on. But I like the idea that it’s intuition doing most of the work, and I think that’s the case.

Wood’s interviewees do occasionally touch on specific technical aspects of novel writing (such as plotting or maintaining narrative tension) but such references are fleeting, and Wood tends not to follow them up.

Margo Lanagan talks about recognising early that she needed to learn about ‘narrative drive’, and then writing some of her earliest Bantam Wildflowers 30,000 word teenage romances using chapter plans that she stuck to closely. Lanagan says that all of this was ‘good practice in plotting’, but does not elucidate any further.

Amanda Lohrey is sceptical of the value of planning in novel-writing.

The best plans never work, do they? I sometimes got impatient with postgrad writing students who wanted to talk for too long about The Plan. I’d say: ‘Try it and let’s see what works on the page.’

Responding to Wood’s question ‘Do you have definite phases of a novel’s development, or is it more blurry than that?’ (and, to be fair, that certainly is a craft-oriented question), Lohrey responds:

In books on writing there is too much emphasis on plot and characterisation and not enough on the more intangible elements. The most important thing is to find the voice, find the tone, establish the inner rhythm, the momentum that carries the thing along… All those dry and boring books on narratology they sometimes prescribe on university writing courses are a waste of time.

Responding to a comment of Wood’s that things occurring in her novels ‘are surprising and unlikely, but never feel implausible’, Joan London says:

I work terribly hard on the mechanics of plot and movement. Over and over and over I write these things, trying to find a way to make it plausible or acceptable. That’s really an area—the mechanics of that stuff—I work very hard on, to smooth it. How to make it work, to make this sort of bolt from the heavens acceptable!

Wayne Macauley says he is reluctant to over-plan a novel, because he is ‘very conscious that it can all just go to shit at any moment’. Nonetheless, Macauley says,

in practical terms, I do have a plan, which would run to about one or two A4 pages. With The Cook, the week before I started writing the book I wrote out a page and a half—I still have the document—describing how it would go. I actually attached page numbers to these sections: ‘That’s going to be sixty pages, that will be about eighty. Then I’ll get to there, then you’ll go to the house, and that’ll be about da-da-da, and then that little coda will happen.’

Macauley goes on to explain that he wrote this plan in an afternoon, a week before he began writing his novel, about which he had been making little notes for a couple of years.

Macauley shares some thoughts with Wood, too, about how he likes to build ‘pressure’ in his novels by confining the action to a ‘single arena’, rather than letting it spread across ‘a Rubik’s Cube kind of world’ as some other writers do.

Speaking with Christos Tsiolkas, Wood asks ‘Let’s talk about structure… How often would it happen for you that you would really take a draft of a novel apart and completely rethink it?’ Tsiolkas replies:

One of the great joys of writing a novel for me is working out and playing with and discovering structure.

And that’s it — the entirety of Wood’s discussion with Tsiolkas ‘about structure’.

Wood and her interviewees are all experienced novelists, widely recognised for creating work of high literary quality, so I can only assume the relatively skimpy treatment questions of technique receive in The Writer’s Room really does reflect their relative lack of interest in such matters at this point in their careers.

Speaking with Emily Perkins, Wood says that while she initially felt she needed to develop ‘some skills in controlling a narrative and all that stuff’, she has ‘lately begun to feel that very controlled, event-driven narrative is a manifestation of authorial insecurity.’

There are certainly some very powerful voices in The Writer’s Room who warn against bringing a technical approach to novel writing, either at all, or prematurely.

Lloyd Jones, for example, says ‘I’m not at all concerned about plot or anything like that… It would go dead for me would be if I plotted something out… And story takes care of itself anyway, don’t you think?’

James Bradley sees a place for ‘intellectualising’, but only after an ‘instinctive process’ has done the groundwork:

(T)rying to intellectualise the process too early is often bad for the work because it can kill that ineffable mystery all writing needs to have at its heart, that thing that makes it alive and irreducible… (W)riting a novel or a story, you need to get into that weird dreaming state, so it’s a much more instinctive process. Of course, there’s a whole lot of intellectual stuff at work as well, about crafting and shaping and working out why isn’t this working and so on.

Margo Lanagan suggests that a good reader can always tell when a novel has been written in a calculated way (or, as Le Guin would say, by following a recipe):

As a reader, you can tell when a writer has one eye on you. You know when they’ve laid out a story nicely, or commercially, with conventional readers in mind. It’s different from when they’ve themselves been dragged along by the power of the thing. I’m all for that second kind of story, where the writer gives you the honour of accompanying them on a journey involving their whole self, with all their expertise in the service of negotiating that new, risky territory.

As someone who has written two (so-far unpublished) novels using a largely intuitive, go-with-the-flow process, but who is also, paradoxically, a sucker for precisely the kinds of recipes and formulae often decried above, I find myself in a dilemma as I start work on my next manuscript. I hear the siren call of the how-to-write-a-novel texts clearly audible to the starboard side of my vessel, while the Charybdis of the dreamlike and ineffable beckons to the port side.

The Writer’s Room has shed some light on this dilemma for me, but I’m afraid the light is rather dimmer than I was hoping for.

What are you thoughts?

Have you ever found yourself wondering, as a writer, whether the best way to solve whatever problems you’re encountering in your current work would be to take a short course on X, or to read the book on Y Essentials? If so, what did you do, and what was the result?

Clearly the great risk in taking the ‘ineffable’ approach to writing a novel is that one may fall flat on one’s face. Has this ever happened to you? If so, have you come away from the experience feeling that maybe you need to try a different approach next time?