The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (15 page)

Or look at an example of Isak Dinesen’s use of the tale’s traditional high style:

The high style, like Bach, is not for everyone; but the fact that amateurs so regularly fall into grotesque imitation of it suggests that it strikes some responsive chord in us. By reading carefully and extensively, by writing constantly and getting the best criticism available to him, the writer who begins with no feeling for diction can eventually overcome his problems.

Sentence variety is discussed in most freshman composition
books and need not be treated at length here; it will be enough to mention one or two of the problems that most frequently plague creative writers. What the young writer needs to do, of course, is study sentences, consciously experiment with them, since he can see for himself what the difficulty is, and can see for himself when he has beaten it: Where variety is lacking, sentences all run to the same length, carry over and over the same old rhythms, and have the same boring structure. Subject-verb, subject-verb, subject-verb-object, subject-verb. What the alert writer learns as he begins to experiment is that the cure can be worse than the disease. I’ve mentioned already the usually ill-fated introduction of an opening infinite-verb phrase. Another bad cure is the sentence awkwardly stretched out by a “that” or “which” clause. For example, “Leaping from the couch, he seized the revolver from the bookshelf that stood behind the armchair,” or, “She turned, shrieking, throwing up her arms in terror at the sight of the gorilla that had arrived that morning from Africa, which had formerly been its home.” What happens in such sentences, obviously, is that they tend to trail off, lose energy. It may help to look at the matter this way: Sentences in English tend to fall into meaning units or syntactic slots—for instance, such patterns as

In the so-called periodic sentence, highly recommended by high-school English teachers, the most interesting or important thing in the sentence is pushed into the final slot, as in “Down the river, rolling and bellowing, came Mabel’s cow.” The natural superiority of the periodic sentence can be exaggerated, but it is a fact that an anticlimactic ending can ruin an otherwise perfectly good sentence, and almost invariably—except in comic
writing—the “that” or “which” clause leads to anticlimax. (In
New Yorker
“super-realist” fiction, this stylistic flatness may be a virtue.)

Often the search for variety leads to another problem, the overloading of sentences and the loss of focus. Look at these sentences: “The dark waters of the Persian Gulf were very peaceful as the pinkish glow of pre-dawn light turned the horizon’s gray clouds to shades of orchid and lavender. The clear, cool air breezed across the decks of the mammoth white ship as it moved almost silently through the water.” In a somewhat frantic attempt to get gusto, the writer packs his sentence like a Japanese commuter train. Perhaps a great writer might get away with this (in prose fiction Dylan Thomas and Lawrence Durrell have tried it), but it seems not too likely. As a rule, if a sentence has three syntatic slots, as in

—a writer may load one or two of the slots with modifiers, but if the sentence is to have focus—that is, if the reader is to be able to make out some clear image, not just a jumble—the writer cannot cram all three syntactic slots with details. So, for instance, the writer may load down slot 1 and leave the others more or less alone, thus:

Or the writer may risk piling high precarious loads on both slots 1 and 2; for instance:

If what chiefly interests him is literary stunts (and such things are not all bad, though they can detract from fiction’s seriousness), the writer can oonch slot 3 just a little, changing it in the sentence above to something like “the bumpy, crooked road.” This sort of playing around with sentences is one of the chief things that make writing a pleasure; nevertheless, no writer can help but recognize that eventually enough is enough.

Readers sensitive to the virtues of good fiction can be distracted from the fictional dream by subtler kinds of mistakes. One of these is faulty rhythm. Many writers, including some famous ones, write with no consciousness of the poetic effects available through prose rhythm. They put the wine on the table, put the cigarette in the ashtray, paint in the lovers, start the clock ticking, all with no thought of whether the sentences should be fast or slow, light-hearted or solemn with wedged-in juxtaposed stresses. I am not speaking now of the intentionally arhythmic writer, the kind who never allows himself a passage
that stands out as rhythmically beautiful but on the other hand never makes us stumble or dance for our footing like a calf on ice. In realistic fiction, such writers argue, an important part of the writer’s business is to imitate the way real people speak; and since in life people do not generally speak in fine poetic rhythms, the controlling narrator, who must thread the rhythms of his speech in with the rhythms of the characters, is wise to keep his rhythms unnoticeable; wise, that is, to steer as far as possible from the rhythms of bardic or incantatory writers like James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, or William Faulkner. To choose the bardic voice is automatically to take a slight step back from realism, to move from the casually spoken to the intoned, from the realistic story toward the tale. Both the intentionally arrhythmic writer—John Updike is an example—and the writer, like myself, who would sacrifice a character’s ears for melodic effect, can be counted on not to distract the reader from his dream by clunky rhythms. The writer who simply never thinks about rhythm is almost certain to do so. The reader may suddenly be stopped cold by a line in accidental doggerel:

The writer thus unintentionally produces a form of sprung verse—that is, jammed stresses one after another—when what he needs, to reflect the moment’s rush, is lighter rhythms, anapests or dactyls. For example, he may write: