Frances Hay

[dfranceshay]

In reading these four texts, I found myself marvelling at Annie Dillard's descriptive powers, John Gardner's analysis of the fundamental tasks required in writing fiction, Elizabeth George's practical advice, and Donald Maass's acute understanding of the different types of novels and where they should be sold in the marketplace. I know I will return to these books again and again. Here are some of the first lessons I've acquired.

 

Annie Dillard

 

 

It is immediately evident why Annie Dillard's nature writing received such acclaim, because when she turns her naturalist's eye to the life of the writer, it is as if she turned up the lens on the microscope on the writing process. I was especially taken with her story of what seemed like a nomadic life, wandering from place to place, across the continent, to find writing environments that contained a kind of stripped down purity in the midst of beauty. This made me appreciate how evocative her landscape writing is and how she extends the same prose-writing skill to map out the landscape of internal thought. Becoming a writer means a lifetime of signing on for solitude, frustration, perhaps too much self-analysis, but actually this internal life may actually make us better observers of human nature. Perhaps only by being faced with our own inner monologues can we imagine the dialogues of imaginary others in a convincing way. Annie Dillard's sentences are beautifully crafted and inspiring.

 

John Gardner

 

This is a very rich resource that I will return to repeatedly. Already I am trying to learn one lesson and apply it to my own writing: his statement that writing a novel requires attention to detail. This precept chimes very well with the exercises in descriptive writing we are doing in the novel-writing course. I find that I naturally pick up on details of social interaction and people's behaviour and dimensions of the natural world, which helps me with characterisation, dialogue and presenting a sense of place, but it is harder for me to describe people's appearances; John Gardner's focus on detail makes me understand that the perception and then writing down of details is a craft skill that has to be practiced, every day, in notebooks or blogs. It is like learning how to play a chromatic scale on the piano before attempting to play Mozart, much less compose anything of your own.

 

Elizabeth George

 

 

There are so many practical pieces of advice in this book, I shall be dipping into it often. Just to name one thing I think is very helpful is her list of various things characters might be doing whilst talking. Animating dialogue is a real challenge and the suggestions on that list give rise to many good ideas about what those of us trying to write upmarket women's fiction can do with our own characters, so all our scenes don't resemble the title of that play from the 1970s, 'Two White Chicks Sitting Around Talking.'

 

Donald Maass

 

 

Of all the sage advice in the books I've been reading for the course, the most helpful for me personally was the clear description Donald Maass provides of the type of novel I am working on in AuthorSalon, which he labels a friendship/generational novel, where the story focuses on a group of people, not a single protagonist. I was happy to find that I instinctively adopted some of the tropes of this genre, most importantly a structural device that links the different characters' stories (e.g., the pieces of fabric in 'How to Make an American Quilt' or the different novels being discussed in 'The Jane Austen Book Club'), and also an ironic tone set by an omniscient narrator who understands all the characters and their relations to each other, over time. This has helped me understand what I'm trying to do and has identified good models.

 

Other Recommended Authors

 

 

I have been enjoying the exercises in the novel-writing course where we study passages from various authors and try to apply some of their techniques to our own work. I've enjoyed and felt inspired by them all, but two in particular have really helped me. I very much enjoyed the exercise where we had to rewrite the opening of section of Fight Club which taught me so much about the importance of a distinctive, compelling voice coupled with fabulously agile prose. Fight Club didn't seem like my kind of book but what fabulous writing. I also reread Gail Godwin's Evensong and was struck not just by her skill at internal monologue and rumination, but even more by her use of pace, so that the interior worlds of characters lead them on step by scary step to a dramatic collision course which often involves death and destruction. In her work, the internal questioning and decision-making in the protagonist's mind lead inexorably to the dramatic events, often through a series of set pieces where clashing characters are seen in action. This provides me with a good model of how to handle the personal and the public scenes in the book I am working on in AuthorSalon as well as the new one I am trying to write for the novel-writing course.