21 Desember 2015
© dr. François P. Verster

Op 15 February 1981 het hierdie essay deur die Amerikaanse skrywer Raymond Carver op die Internet (die New York Times se databasis) verskyn en dis op 19 Desember 2015 na my aangestuur deur ’n vriend.

Ek glo hierdie essay het heelwat nuttige wenke vir beginner- en gevestigde skrywers. Ek het dit gelees en my kommentaar daarop na my vriend teruggestuur – dit verskyn na heirdie essay (vir wat dit werd mag wees).

Elke skrywer, nieteenstaande die genre waarin hy/sy werk, sal van hierdie opmerkings herken as toepaslik op hulle eie werk. Die vraag is dan: wat gaan jy daaromtrent doen?

A Storyteller’s Shoptalk

By RAYMOND CARVER

When I was 27, back in 1966, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It’s an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late 20’s. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. ”The World According to Garp” is of course the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah. Every great, or even every very good writer, makes the world over according to his own specifications.

It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. ”Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has ”fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: ”… and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that is implied. There is a bit of mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all – what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief – and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say ”No cheap tricks” to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to ”No tricks.” Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.

Some months ago, in this Book Review, John Barth said that 10 years ago most of the students in his fiction writing seminar were interested in ”formal innovation,” and this no longer seems to be the case. He’s a little worried that writers are going to start writing mom and pop novels in the 1980’s. He worries that experimentation may be on the way out, along with liberalism. I get a little nervous if I find myself within earshot of somber discussion about ”formal innovation” in fiction writing. Too often ”experimentation” is a license to be careless, silly or imitative in the writing. Even worse, a license to try to brutalize or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that’s all – a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognizably human, a place of interest only to a few scientific specialists.

It should be noted that real experiment in fiction is original, hard-earned and cause for rejoicing. But someone else’s way of looking at things – Barthelme’s, for instance – should not be chased after by other writers. It won’t work. There is only one Barthelme, and for another writer to try to appropriate Barthelme’s peculiar sensibility or mise en scene under the rubric of innovation is for that writer to mess around with chaos and disaster and, worse, selfdeception. The real experimenters have to Make It New, as Pound urged, and in the process have to find things out for themselves. But if writers haven’t taken leave of their senses, they also want to stay in touch with us, they want to carry news from their world to ours.

It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earrings – with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine – the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me. I hate sloppy or haphazard writing whether it flies under the banner of experimentation or else is just clumsily rendered realism. In Isaac Babel’s wonderful short story, ”Guy de Maupassant,” the narrator has this to say about the writing of fiction: ”No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” This too ought to go on a three-by-five.

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason – if the words are in any way blurred -the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader’s own artistic sense will simply not be engaged. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing ”weak specification.”

I have friends who’ve told me they had to hurry a book because they needed the money, their editor or their wife was leaning on them or leaving them – something, some apology for the writing not being very good. ”It would have been better if I’d taken the time.” I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist friend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which I don’t. It’s none of my business. But if the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end it’s all we have, the only thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven’s sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain.

In an essay called, simply enough, ”Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as an act of discovery. O’Connor says she most often did not know where she was going when she sat down to work on a short story. She says she doubts that many writers know where they are going when they begin something. She uses ”Good Country People” as an example of how she put together a short story whose ending she could not even guess at until she was nearly there:

”When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable.”

When I read this some years ago it came as a shock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was just a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject.

I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I’d been going around with this sentence in my head: ”He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang.” I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that a story belonged with that beginning, if I could just have the time to write it. I found the time, an entire day – twelve, fifteen hours even – if I wanted to make use of it. I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach themselves. I made the story just as I’d make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.

I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won’t be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.

V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is ”something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.” Notice the ”glimpse” part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we’re lucky -that word again – have even further-ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer’s task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He’ll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things; of how things out there really are and how he sees those things – like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes.

Raymond Carver is the author of two collections of short stories, ”Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” and the forthcoming ”What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” He is a professor of English in the writing program of Syracuse University.

Hallo Dana

Ek het die stuk gelees, en ge-save. Laat ‘n mens beslis dink.

Een fout van my sover – wat al drie my romans betref – is die spoed waarteen dit geskryf was. Ek weet dit. Ek wonder dikwels of ek stadiger en versigtiger sal skryf as ek R30 miljoen in die bank het en niks anders hoef te doen nie. Ek weet nie. In Murray la Vita se boek [Gesprekke met merkwaardige mense, 2011) sê Deon Meyer hy voel hy kan noudat hy voltydse skrywer is, dae aaneen skryf, maar dat sy wêreld kleiner geword het omdat hy nie meer rondreis vir werk [BMW] nie. Feit is, daar is altyd nadele, of jy voltyds kan skryf, al dan nie. Ons moet doen wat ons kan met wat ons het.

Ek moet ook langer neem om boeke te skryf, al voel ek dat my tyd so ontsettend min is, weens alles waarby ek betrokke is. Ten minste het ek nou darem al ‘n paar publikasies op die rak en is daardie druk nie meer daar nie. Nou moet ek gaan vir kwaliteit.

Die ander ding wat ek heir opgetel het hier is “eksperimentasie” – ja, dit het ek nou ook al gedoen, en ek wil nog bietjie, maar binne perke soos hulle aanbeveel. Dat ‘n mens eers die basiese dinge moet bemeester voordat jy reëls buig, is natuurlik goeie raad. En jy moet jou sinne, jou beskrywings, jou perspektiewe, op ‘n persoonlike wyse stel – dis immers net so belangrik as jou “stem” wat uniek en herkenbaar moet wees. Skep jou eie wêreld waarin alles skynbaar natuurlik inpas en soos ‘n groot perfekte komposisie

Truuks en tegnieke is sleg ja – daar het jy dit reg om dinge eenvoudig te hou. Suiwer, eerlik. En laastens, redigeer. As jy eerlik en onbevange skryf (soos die een vrou in die stuk gesê het: sy is nie bevrees nie, ook nie heeltemal kommerloos nie), is dit goed, maar as jy eerlik en onbevange redigeer is dit beter. Die kommas, die punte – ek moet nog ver kom om daar te wees; op hierdie stadium is ek ‘n vakleerling en ek hoop die uitgewer lei my daarmee.

Een ding waarmee ek nie mee kan identifiseer nie, is die konsep van blindweg skryf, en die karakters te laat oorneem. Vir my werk dit nie, want dan speel geluk ‘n té groot rol. Dis soos om ‘n legkaart oor ‘n vloer te strooi en te verwag dat jy ‘n volledige prentjie sal kry. Jy kan dit doen, ek hét al en dis lekker want die opwindend, maar as jy tyd het om te mors met die wete dat jy heel waarskynlik in ‘n hoek gaan eindig en die manuskrip in ‘n laai, is te groot. Nie eens as ek daai R30 miljoen het sal ek dit weer probeer nie. Dis oraait as die karakters die storie beïnvloed, dis rég ook, maar jy kan hulle nie laat oorneem nie – jy kan net sowel ‘n hond toelaat om met jou aan ‘n leiband te laat stap, i.p.v. andersom.

Baie sterkte met jou boek.
Groete
Francois

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Ek hoop bovermelde is nuttig.

Vir my gaan 2016 ’n avontuur wees – ek het in 2015 my tweede wetenskapfiksieroman, Inversium (Thompson) klaargemaak, my weermagmemoir Omega (Tafelberg-Uitgewers) is ook by die drukkers om in Februarie 2016 te verskyn, en ’n nie-fiksieboek oor Die Burger se spotprenttekenaars Die Groot Drie (Penguin-Uitgewers) is in die finale stadia van redigering om ook middel-2016 te verskyn. Ander boeke is reeds in die pyplyn en die uitgewers het my by kunstefeeste geboek vir bekendstellings. Ek is baie dankbaar vir alles, want dit het nie oornag gebeur nie – agter my lê jare se geswoeg: kortverhale, gedigte, essays, rubrieke … punt is; as ek kan, kan jy ook, as jy aanhou glo en aanhou werk.

Lekker skryf, almal.

FV