Novelist as a Vocation(21)
It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading. Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing, too. This is your most important task. Through it you will develop the basic novelistic muscles that every novelist needs. Build up your foundation. Make it strong while you have time to spare and while your eyes are still good. Writing is important, too, I guess, but it can come later—there is no need to rush.
Next, before you start writing your own stuff, make a habit of looking at things and events in more detail. Observe what is going on around you and the people you encounter as closely and as deeply as you can. Reflect on what you see. Remember, though, that to reflect is not to rush to determine the rights and wrongs or merits and demerits of what and whom you are observing. Try to consciously refrain from value judgments—conclusions can come later. What’s important is not arriving at clear conclusions but retaining the specifics of a certain situation—in other words, your material—as fully as you can.
Some individuals decide what or who is right or wrong based on a quick analysis of people and events. Generally speaking, though (and this is purely my opinion), they don’t make good novelists. Instead, they are better suited to becoming critics or journalists. Or possibly academics of a certain kind. Someone cut out to be a novelist, on the other hand, will stop to question the conclusion he or she has just reached, or is about to reach. “It sure looks that way,” he or she will think, “but wait a minute. That might be only my preconceived notion. Maybe I should consider it more carefully. After all, things are never as simple as they seem. If down the road something new pops up, it could become a completely different story.”
That’s the type of guy I seem to be. Of course, my brain doesn’t work that fast in the first place, so when I do voice a quick opinion on something it often turns out to be wrong (or inadequate, or completely off the mark), a failing that has led me into countless painful experiences. Over and over again, I have been embarrassed, or put in a tight spot, or sent off on a fool’s errand. As a result, little by little, I have developed the habit of questioning my immediate response to things. This pattern of behavior is not natural to me; rather, it is acquired, the result of a long list of disastrous decisions.
That is why I don’t leap to judgment when something happens. My mind no longer works that way. Instead I strive to retain as complete an image as possible of the scene I have observed, the person I have met, the experience I have undergone, regarding it as a singular “sample,” a kind of test case, as it were. I can go back and look at it again later, when my feelings have settled down and there is less urgency, this time inspecting it from a variety of angles. Finally, if and when it seems called for, I can draw my own conclusions.
Nevertheless, based on my own experience, I have found that the occasions when conclusions must be drawn are far less numerous than we tend to assume. Indeed, the times when judgments are truly necessary—whether in the short or the long run—are few and far between. That’s the way I feel, anyway. This means that when I read the paper or watch the news on TV, I have a hard time swallowing the reporters’ rush to give opinions on anything and everything. “Come on, guys,” I feel like saying, “what’s the big hurry?”
There is a general expectation in the world today that choices should be laid out in black-and-white terms as quickly as possible. Of course, some questions must be answered right away. To take a couple of extreme examples, “Should we go to war?” and “Should we restart our nuclear reactors tomorrow?” require us to take clear and prompt positions. If we don’t, then all hell could break loose. Yet occasions like those, which compel us to come to a firm decision, are not all that frequent. When less time is taken between gathering information and acting on it, so that everyone becomes a critic or a news commentator, then the world becomes an edgier, less reflective place. And probably much more dangerous, too. Opinion surveys allow you to check the box “Undecided.” Well, I think there should be another box you can check: “Undecided at the present time.”
Enough talk about today’s world—let’s get back to the aspiring novelist. As I have said, the challenge is not to form value judgments but, rather, to stockpile as much material as possible in its original form. To create an inner space in which it can all be stored. Of course, realistically, it is impossible to retain everything. There is a limit to how much our memory can hold. Thus, we need a minimal kind of information-processing system to reduce the amount.
In most cases, I try to fix a few telling details about the event (or the person, or the scene) in my mind. Since it is hard to recall (or, having attempted to remember, easy to forget) the whole picture, it is best to try to extract specific features in a form that can be easily held for safekeeping. This is what I mean by a minimal system.
What sorts of features? They tend to be those striking details that make you sit up straight, that fix themselves in your mind. Ideally, those things that can’t be explained away. It is best if they are illogical, or counter the flow of events in a subtle way, or tempt you to question them, or suggest some kind of mystery. You gather these bits, affix a simple label (place, time, situation) and mentally file them away in your personal chest of drawers. It is possible, of course, to jot them down on a notepad or something of the sort, but I prefer to trust my mind. It’s a real pain to carry a pad around, and I have found that once I have jotted something down I tend to relax and forget it. If I toss the bits into my mind, on the other hand, what needs to be remembered stays while the rest fades into oblivion. I like to leave things to this process of natural selection.