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Manuals of Style
By Geoff Carter
New books are flooding the market like never before. Since self-publishing has become a viable alternative to traditional publishing, it seems everyone is writing that novel lurking inside of them—or learning how. The teaching of creative writing has become a thriving industry.
Classes like “How to Write a Believable Character”, “Ways to Create Suspense”, or “Writing Realistic Dialogue” are just a tiny sampling of this vast trove of online material. And courses about the craft of writing don’t even touch aspects of self-publishing, marketing, or finding an agent. Craft is important and these classes are extremely useful for what they do, but how far can they take the author?
Sure, we can learn mechanics and literary conventions from these classes, but how far does that take us as writers? Yes, these elements of fiction are the bread and butter of writing, but what about the sublime flavors like saffron risotto or a fine burgundy? How can we harness the magic we’ve experienced reading the homespun ironies of Huckleberry Finn or the bitter satire of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? Or the dancing prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Or the magical lyricism of Madeleine Miller’s A Song for Achilles? Can these sorts of skills—voice, tone, diction, style, and mood—be taught? And, if so, how?
I am a published novelist, but I would not consider myself any sort or expert, but the two texts that were instrumental in helping me understand the finer subtleties of writing are The Writing Life by Annie Dillard and How Fiction Works by John Wood.
Annie Dillard is a brilliant author with novels, numerous essays, memoirs, and criticism to her creidt. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek delves deeply into the mysterious and beautiful connections between herself, time, and nature. The opening passage in which she writes about the nocturnal visits of an old tomcat are absolutely sublime. In The Writing Life, she speaks to the drive, the need to write, and the importance of doing it right. One of her mantras in this manual is to:
“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The Writing Life is an enthralling, breath-taking work that cannot help but to inspire and galvanize writers of any stripe. Any work of Dillard’s is—at worst—a benchmark to which any aspiring writer should aspire
James Wood’s landmark text How Fiction Works is slightly less esoteric than A Writing Life, but the lessons it provided were no less valuable for me as an author. While not written specifically for writers, How Fiction Works is indispensable in understanding why fictive conventions work and how traditional rules of the craft can be stretched, pushed, or broken. For instance, in his chapter on narrating, he espouses the use of “free indirect style” a narration in which thoughts are shared by the author and the character.
“Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language and also through the author’s eyes and language.” (p. 11)
–James Wood, How Fiction Works
Or, in other words, free indirect style allows the reader to simultaneously see the world through a character’s point-of-view and understand the author’s attitude toward it. His subsequent commentary on how free indirect style works in—of all things—Robert McCluskey’s Make Way for Ducklings perfectly—and charmingly—illustrates the use of this device, which he also terms another form of dramatic irony.
“Some of the purest examples of irony are found in children’s literature, which often needs to allow a child—or the child’s proxy, an animal—to see the world through limited eyes, while alerting the older reader to this limitation.” (p. 12)
–James Wood, How Fiction Works
While How Fiction Works is not a style manual or a textbook, it gives the author valuable insights into how to manipulate the finer points of her craft. And it’s fascinating. Plus, it’s got ducklings.
Writing fiction is, at the best of times, difficult. The writer’s toolbox must be long, wide, deep, and well-stocked. The author must also be open to new ideas, ready to work with new concepts and to reinterpret—or reject—ironclad conventions of creative writing. These texts offer viewpoints on the art of fiction that open new windows onto the sensibility of the art of fiction writing. I highly recommend them.
Works Cited
Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. Harper Perennial, 2013.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. Vintage, 2019.