Perhaps she's on a roll after winning the Booker prize, but for whatever reason, Hilary Mantel’s rules for writing are far more useful than the other 28 authors’ offerings in the Guardian’s recent list.
The others are good – real advice from successful authors – and enable you to see which 4 bits of advice are most repeated. Yet many of the suggestions are to do with getting on with writing, that is, the motivation behind it, as opposed to what those words actually should be.
And as someone who has already committed to writing, who has found a good place and time to work, is pushing through the dip and learning to overcome his own hurdles, it is the how-to advice that I need the most.
Like how the chuff are you supposed to write description?*
This question vexes me the most about writing a novel (it’s rather embarrassing to admit, but I will be nothing if not honest on this blog). I get stuck when I have to write the bits in between the dialogue.
I started the book with two things: the notion it would be about 100,000 words; and the anxiety about where on earth they would come from.
Dialogue is fine. I love my characters and their voices. I put them together and they talk. Usually they end up saying the sorts of things to each other that I had hoped (although they occasionally rebel) and all these little ambiguities and tensions and energies flow out from their conversations.
Small bits of description come naturally in between their speech because they speak with their bodies and not just their minds. For example:
The friends wriggled on their chairs and ducked into each other to talk. A thin, brown-haired woman walked straight up to the table.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she said.
The blonde girls looked at each other and smiled.
‘We’re waiting for Steve,’ they said. The other girl stopped watching the people and looked towards the woman.It was Davina. They had never met.
Look at Melville, writing whole chapters on harpoons and other technicalities of the whaling industry in Moby Dick; or Steinbeck, with his passages on dust and tractors in The Grapes of Wrath. Where did they get them from?
It’s not so much the point-of-view dilemma (is the narrator invisible or evident; omniscient or limited to a character’s point of view?) although this is part of the problem. Anne Enright says: ‘Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand’, which sums up the difficulty without helping to solve it.
Mostly it’s just knowing what to describe, when, how much, and in what style.
This is where I find Mantel’s advice invaluable
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change … When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don’t notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they’re trying too hard to instruct the reader.This is brilliant, and it makes me realise that most fluent passages of description that I have already written come when a character is new to a place. It takes off the pressure to describe everything, and inspires me to think about whether or not enough is new or changing in the story so far – is that the real problem?
Her second point tackles the point of view question:
Description must work for its place. It can’t simply be ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; … from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.Many writers have written from an all-seeing perspective, or from a self-conscious narrator position, but Mantel is probably right that it functions best as a viewpoint of a character. I like the idea that then it becomes part of the action, rather than floating, detached, each passage of description killing the story with stasis.
It is not the only way to do it. Steinbeck’s dispassionate exposition of the bare countryside prepares us for the indifference with which his characters will be greeted in the story. Melville’s whaling chapters ensure that the experience of pushing through the book is a taste of a gruelling journey across the sea. Passages of detached description can create mood, or misdirect the audience, or progress the narrative.
* I’m indebted to Roger B for the subheading. Perhaps they all say it around Lincoln but he’s the only person I’ve heard employ ‘chuff’ as a substitute swearword.
I've been noticing this in "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch". (Show-off, moi?!) In a setting which is very familiar to the main character, and totally unfamiliar to the rest of the world, Solzhenitsyn writes all the description through his character's eyes. And it works, because you get descriptive passages at points when the narrator withdraws and gets lost in his thoughts and begins noticing things around him. Or when he is in an familiar place but trying to solve a problem: e.g. you get a whole detailed description of a building site, or the ice on a wall, or the precise lay-out of a prison hut. Or when the narrator reminisces about home, or worries about his family coping in their tumble-down house. (But maybe that last one is a different version of the unfamiliar situation?)
I've also recently realised that if an author writes description beautifully, then I'll happily wade through pages of it at a time. Even if it does “interrupt” the story, a novel that stops to make you taste and hear and see and smell the characters' world... can be magical. Although I'm having a hard time thinking of examples other (better known?) than Alice Greenway's “White Ghost Girls”.