I wondered whether to post this link under Technique or Ethical Issues - decided on the latter.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1988887,00.html

Some bold and really interesting thoughts about novel-writing, e.g.

A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones.

Do you agree?

Frances

Thanks for posting this, Frances. I'm a bit enamoured with our Zadie. I'm going to read this now. Oh, I'm here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase.

God, she can waffle for England, can't she.
Still trying to get to the end, but I find myself wondering if she's just talking about the technical aspect of writing v's life experience; or whether she's really taking a pop at Will Self

If only ZS had been around 30 years ago, when I was swallowing T.S. Eliot's assertions wholesale - no mind of my own, either then or now, but thank God she has one.

Frances

I’m not going to write an essay:

I know that the reason I spend so long staring at the screen - changing, deleting, rearranging words and phrases - is not so much to get something across to the reader more clearly (that’s a side-effect) but more to try and minimise the distance between what’s in my head and what falls out onto page. I guess Zadie might flatter me by saying that I’m trying to convey accurately my ‘truth’ (I’m more than happy to be flattered).

Stendhal said something like the writer with a novel should be like a man walking down the street holding a mirror out. I’m not sure - I think the mirror, in my case, is facing me and anything I’m saying about the human condition is reflected back out through my own experiences, responses and compromises.

For writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world.

Yes, and by doing that, we express a bit of what it means to be human which is what, to me, the novel is all about.

The slightly sad thing is that, judging by her books to date, Zadie doesn’t seem to have it in her to be a Great writer - there’s a lack of authenticity, I guess she’d call it a lack of truth in each of her books. She never goes far enough, or deep enough. She raises the stakes but doesn’t - can’t? - deal with the fallout in any truthful way. But, as she says, there’s no shame in being an honourable failure. And she’ll carry on writing because, as Beckett said (from whom she took the title of her essay) when asked by a young writer what he should do now he’d finished writing his book: fail again, fail better.

I really want to read this, but I am back in that horrible place of being utterly unable to deal with anyone else's literary success/ambition/insights.

Unless they're WWers, of course.

Didn't Faulkner say all four parts of The Sound and The Fury are his failures to write the story of Caddie. I wonder if it is true too in a way, because you get the impression he is really trying to nail something, put his finger on something, and ultimately he can't and you are left with the sense of something huge and simultaeously frustrating.

But then I actually think this is rather a good image for human beings relationship to the world anyway and why it is ultimately, a great book.

I like failures. I don't think I like too much perfection in art or novels or anything because it is a little inhuman.

I like failures.

Oh, Snowbell, you'd love me. And The Sound and the Fury is my third favourite Faulkner novel. I know what exactly what you mean about the elusiveness of great works - that otherness that just always keeps giving you the slip, like a though that refuses to come into proper focus.

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like a thought...

I like perfection.

Aren't even great novels always just an attempt, never a success? Aren't they just one more route up the mountain, never the mountain itself?

I sometimes think that all the great books added up together probably get close to something, but each on its own is a small thing...

...apart from certain moments achieved by writers like Goethe, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Eliot, when something amazing gets touched, great truths I guess. Though I guess that's poetry doing the job; not sure if novels ever provide those overwhelmingly exciting, epiphanic or revelatory moments you get with poetry. Not for me anyway.

Rambling.

Pete

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because isn't a novel essentially a parable in how it looks at 'truth', ie it doen't go straught to the heart like a poem will, but rather takes an elliptical approach - it's an exploration, an examination through examples and comparisions.

Really rambling

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scuse typos

Still mulling over -

skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones

- I'm thinking, but name me a good/great book written by an 'unskilled writer' -

also this statement seems in a way to contradict what she says in the rest of the article, about trying to express one's way of being in the world - doesn't such expression require skill - and as you say, Sammy, "changing, deleting, rearranging words and phrases"?

Frances

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I guess she's saying that skill alone isn't enough.

I guess she's saying that skill alone isn't enough.

Yes, I think so. That you also have to look at yourself in a harsh, unsentimental way in order to pierce most cleanly through the idea of The Self that sits between the thoughts in your head and the words that get onto the page.

because isn't a novel essentially a parable in how it looks at 'truth', ie it doen't go straught to the heart like a poem will, but rather takes an elliptical approach - it's an exploration, an examination through examples and comparisions.

I think this is very true (though I do balk at the word parable, probably cos it's a bit too close to the bone to how I read books). I often find myself reading books as a kind of Guide to Life, not in any great instructive way but more as warnings in how-not-to-do-it. I find novels revelatory in a way that I don't find poems.

I do balk at the word parable

Parable's a very balk-at-able word.

Indeed, he said, hesitantly.

Is there such a thing as a perfect piece of art? I always thought it was a hypothetical construction.

This article was interesting but I'll be honest, I found it hard going. For what it's worth, Frances, here's my reaction.

Initially I was cheesed off by the story of Clive, which suggests that all you have to do to get a critically-acclaimed novel on the shelves is sit at an ergonomic chair for three years pondering a bit and then hand your manuscript in, even though you privately think it's not so good. 'His book gets an agent, his agent gets a publisher, his novel goes out into the world, it is well received.' Well, bully for Clive.

I certainly didn't feel the way she talks about Clive feeling when I wrote my first novel - but then I wasn't aiming for great literature. So maybe none of my input's relevant. Yes there's a gap between what you think the novel might be when you start it, and what it becomes, but isn't all of life like this? My marriage certainly is, parenting, my career, even the way I've decorated my house. I had visions of what those things might be and they didn't happen quite the same way. Does this mean they've failed? No. Just that my vision wasn't precisely fulfilled (and how spooky if it had been!).

Moving on, I don't think most of us do see fiction as independent from the writer's self. I'm not sure where she's got that idea from. And I sense a false dichotomy: a novel can be full of the writer's self but still speak about the universal. The personal and the universal are connected. That's what Keats talks about in Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Who's suggesting writers have a perfect knowledge about the quality of their work? If that were the case, none of us would need editors. Can there be an author alive who assumes he has a perfect facility to assess his own writing? If so, I've never met him.

Smith says it is 'impossible to convey all of the truth of our experience': I'm not wholly clear what she means here. Does she mean 'all of' as in the entire spectrum? In which case, what writer could? (Especially in a single work). And why would we, when so much of a novel is often studying one character's perpective? Or does she mean 'with total accuracy'? In which case, how can she tell? How can she judge whether a writer's personal truth has appeared on the page, without having been inside that writer's head? Or have I misunderstood this point?

On cliches: how does she know that a phrase used by others isn't exactly the right one to pin down one person's experience? What she calls a cliche can carry resonances which lend a dimension and power to a set of syllables, where an invented phrase might be too aware of its own newness to ring true. Or it might not. the piont is, one can't generalise. This seems to me to be like assuming the colours I see are the same you see, and we can't make that assumption.

I thought her comment about the way a good novel affects your world view for days after was beautifully observed.