Steal This Book

Or, better, look closely at how it's written

If you wanna be a writer you gotta be a reader. We all agree on that. But what kind of reader? It’s fun when a novel totally engages us. We get lost in it. It becomes, as John Champlin Gardner described, a “vivid and continuous and dream.’  We float along on the story. We let it take us where it will, which is proof that the writing is REALLY good. There are no distractions. No over-written (or under-written) parts. It has what George Orwell called “window-pane prose.” That is, we see right through the sentences and paragraphs into the world the writer has created–vividly and believably.

So how do we achieve that kind of writing? It starts with (yawn) basic fiction writing techniques. You know – plot, character-building, setting, description, imagery, tone, and the rest. But rather than harp on these, let’s come at them “aslant,” as Emily Dickinson would say. A while ago I ran across a neat article in an old  Smithsonian magazine (Jan 09) about Van Gogh the painter. The article’s author Paul Trachtman writes:

“. . . van Gogh’s discipline was as firm as his genius was unruly, and he taught himself all the elements of classical technique with painstaking thoroughness.  He copied and recopied lessons from a standard treatise on drawing until he could draw like the old masters, before letting his own vision loose in paint.”

Point here?  How van Gogh approached painting is much the same as a committed, serious writer should approach writing. First learn the rules, the basic techniques, until they come easily to you. Until they feel natural.Then you are ready to write your own stories in your own style and voice. In Van Gogh’s painting above, he has clearly mastered the basic art of putting oil paint on canvas. He could mimic the Old Masters. After that, he did it his way.

Back to you: a great way to learn how writers “do it” is to read their fiction very closely. Purposeful reading in which you examine their sentences. Their use of imagery and details. Their construction of scenes. Their idea of a chapter. A really good novel is a road map that shows you how the author presented (told, brought to life) her story. It’s certainly not stealing to use her techniques. Those are and have always been in the public domain. Using them to tell your story is what we all do. With literature, we’re all in this together.