American Writers - Short is Often Better

I have often heard folks say that they just do not have time to read. Understandable, since many authors feel compelled to write lengthy tomes. I once was advised that I just had to read Thomas Pynchon's Mason Dixon. It was said to be a work of vast importance. Well, the vast part was correct and it mat have held the secrets of the Universe but, alas, I shall never know. The darn thing was about 1200 pages and weighed so much it hurt my hands to try and hold it and read. I made about 300 pages and decided that whatever its charms and depth, I would have to muddle on throughout my life without Pynchon's artistry.

But, there are many writers of wonderful short fiction. Now, short stories are very hard to write and, while most writers make a stab at them, few are good at it. In short stories you have to keep the plot moving, develop characters and get to the point without seeming to rush through to the finish. Many short stories I have read seem more like  ideas for novels or, simply little vignettes, little snapshots of slivers of lives. In both cases, the writing may be fine and the idea interesting, but something is lacking, kind of like French fries without salt. America is the birthplace of the short story and we do have some masters. Try Poe, Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard, Steven King, Sherwood Anderson, Hemmingway (short stories were perfect for his lean prose), Faulkner (writing short fiction kept his wordiness under control; it is a shame he did not write more of them), and, the undisputed champion of the short story, Flannery O'Connor.

There is a middle ground between short stories and lengthy novels, the novella. I love the novella because the writer can stretch out a little but still does not have room to become self-indulgent. One of a writer's worse sins is to become enamored of his own writing and begin rambling on and on with descriptive prose and psychological analyses. Shorter fiction requires the writer to get to the essence of the story and most often, not always but usually, shorter is far better. Think of the wonderful nature paintings of the old Chinese masters.  With a few brush strokes of black ink on white paper, the capture the beauty and power of Nature. It is much the same with writing. Clear and crisp beats long winded almost every time. Almost, not always but it takes a true master of words to write lengthy stories that maintain pace and hold interest. You might enjoy some of the following: Hemmingway's The Old Man and The Sea, any of Phillip K Dick's short science fiction, Louis L'Amour and Elmore Leonard short Western novels, 2 of Cormac McCarthy's early novels Child of God and Outer Dark (both very short and very dark), and any of Henry James' short works (especially The Turn of the Screw). I especially recommend Jack Kerouac's Tristessa, a novella bout a doomed love affair he had with a young, Mexican woman. For once, Kerouac restrained himself and avoided long, rambling passages of nonsense and the book is wonderful. Also, try Poe's wonderfully strange The Fall of the House of Usher.

I have learned 2 lessons about writing. First, always be ready to cut about a third of your original draft and, second, the parts you most hate to cut are usually the ones you most need to cut.

 Think in terms of music. Nothing is more boring than a long drum solo, unless it is done by a true genius like Buddy Rich or Ginger Baker, and there are very few of those around.

American Writers

I will sing the praise of American writers. There are none on Earth like them. Americans have mastered the novel, the short story and, in short, narrative fiction. When it comes to just plain story telling, they have no equal.

English writers tell stories but, always, with the exception of the Scot, RL Stevenson, there stories are so concerned with manners and social class that the story is stulliflied. Even the great Dickens was so wrapped up in social criticism that his stories were often soap opera-ish, simple frameworks in which he made his critiques of British society. French authors are just way too cerebral and their stories suffer. Spain had one great novelist, Cervantes. In fact, he pretty much invented the novel and was brilliant but, since then,  naught. The Germans are like their French cousins, too full of angst and intellectual theory. The Russians are just too long winded and the Latin American writers are lost in a world of magical realism. The problem with that is if you can just make up anything to advance the tale, it  is simply left limp and foolish. The Japanese writers are even weirder and less comprehensible.

Americans know how to tell a tale, to spin a yarn. Twain had a lot to say in Huckleberry Finn bit never let that stand in the way of telling his wild. raucus story of a boy's adventure. Melville certainly had a lot on his mind and made extensive use of symbollism bur, when push comes to shove, Moby Dick is simply a whopper of a tale, a sea story unmatched. Hemmingway's novella, The Old Man and the Sea is a simple fish story yet, in its simplicity, it is a story of incredible bravery.

And on the list could go. Crane, Cooper, Irving, Hawthorne, the incomparable Poe and his descendent Lovecraft, King, Bradbury, Dick, Kesey, Mailer, Vonnegut, Clavell, Mitchener, Rawlings. On and on I could go, but you get my point. The most important part of a story is the story. Style, symbolism, all the rest mean nothing if the story is not compelling. If you place a lump of coal in a beutifully decorated box, it is still a lump of coal. Likewise, if you place a great pastrami sandwich in a series of steel boxes, each sealed with a combination lock that you have to figure out the combination of, then it is quite unlikely that you will pursue it. It is just too easy to go find a  deli and buy a pastrami sandwich you can just take out of the paper and enjoy.

There is one exception that I must note, a non-American who wrote perhaps the best novel I have ever read. In my next blog I will nominate him for status as an honorary American.

America and Storytellers

I have said before that I love to read. I believe that storytelling is what makes humans different from the rest of Creation. After all, we are said to be made in the image of our Creator and what has been created is, to make a complex issue simple, a grand story.

I seldom find books these days that simply tell a good story. For the past many years, authors seem to have become obsessed with style over substance. Take, for example, James Joyce.

Joyce could write. His first novel, Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was very good, not great but very good, His book of short stories, Dubliners, was brilliant, especially  his Christmas story, The Dead. I know, that does not sound very Christmasy, but it is a beautiful, warmly human story. We will get back to that human part shortly.

I have tried repeatedly to read Ulysses and each time, about half way through, I ask myself why I am bothering. I understand it, and can appreciate the quality of the writing. I even get the humor but, so what? The story is simply boring. The main characters are unpleasant and who really wants to know every thought that passes through their minds.

Then, we reach Finnegan's Wake. The book is absurd and I think that is almost the point. It is experiment for the sake of experiment, a sort of artistic masturbation.

Joyce was an odd man, obsessed with himself and his own thinking. He was so disappointed with the people of his own native Ireland and seemingly wwithdrew into himself. He developed that habit of writing notes documenting his every thought and truly, they were not that special and really uninteresting. His experiments in writing are absurd and I believe that is because he found people absurd and somewhat distasteful, if not downright loathsome.

For reaasons that escape me, literary critics became enamored of his nonsense, hailing his great profundity at every turn. Honestly, he was a naught schoolboy, a near sociopath who expected the World to support him while he thumbed his nose at his supporters. His own wife once asked him when he was going to write something that people could actually read.

Well, as should have been expected, all the praise heaped upon him set the wheel in motion and rather quickly, substance was foresaken for style and classic style was foresaken for experiment, experiment for its own sake. The art of storytelling was lost.

There are still writers who tell stories but the quality of their subject matter is limited. For example, Phiilip Roth and John Updike are fine wordsmiths but their obsessions are trivial and boring. To be blunt, Updike's suburbanites are not the stuff of great stories, nor are Roth's tales of the frustrated Jewish males.

I once heard Ken Kesey say, in an interview, that he wanted writers like Twain and Poe who could write tales of heroes and villians, of machines and monsters. I concur.