"Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just carefully imagining truths you haven't had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary strict toiling with language."

- John Irving     

In the first and second of my three articles inspired by John Irving's words, I discussed the need for careful observation and the need for precise imagination. But all the acute observation and brilliant imagination in the world will come to nothing if you can't convey your images, characters and the narrative action to your readers.

Strict Toiling with Language

You've just seen a spectacular thunderstorm and have carefully observed it, you suddenly have a mental image of your hero caught in such a storm at the crisis point of your story, and mentally build thescene in your mind's eye. Yes, the storm would be a dramatic metaphor for his inner turmoil. You write:

The old man was soaked to the skin. The thunder was deafening. His eyes were dazzled by the lightning. He thought he might be killed any minute. Yet defiantly he shouted that this storm was nothing compared to the inhumanity of man.

Gosh, that certainly summons up the sublime terror of the storm and that man's inner despair, doesn't it? All that careful observation and imagination let down by third-rate language.

Language is the only thing you have. It is your single instrument, your tool kit. If a carpenter turned up to do building work with a wonky hammer, a rusty chisel and a single screwdriver, you'd rightly dismiss him as a joke, yet novice writers set to work with a poor vocabulary, a shaky grasp on grammar and spelling, a slender acquaintance with punctuation, and are confident that they are adequately equipped to write a novel.

I don't think so.

Good writing is more than such knowing a semi-colon from a period, a subjunctive from a future tense. It is knowing all these so well that they are like a dancer's muscles: so exercised, so trained, that the dancer need only concentrate on what he has to express, not what he has to do to express them.

The strict toiling with language begins with learning your tools. I have yet to meet the real writer who did not love words for themselves alone and who had decided views as to the best use to be made of the ellipsis, the colon, the past imperfect, or indirect speech. Real writers keep teaching themselves the rules of good writing and keep practising what they have learned. This is part of the strict toil. You can never become complacent; you must always be learning.

But good writing is more than good grammar and a wide vocabulary. It means cultivating an ear for the right sounds and training your eye for the look of the words on the page. You need to develop the sense of the rhythm of the paragraphs and chapters, an understanding of the pace and swing of the narrative. When the flow turns a little sour or strikes a dead note, you have trained yourself to spot it, to know what went wrong, and deal with it.

Language takes hard work at both the macro and micro level. You have to learn to 'feel' your story as a whole and to be able to sustain a voice throughout. You also have to be able to zoom into a single sentence, a single comma, and make a considered decision. Cut or not to cut? Reverse verb and noun? Alter the subordinate clause? You'll find yourself debating over one adverb: "she said sarcastically? sardonically? caustically?" as much as you do over the over-all structure of the narrative. A real writer doesn't pretend to be a genius. He collects his tool kit: an etymological dictionary, a thesaurus, grammars, slang dictionaries, literary references such as Brewers, books of quotations, books of aphorisms, a spelling dictionary —and he uses them.

He also reads the best writing he can find from his past and present colleagues to know both what he is aiming for and how those others have achieved what he is seeking to achieve. He is never to proud to sit at the feet of the masters.

Strict toil, because you have to work at it. You have to rewrite and rewrite until you can't face going through that manuscript one more time—and then you go through it one more time. You might revise a sentence ten times, the opening five pages twenty times, testing it against the carefully imagined scene in your mind's eye, comparing what you've written to that mental image until you have made as perfect a match with it as you can. Strict, because you don't let yourself off the hook until you get it right. Only you can keep yourself to a standard, only you can set that standard. Strict toiling, yes, and the real writer would not trade one agonised hour of it for all the easy rest in the world.

What could that man in that storm say? Here's what one strict toiler wrote:

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow you cataracts and hurricanes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once that make ingrateful man!"

Yes, it's Shakespeare. I guess you'd call him a real writer.

Copyright 2000 Caro Clarke

Here are the other writing advice columns I have written for NovelAdvice, the on-line advice column for novice writers: