Writing Is Not Typing
The greatest authors throughout history write as if words matter. This is a recurrent theme of mine -- and I feel very strongly about it, because I am a writer AND a reader. To my great frustration, most fiction writing today is banal and colloquial. It's no more than what I call "talk-writing." It lacks poetry, it lacks craft. "He said this , then she said that." When you crack a modern novel, that's the level of creativity that you find.
As an experiment (and because I wanted to find out, as a curious reader), I read the opening pages on Amazon of about a dozen novels recently highlighted by the New York Times as "notable" books of the year. The novels were by authors from around the world. They all sounded as if the author was TELLING you the story, not writing it, with artistry and precision.
What's to blame for this simplistic, pedestrian development in fiction writing? The global literary marketplace? All cars now look the same -- even luxury cars. Why shouldn't novels sound the same?
To underline this sad decline in the art of fiction, I present to you the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Lodging for the Night," RLS's first published short story. Stevenson, who lived in the second half of the 19th century, is too often dismissed as a boys' adventure writer, because of his classic novels Treasure Island and Kidnapped. But the man could WRITE. My wife , Camille Peri, who has just completed a book about the Scottish-born Stevenson's bohemian marriage to his untamed American wife Fanny, asked a small dinner party of literati to read the story. We were all impressed --- not only by Stevenson's prickly narrative, but his descriptive power. (Camille's book will be published by Viking Penguin in early 2024.)
Here is the way that Stevenson begins his story. Every time I read evocative descriptive prose like this, I drink thirstily like a man long parched:
"It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices, sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus or were the holy angels moulting?...The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing, and the flakes were large, damp and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm."
