A gifted novelist shows us the ‘Way’ of it
Charles Johnson, one of America’s finest novelists ( Middle Passage) and foremost thinkers pondering the cosmos of literature, has published a road map to that cosmos that is as complex, as daunting and rewarding as the destination itself. Titled The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling (Scribner, 256 pp., out of four), this dense little book could just as cogently be called The Rigors of Writing Seriously.
Johnson is dead serious about his business and omnivorous in his pursuit of it. Seemingly every aspect of writing as an art is touched upon here, and the going is not easy. Nor, as Johnson makes clear, should it be.
“A Boot Camp for Creative Writing ” is the header for one of his early chapters; it is also Johnson’s self-characterization for the classes he taught over many years in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. A delineation of those classes kicks of his book like a boot in the keister.
Beyond the three full-length stories his students were expected to write in a variety of forms and voices, and a daily-kept writer’s notebook a la Hawthorne or Camus, was the welter of killer exercises Johnson threw at his students from The Art of Fiction, an exacting handbook authored by Johnson’s own mentor, the
novelist John Gardner. (“Write three effective long sentences: each at least one full typed page … each involving a different emotion” is one of Johnson’s favorites.)
Johnson also (strongly) urges his students to read at least one dictionary cover-to-cover — ideally, The Compact Edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary, with its little magnifying glass. Readers, and more than a few writers, may wince admiringly.
The strictures of Boot Camp slowly lift as The Way of the Writ
er progresses. A multipage list of the 100 Best Opening Sentences in English fiction — borrowed (with credit) from an old issue of
American Book Review — is enormous fun. Finally, in a chapter unpromisingly titled “Storytelling and the Alpha Narrative,” Johnson lets slip the tight grip of painstaking craft and simply gushes (almost) about the “innocent enchantment” of a great story, recalling his unadulterated joy in reading as a child. Some of the loveliest writing in
The Way of the Writer deals with Johnson’s generally happy childhood growing up in Evanston, Ill. This happy childhood also generates one of the book’s most trenchant observations. In a chapter titled “The Wounds That Create Our Work,” Johnson confronts the belief of his mentor John Gardner that “a psychological wound is helpful … to keep the novelist driven.”
“Does a writer need tragedy?” Johnson asks in response. No, he concludes. “Happy, well-adjusted children or adults can create great art. Guilt and shame are not the only experiences that ‘bend the soul inward.’ ”
“I work to get emotion into my fiction,” Johnson ultimately acknowledges. “In my essays and articles I’m not emotional, just professorial.” A-ha, a reader may exclaim. That explains a lot about this stringent primer. Its professorial scrupulousness is inspiring. Underlying it all, however, one easily discerns an ocean of emotion.