What makes a good writer?

IS writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, ‘an escape from personality’?

Do novelists have a duty? Do readers? Why are there so few truly great novels?

I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission. He wants to write the perfect novel. Clive has a lot going for him: he’s intelligent and well read. He’s made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong? He has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory those elegant blueprints for novels not yet built and is now ready to build his own unparalleled house of words.

Maybe Clive even teaches novels, takes them apart and puts them back together. If writing is a craft, he has all the skills, every tool.

Clive is ready. He clears out the spare room in his flat, invests in an ergonomic chair, and sits down in front of the blank possibility of the Microsoft Word program. Hovering above his desktop he sees the perfect outline of his platonic novel , all he needs to do is drag it from the ether into the real. He’s excited. He begins.

Fast-forward three years. Somehow, despite all Clive’s best efforts, the novel he has pulled into existence is not the perfect novel that floated so tantalisingly above his computer. It is, rather, a poor simulacrum, a shadow of a shadow. In the transition from the dream to the real it has shed its aura of perfection? Its shape is warped, unrecognisable.

Something got in the way, something almost impossible to articulate. Clive found he needed something more than simply “the right words” or “knowledge about economists”. He found it hard to get into his characters.

There are a million little flaws of language or design. But his book find an agent, his agent gets a publisher, his novel goes out into the world. It is well received. It turns out that Clive’s book smells like literature and looks like literature and maybe even, intermittently, feels like literature, and after a while Clive himself has almost forgotten that strange feeling of untruth, of self-betrayal, that his novel first roused in him.

He becomes not only a fan of his own novel, but its great defender. If a critic points out overindulgence here, a purple passage there, well, then Clive explains this is simply what he intended. It was all to achieve a certain effect. In fact, Clive doesn’t mind such criticism: nitpicking of this kind feels superficial compared to the bleak sense he first had that his novel was not only not good, but not true.

The critics, when they criticise, speak of the paintwork and brickwork of the novel, a bad metaphor, a tedious denouement, and are confident he will fix these little mistakes next time round.

That is the end of the tale of Clive. Its purpose was to suggest that somewhere between a critic’s necessary superficiality and a writer’s natural dishonesty, the truth of how we judge literary success or failure is lost. It is very hard to get writers to speak frankly about their own work, particularly in a literary market where they are required to be not only writers, but also hucksters selling product. It is always easier to depersonalise the question.

In preparation for this essay, I emailed many writers (under the promise of anonymity) to ask how they judge their own work. Many writers are concerned with the ways in which what they have written reveals or betrays their best or worst selves.

Writers feel, for example, that what appear to be bad aesthetic choices very often have an ethical dimension. Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised.

That’s why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great. This is hard for young writers, like Clive, to grasp at first. A skilled cabinetmaker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. We are repelled by the idea that writing fiction might be, among other things, a question of character. We like to think of fiction as the playground of language, independent of its originator. Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting? the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either their audiences. — rafalreyzer.com