Writing In Prose Fiction

Consider the following on the importance of the writing in a work of prose fiction.

How important is the word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence writing — I always think of it as "writin'" — in a work of prose fiction?

I know all too well that the professor-and-critic-approved line is that for a work of true literature, the writin' is everything. Sigh. Lord, am I aware of this. I dispute it, though. I don't see — given the massive amount of evidence to the contrary — how the case can even begin to be made. There are a lot of powerful novels whose writin' is indifferent, and tons of books whose writin' is first-class that have no life at all.

Interesting observation that last, and one thoroughly dependent on just what one means by "the writing," or, as the above writer put it, "the writin'". I confess I'm unable to get a secure handle on just what is meant by the term by the above writer, but he seems to be saying that, in a curious way beyond my ability to comprehend, the writing is somehow separate or disconnected from the other elements that go into making a work of prose fiction as his "There are a lot of powerful novels whose writin' is indifferent, and tons of books whose writin' is first-class that have no life at all" appears to suggest. It seems to me both cases are something of a contradiction in terms, and quite impossible.

There are two fundamental elements that go into making a work of prose fiction — every work of prose fiction — both of which are sine qua non. First and foremost, of course, is a story. No story, no work of prose fiction. Lousy story, lousy work of prose fiction. Nothing will save a work of prose fiction that's absent a first-rate story. Second, is human characters or a character (whether they take actual human form or not) through whom the story is played out.

Fundamentally, that's pretty much the whole deal, and it would seem all other elements that go into making a work of prose fiction — e.g., character development, narrative structure, pacing, plotting, "color" (i.e., excitation of sensations of time and place), form (e.g., lyrical, dramatic, epical, confessional), etc. — are simply mere details of construction.

But then, as we all by now should know, in the details is where God and the Devil reside, and those mere details of construction are in fact prose fiction's shaping force, and all of them are entirely dependent upon, and inseparable from ... the writing. If the writing, "word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence," is, say, notable for its evocative poetic expressiveness but in some way fails to serve at least adequately the story and its characters — which is to say, fails its raison d'être — then its evocative poetic expressiveness notwithstanding, it's bad prose fiction writing, and as a consequence the work will, in a fundamental way, fail ineluctably as a work of prose fiction.

Lolita, for instance, is a great and powerful work of prose fiction not because Nabokov writes beautiful-sounding, evocative, poetic prose "word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence" (which indeed he does), but because he's got a great story to tell, great human characters through whom the story is played out, and because word-to-word, and sentence-by-sentence his writing unselfconsciously serves supremely well the story and its characters, the resulting gestalt making this particular work of prose fiction a great and powerful one as it could hardly otherwise help but do.

Another example of a great and powerful work of prose fiction is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It's got a story that's undeniably great, and characters undeniably intriguing through whom the story is played out, but, oddly, the writing appears perfectly straightforward, almost ordinary if quietly elegant, and it seems there's nothing special about it at all. Until, that is, one reaches the work's end and realizes with a jolt of astonishment that in less than 200 pages Fitzgerald has managed through the gestalt created by that seemingly ordinary if quietly elegant writing to create a menagerie of characters, an entire created world, and the evocation of an era so full and rich and real that it's impossible to see how it all could have been limned in less than a two-inch-thick-War-and-Peace-length volume.

To cite an opposite case, the writing in the novels of my acquaintance of John Updike, resonant and beautifully crafted as it is "word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence," fails in some way (different ways in different novels, if I remember correctly) to fulfill the imperative of its raison d'être, and in consequence, in my not-so-humble opinion, the gestalt in these works of prose fiction fails as well, resonant and beautifully crafted though the writing itself may be, and so the novels as works of prose fiction.

Truth be told, truly great prose fiction writing — the sort noted above in the cases of Nabokov and Fitzgerald — is a kind of magic, and the creation of the gestalt that emerges by virtue of its presence, ultimately a mystery in the face of which rational or logical analysis is helpless. The one thing, however, that can be stated with rational certainty about truly great prose fiction writing is that it's an element sine qua non in a work of prose fiction, and impossible of separation from the story and characters it exists to serve.