This Year You Write Your Novel

Unlike the mechanic teaching a young pupil on his first day (with his newly embroidered jumpsuit and day-one rag), writers are pretty lousy when it comes to impressing upon a fresh mind the nuts 'n bolts of the art of writing. John Gardner used Fichte's curve and was just plain strict: "Good-heartedness and sincerity are no substitute of the fictional process." Wallace Stegner confessed to failure flat-out, likening the creative process to a lost voyage: "Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All {the teacher} can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging." Ayn Rand was comparative and chatty: "At the start of my career, I had a valuable conversation with Cecil B. Demille…" E.M. Forster had his famous King/Queen death differential between story and plot, Henry James planted a "stout stake," Victoria Nelson talked about master/slave relationships, Richard Ford recommended SportsCenter, Lorrie Moore went ridiculous, Robert Olen Butler became a drill sergeant, David Lodge was cautious, William Gass was heavenly and unhelpful, Wayne C. Booth fished out half-a-dozen options on third-person narratives alone, and Raymond Carver ranged the world about his creative writing classes with John Gardner, and then we're back to John Gardner, and none the wiser.

Writers are funny this way. One writer's formal and structural generosity is canceled out by another writer's formal and structural generosity; where one writer tells you to do it this way, another directs you specifically against it. Then uses examples. Ouch! Then there are the critics who seem to have it in their pince-nezzy heads how any number of books should have been written, how, nil admirari, this novel lacked sufficient fourth act sustain, or how that book could have benefited from closer editing. The reader who isn't a writer but would like (one day...) to become a writer, that reader is keen enough to have an index for every rule that has ever been broken. In other words, reading a great author's art of fiction becomes an act of voyeurism. When Chekhov - arguably the greatest short story writer of any literary epoch - advised Gorky to "cross out a host of terms qualifying nouns and verbs," the keen reader only has to peruse the former's perfect "Lady with the Pet Dog" for repeat misdemeanors. Again, writers are funny: They are expert in their own flaws. Aristotle was preemptive: A narrative could never attain perfection based on the simple reason that narratives are written by Man. No way, not at all, unh-uh, ain't no such thing as the perfect book. A writer's flaw then becomes malleable, the clay called style, form, voice. And always, that nagging, human flaw. Even so: a great writer will be damned if the novice repeats these errors!

Several years ago, I read an essay in the Times by Walter Mosley called "For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day." I liked it. It was honest and direct: there was no claiming of answers, no divine beacon, no ivory tower unknowables (hello, Virginia Woolf!). Instead, Mosley offered only this: To be a writer, you have to write every day, Monday to Sunday. "Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It's an excursion into the ether of ideas. There's no time to waste."

So, just in case you hadn't read the Times essay, Mosley has released his own art of fiction, an original, non-compiled (meaning, this is no contractual obligation ticket, sourced from nine disjointed previously published essays), hundred-odd page, how-to called This Year You Write Your Novel, all of which's wisdom is derived from his earlier maxim of writing every day. Strike the cast image of the writer as a gutted, opium-faced, fringe-of-society, near-criminal Rimbaud; there are no such grand illusions to be found here. This is worker bee stuff.

What's most striking is just how helpful, just how digestible this book is. Mosley, of course, we know from his Easy Rawlins series (Devil in a Blue Dress as the most famous); scores of non-Rawlins books (Fortunate Son, The Man in My Basement, The Wave), and, oh, yes, three non-fiction titles. Somewhere just under thirty books, with a career beginning in 1990 - an average of a book-and-a-half each year - you get the feeling that he's not fooling around with this writing every day business, that this advice is no hypocritical directive. A stalwart to his own regime, he confesses, "My only ritual for writing is that I do it every morning. If I'm in a hotel in Mobile - so be it. If I am up all night, and morning is two o'clock in the afternoon, well, that's okay too."

For the writer embattled in MFA workshops, for the writer slicing open her thousandth rejection slip, for the cynical smarty-pants, Mosley's book is not for you. And that's fine. This Year You Write Your Novel is meant for the non-writer among us all. And I don't know of any established writer who has ever offered such an open palm in our direction. The guide is book-ended by these two offerings, and these are important front-to-back cautions:

"I am fairly certain that anyone who reads this book, and who applies its lessons with tenacity, will be able to produce a complete draft of a short novel… I don't promise a masterpiece, just a durable first novel of a certain length."