The Craft of Writing

Reading pre-publication reviews is not like reading The New York Review of Books. Pre-pub reviews are short and succinct, designed to help a librarian or book-seller make a quick purchase decision and move on to the next. And there is always a next one. "Library Journal," one of the standards for library book selection, publishes nearly 7,000 reviews annually.

These reviews are generally well-written. But certain words occur over and over, especially in reviews of fiction. Compelling. Evocative. Well-crafted. In the day-to-day world of book selection we assume these terms mean "good" and don't think much more about it.

But what does it mean for a book to be well-crafted?
In most instances, a well-crafted novel's "craft" goes unnoticed by the reader: the writing carries us along to an inevitable though perhaps surprising conclusion. Occasionally, though, a novel carries its craft on its sleeve, so to speak, and we are forced to stop and marvel at the structure beneath the story.

"The Lover's Dictionary" by David Levithan, for example, is a novel written in A-to-Z dictionary-style entries, each word descriptive in one way or another of a loving relationship. A bit of a gimmick, perhaps; most of us who have been in love could come up with an alphabetical sequence of relevant words.

But that's not what Levithan does. With his alphabet, he tells the story of a relationship: how it began and grew and ultimately how it might be ending. Struggles and challenges are revealed as well as growing intimacy and joy. Though it can be read in one sitting, it is a story with depth: there is no guarantee for happily ever after. The author's craft saves it from the Valentine gift book bin.

Somewhat less obvious is the craft behind Hannah Pittard's "The Fates Will Find Their Way." Students at a private school in a small mid-Atlantic town are devastated by the disappearance of one of their own on Halloween night. Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell vanishes, never to return. Pittard explores the aftermath of this event through the obsessive conjectures of the boys Nora left behind. Told in the first-person plural, the novel ranges over 30 years; the boys grow into men, find work, marry and have children, but, somehow, Nora is always there, in the background. Fueled by unlikely "sightings" through the years, their speculations on Nora's life grow ever more elaborate.

Pittard's craft reveals itself through the stories these men create for Nora, stories which in turn reveal the men themselves. Nora is ever-present because she is not with them. Her life is not one of dreams left behind.

Reviewers of Verlyn Klinkenborg's "Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile," didn't resort to stock descriptors. They used words like "dazzling" and "astonishing." The "true" story of a turtle transported from the Mediterranean to the village of Selborne, England, in the 18th century, the book is an account of how Timothy lived for more than 50 years in the garden of Gilbert White, village curate and amateur naturalist. While White observes and records the lives of Timothy and other curiosities of nature, Timothy observes and records the behavior of that most curious creature of all, the human.

The tortoise-eye view is wry and funny and wise all at once. There was something about how the story was told, though, in short sentences and fragments, that I didn't catch at first. Then, in a flash, it came to me: a vision of a turtle walking. Slow? Perhaps. Clumsy? No! Klinkenborg's novel, like a turtle, moves with great dignity and purpose.

All this thinking about craft put me in mind of a novel on my personal treasures shelf: "Rebecca's Daughters" by Dylan Thomas. This delightful bit of fluff is set in Wales, 1843. A young squire, just home from service in India, is dismayed by the plight of the peasants. He secretly organizes a group of peasant men and, disguised as women, "Rebecca's Daughters" begin a series of midnight raids against the hated toll gates of the gentry. The novel was commissioned as a screenplay and is Thomas' attempt to realize his ambition to write a film scenario "ready for shooting, which would give the ordinary reader an absolute visual impression of the film in words and could be published as a new form of literature."

I don't think "Rebecca's Daughters" is a new form of literature, but it is a sparkling and visual novel, one that wears its craft on its sleeve.

Photo by Keith Williamson (Creative Commons)