3 Things I Learned from Henry James

First things first: I’m being interviewed by Katie Weiland over on AuthorCulture. Have you ever wondered whether or not independent editing means staying home all day in your jammies? Now’s your chance to find out!

Second: I promised you guys back in December that whatever I learned from the fabulous Notebooks of Henry James I would share with you here. I haven’t finished it yet—it’s a heck of a long book, plus I got completely sidetracked by Shirley Jackson’s key to increasing tension over time, Dashiell Hammett’s description of Sam Spade’s face in v’s, and Stephen King’s coke addiction, not to mention my grandmother—but I’ve read enough to be able to share some wonderful stuff.

So. . .please allow me to introduce you to the lessons I’ve learned from the indomitable Henry James:

1. What passes for exposition in much of modern fiction is merely notetaking to the greats

If you didn’t know how beautifully-rendered and meticulous-written James’ stories and novels are, you might mistake his notebooks for his fiction.

It’s all there: the protagonist’s situation, character, relationships to the other characters. The secondary main characters and their relationships. The Hook, Development, and Climax (which he sometimes called the denouement, as did Gustave Freytag when he invented Freytag’s Triangle). The motivations for everyone’s behavior. The insights explored.

All that’s left is the actual writing.

For the record, James never stopped exhorting himself to write shorter stories that he did. His notebooks are simply riddled with announcements that he intends to limit himself “this time” to 5,000, 8,0000, or 10,000 words. And he seems to have been a consummate failure. I think it was The Ambassadors that was intended to be barely a nibble.

2. Characters, even in the most ‘literary’ of fiction, always cause their own problems

Very often, James started with an idea based on a story someone had told him at a dinner party. (He was quite the social butterfly of London, an upper-class American expatriate who complained, Camille-like, of the ceaseless whirl of invitations even as he hurtled constantly from taxi to taxi, doorstep to dining room.) His notebooks will say something like, “Lady M told me last night of the case of H de L,” and then elaborate upon the anecdote, commenting in almost audible mumbles, “I think if I were to make it someone young—a woman? a man?—and give them a reason for objecting to the elder woman’s ambitions, I might have a nice little vignette. Yes, I believe that would illuminate what I mean to discover.” Half the time he was mumbling to himself in broken French.

Always, always he was working with the characters, delving into their conflicting interests and needs, piling pressures on them to see what they’d do. In long, luxurious discussion with himself.

This could go on for weeks, months, years. He didn’t bother to start the actual writing until he had the conflicts worked out.

He knew the Climax of a story is the whole point. So he delved and delved and delved until he knew exactly what his point was.

3. The more a writer develops their storytelling muscles, the greater a thrill it is to be a writer

   And the loveliest part of reading James’ writing process is the sense you get of his great pleasure in his expertise at spinning tales.

   I believe, of course, that he loved the actual writing. He was so adept with a well-turned sentence, so skilled with flashes of insights. What a joy to be able to produce such accomplished lines, paragraphs, and scenes! Although his writing in his later years became ridiculously convoluted, if you take the time to disentangle his sentences you see that he really was mining ore worth mining, creating refractions with his complicated sentences that could not be created any other way.

   But he also loved the planning. Oh, how he loved it. Because he knew this work takes two different parts of the writer’s brain: the storytelling part and the prose part. We cannot become writers by choosing to develop only one and neglect the other.

   This is a lesson it’s too easy to forget in today’s manic rush to publication.

   There is the art. And there is the craft.

I’m incognito this week—elsewhere aging gracefully in media res with a ghost story—so if your comments don’t show up right away that’s why. I’ll be back next week and get them posted. Also, I’m expecting you all to have run out and gotten your hands on The Notebooks of Henry James while I’m looking the other way.