On Writing

by Eudora Welty

  The point for us if we write is that nearly everything we can learn about writing can be set down only in fiction’s terms. What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

  Try to tear it down, take it back to its beginning, and you are not so much lost as simply nowhere. Some things once done you can’t undo, and I hope and believe fiction is one of them. What its own author knows about a novel is flexible till the end; it changes as it goes, and more than that, it will not be the same knowledge he has by the time the work ends as he had when it began. There is a difference not so much in measure of knowledge, which you would take for granted, as in kind of knowledge. The idea is now the object. The idea is something that you or I might just conceivably have had in common with the author, in the vague free air of the everyday. But not by the wildest chance should we be able to duplicate by one sentence what happened to the idea; neither could the author himself write the same novel again. As he works, his own revision, even though he throws away his changes, can never be wholly undone. The novel has passed through that station on its track. And as readers, we too proceed by the author’s arbitrary direction to his one-time-only destination: a journey rather strange, hardly in a straight line, altogether personal.

  There has occurred the experience of the writer in writing the novel, and now there occurs the experience of the reader in reading it. More than one mind and heart go into this. We may even hope to follow into a kind of future with a novel that to us seems good, drawn forward by what the long unfolding has promised and so far revealed. By yielding to what has been, by all his available means, suggested, we are able to see for ourselves a certain distance beyond what is possible for him simply to say. So that, although nobody else ought to say this, the novelist has said, “In other words …”

  Thus all fiction may be seen as a symbol, if this is desired—and how often it is, so it seems. But surely the novel exists within the big symbol of fiction itself—not the other way round, as a conglomeration of little symbols. I think that fiction is the hen, not the egg, and that the good live hen came first.

  Certainly symbols fill our daily lives, our busily communicative, if not always communicating, world; and any number of them come with perfect naturalness into our daily conversation and our behavior. And they are a legitimate part of fiction, as they have always been of every art—desirable as any device is, so long as it serves art. Symbols have to spring from the work direct, and stay alive. Symbols for the sake of symbols are counterfeit, and were they all stamped on the page in red they couldn’t any more quickly give themselves away. So are symbols failing their purpose when they don’t keep to proportion in the book. However alive they are, they should never call for an emphasis greater than the emotional reality they serve, in their moment, to illuminate. One way of looking at Moby Dick is that his task as a symbol was so big and strenuous that he had to be a whale.

  Most symbols that a fiction writer uses, however carefully, today are apt to be as swiftly spotted by his reader as the smoke signals that once crossed our plains from Indian to Indian. Using symbols and—still worse—finding symbols is such a habit. It follows that too little comes to be suggested, and this, as can never be affirmed often enough, is the purpose of every word that goes into a piece of fiction. The imagination has to be involved, and more—ignited.

  How much brighter than the symbol can be the explicit observation that springs firsthand from deep and present feeling in one breast. Indeed, it is something like this, spontaneous in effect, pure in effect, that takes on the emotional value of a symbol when it was first minted, but which as time passes shrinks to become only a counter.

  When Chekhov says there were so many stars out that one could not have put a finger between them, he gives us more than night, he gives us that night. For symbols can only grow to be the same when the same experiences on which fiction is based are more and more partaken of by us all. But Chekhov’s stars, some as large as a goose’s egg and some as small as hempseed, are still exactly where they were, in the sky of his story “Easter Eve.” And from them to us that night still travels—for so much more than symbols, they are Chekhov looking at his sky.

  Communication through fiction frequently happens, I believe, in ways that are small—a word is not too small; that are unannounced; that are less direct than we might first suppose on seeing how important they are. It isn’t communication happening when you as the reader follow or predict the novel’s plot or agree with, or anticipate, or could even quote the characters; when you hail the symbols; even when its whole landscape and climate have picked you up and transported you where it happens. But communication is going on, and regardless of all the rest, when you believe the writer.

  Then is plausibility at the bottom of it? When we can read and say, “Oh, how right, I think so too,” has the writer come through? Only stop to think how often simple plausibility, if put to measure a good story, falls down, while the story stands up, never wavers. And agreement isn’t always, by any means, a mark of having been reached.

  As a reader who never held a gun, I risk saying that it isn’t exactly plausible that Old Ben, the bear in Faulkner’s story, when he was finally brought down by a knife-thrust, had already in him fifty-two little hard lumps which were old bullets that had had no effect on him. Yet as a reader caught in the story, I think I qualify to bear witness that nothing less than fifty-two bullets could have been embedded in Old Ben or Old Ben he would not be. Old Ben and every one of his bullets along with him are parts of the truth in this story, William Faulkner’s particular truth.

  Belief doesn’t depend on plausibility, but it seems to be a fact that validity of a kind, and this is of course a subjective kind, gained in whatever way that had to be, is the quality that makes a work reliable as art. This reliability comes straight out of the writer himself. In the end, it is another personal quotient in writing fiction; it is something inimitable. It is that by which each writer lets us believe—doesn’t ask us to, can’t make us, simply lets us.

  To a large extent a writer cannot help the material of his fiction. That is, he cannot help where and when he happened to be born; then he has to live somewhere and somehow and with others, and survive through some history or other if he is here to write at all. But it is not to escape his life but more to pin it down that he writes fiction (though by pinning it down he no doubt does escape it a little). And so certainly he does choose his subject. It’s not really quibbling to say that a writer’s subject, in due time, chooses the writer—not of course as a writer, but as the man or woman who comes across it by living and has it to struggle with. That person may come on it by seeming accident, like falling over a chair in a dark room. But he may invite it with wide-open arms, so that it eventually walks in. Or his subject may accrue, build up and build up inside him until it’s intolerable to him not to try to write it in terms he can understand: he submits it to the imagination, he finds names, sets something down. “In other words …”

  So he does choose his subject, though not without compulsion, and now not too much stands in the way of the writer’s learning something for himself about his own writing. For he has taken the fatal step when he put himself into his subject’s hands. He might even do well to feel some misgivings: he and his fiction were never strangers, but at moments he may wonder at the ruthlessness of the relationship, which is honesty, between it and himself.

  His inspiration, so-called, may very easily, then, be personal desperation—painful or pleasurable. All kinds of desperation get to be one in the work. But it will be the particular desperation that the particular writer is heir to, subject to, out of which he learns in daily life, by which, in that year, he is driven, on which he can feel, think, construct something, write out in as many drafts as he likes and then not get to much of an end. What he checks his work against remains, all the way, not books, not lore, neither another’s writing nor in the large his own, but life that breathes in his face. Still, he may get to his end, have his say.

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sp; It really is his say. We have the writer’s own vision of everything in the world when we place his novel in the center. Then so much is clear: how he sees life and death, how much he thinks people matter to each other and to themselves, how much he would like you to know what he finds beautiful or strange or awful or absurd, what he can do without, how well he has learned to see, hear, touch, smell—all as his sentences go by and in their time and sequence mount up. It grows clear how he imposes order and structure on his fictional world; and it is terribly clear, in the end, whether, when he calls for understanding, he gets any.

  And of course he knew this would be so: he has been, and he is, a reader. Furthermore, all his past is in his point of view; his novel, whatever its subject, is the history itself of his life’s experience in feeling. He has invited us, while we are his readers, to see with his point of view. Can we see? And what does he feel passionately about? Is it honest passion? The answer to that we know from the opening page. For some reason, honesty is one thing that it’s almost impossible to make a mistake about in reading fiction.

  Let us not think, however, that we ever plumb it all—not one whole novel; and I am not speaking of the great ones exclusively. It is for quite other reasons that we never know all of a single person. But the finished novel transcends the personal in art. Indeed, that has been its end in view.

  For fiction, ideally, is highly personal but objective. It is something which only you can write but which is not, necessarily, about you. Style, I think, is whatever it is in the prose which has constantly pressed to give the writing its objectivity. Style does not obtrude but exists as the sum total of all the ways that have been taken to make the work stand on its own, apart. Born subjective, we learn what our own idea of the objective is as we go along.

  Style is a product of highly conscious effort but is not self-conscious. Even with esthetic reasons aside, the self-consciousness would not be justified. For if you have worked in any serious way, you have your style—like the smoke from a fired cannon, like the ring in the water after the fish is pulled out or jumps back in. I can’t see that a writer deserves praise in particular for his style, however good: in order for him to have written what he must have very much wanted to write, a way had to be found. A reader’s understanding of his style—as the picture, or the reflection, or the proof of a way in which communication tried to happen—is more to be wished for than any praise; and when communication does happen, the style is in effect beyond praise.

  What you write about is in the public domain. Subject you can choose, but your mind and heart compel you. Point of view you develop in order to transcend it. Style you acquire in the pursuit of something else which may turn out to be the impossible. Now let me mention shape.

  In fiction, as we know, the shapes the work takes are marvelous, and vary most marvelously in our minds. It is hard to speak further about them. Specific in the work, in the mind, but not describable anywhere else—or not by me; shape is something felt. It is the form of the work that you feel to be under way as you write and as you read. At the end, instead of farewell, it tells over the whole, as a whole, to the reader’s memory.

  In sculpture, this shape is left in rock itself and stands self-identifying and self-announcing. Fiction is made of words to travel under the reading eye, and made to go in one sequence and one direction, slowly, accumulating; time is an element. The words follow the contours of some continuous relationship between what can be told and what cannot be told, to be in the silence of reading the lightest of the hammers that tap their way along this side of chaos.

  Fiction’s progress is of course not tactile, though at once you might rejoin by saying that some of Lawrence’s stories, for instance, are—as much as a stroke of the hand down a horse’s neck. Neither is shape necessarily, or even often, formal, though James, for example, was so fond of making it so. There is no more limit to the kinds of shape a fictional work may take than there appears to be to the range and character of our minds.

  The novel or story ended, shape must have made its own impression on the reader, so that he feels that some design in life (by which I mean esthetic pattern, not purpose) has just been discovered there. And this pattern, shape, form that emerges for you then, a reader at the end of the book, may do the greatest thing that fiction does: it may move you. And however you have been moved by the parts, this still has to happen from the whole before you know what indeed you have met with in that book.

  From the writer’s view, we might say that shape is most closely connected with the work itself, is the course it ran. From the reader’s view, we might say that shape is connected with recognition; it is what allows us to know and remember what in the world of feeling we have been living through in that novel. The part of the mind in both reader and writer that form speaks to may be the deep-seated perception we all carry in us of the beauty of order imposed, of structure rising and building upon itself, and finally of this coming to rest.

  It is through the shaping of the work in the hands of the artist that you most nearly come to know what can be known, on the page, of his mind and heart, and his as apart from the others. No other saw life in an ordering exactly like this. So shape begins and ends subjectively. And that the two concepts, writer’s and reader’s, may differ, since all of us differ, is neither so strange nor so important as the vital fact that a connection has been made between them. Our whole reading lives testify to the astonishing degree to which this can happen.

  This ordering, or shape, a felt thing that emerges whole for us at the very last, as we close the novel to think back, was to the writer, I think, known first thing of all. It was surmised. And this is above all what nobody else knew or could have taught or told him. Besides, at that point he was not their listener. He could not, it seems, have cast his work except in the mold it’s in, which was there in his mind all the hard way through. And this notwithstanding thousands of other things that life crowded into his head, parts of the characters that we shall never meet, flashes of action that yielded to other flashes, conversations drowned out, pieces of days and nights, all to be given up, and rightly.

  For we have to remember what the novel is. Made by the imagination for the imagination, it is an illusion come full circle—a very exclusive thing, for all it seems to include a good deal of the world. It was wholly for the sake of illusion, made by art out of, and in order to show, and to be, some human truth, that the novelist took all he knew with him and made that leap in the dark.

  For he must already have apprehended and come to his own jumping-off place before he could put down on paper that ever-miraculous thing, the opening sentence.

  1965

  MUST THE NOVELIST CRUSADE?

  Not too long ago I read in some respectable press that Faulkner would have to be reassessed because he was “after all, only a white Mississippian.” For this reason, it was felt, readers could no longer rely on him for knowing what he was writing about in his life’s work of novels and stories, laid in what he called “my country.”

  Remembering how Faulkner for most of his life wrote in all but isolation from critical understanding, ignored impartially by North and South, with only a handful of critics in forty years who were able to “assess” him, we might smile at this journalist as at a boy let out of school. Or there may have been an instinct to smash the superior, the good, that is endurable enough to go on offering itself. But I feel in these words and others like them the agonizing of our times. I think they come of an honest and understandable zeal to allot every writer his chance to better the world or go to his grave reproached for the mess it is in. And here, it seems to me, the heart of fiction’s real reliability has been struck at—and not for the first time by the noble hand of the crusader.

  It would not be surprising if the critic I quote had gained his knowledge of the South from the books of the author he repudiates. At any rate, a reply to him exists there. Full evidence as to whether any writer, alive or dead, can be believed is always at hand in one p
lace: any page of his work. The color of his skin would modify it just about as much as would the binding of his book. Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run denied. Integrity is no greater and no less today than it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It stands outside time.

  The novelist and the crusader who writes both have their own place—in the novel and the editorial respectively, equally valid whether or not the two happen to be in agreement. In my own view, writing fiction places the novelist and the crusader on opposite sides. But they are not the sides of right and wrong. Honesty is not at stake here and is not questioned; the only thing at stake is the proper use of words for the proper ends. And a mighty thing it is.

  Because the printed page is where the writer’s work is to be seen, it may be natural for people who do not normally read fiction to confuse novels with journalism or speeches. The very using of words has these well-intentioned people confused about the novelist’s purpose.

  The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it, and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again. For the mind of one person, its writer, is in it too. What distinguishes it above all from the raw material, and what distinguishes it from journalism, is that inherent in the novel is the possibility of a shared act of the imagination between its writer and its reader.

  “All right, Eudora Welty, what are you going to do about it? Sit down there with your mouth shut?” asked a stranger over long distance in one of the midnight calls that I suppose have waked most writers in the South from time to time. It is part of the same question: Are fiction writers on call to be crusaders? For us in the South who are fiction writers, is writing a novel something we can do about it?