The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

by Norman Mailer

  It took some time to learn that this did not necessarily diminish the drama. It could increase it. Most of our lives are spent getting ready for dramatic moments that don’t take place. Or if they do, are less than we expected. About the time we say, “Well, nothing really big ever happens to me,” you can get knocked down with something larger by far than you expected. All the frustrations of all the little narratives in your life that never had a real climax can be present in the rare denouement that life also offers once in a great while.

  I no longer work up a master plan before I begin a novel. When I was younger I used to sit down and write out such plans, but I never finished such projects. Even with The Executioner’s Song, where, after all, I knew the end of the story, I was careful not to be too versed in too many details ahead. I preferred to do my research up to no more than a hundred pages ahead of where I was. I wanted to keep the feeling that I didn’t know how it was all going to turn out. I needed something like the illusion that I was inventing each detail. Obviously, I prefer doing a book that is not too carefully prepared. Some of my best ideas come because I haven’t fixed my novel’s future in concrete. Once you know your end, it’s disastrous to get a new idea. That can only take you away from your prearranged conclusion. Yet the new idea that you didn’t follow may be worth more than the denouement you planned in advance.

  For that matter, the moment I think of a good plot, I find that the book becomes almost impossible to write, because I know I won’t believe it. Life may consist of people plotting all the time, but the plots rarely develop. We decide: I’ll make this move in my life, and that should result in the following—then life confounds us. So I prefer a story that develops out of the writing. I don’t like one that moves ahead of my characters, because then my people won’t live. Tie your characters to a prearranged plot, and you are doing to them what we would do to our children if we carefully selected their colleges, their spouses, and their jobs without ever consulting them. The same unspoken despondency weighs on characters who are treated that way in a novel: They never get to fulfill their own perverse (that is, surprising to the novelist) capabilities; they never come alive. Bill Buckley is wonderful at plots—his mind may work that way—but nobody lives and breathes in his novels with any more three dimensionality than some passing movie star who can’t act.

  Many young novelists tend to draw for their material on family or the near world of friends. How, goes the question, do you manage that without making these near and dear people too recognizable? Can you treat the familiar in such a way as not to incur the rage and tears of those who are close to you?

  It is next to impossible. You cannot write about people you care about and not hurt them or, to the contrary, even worse, allow too little to be wrong with them. They then come through as boring. That is the first mark of bottom-level amateur writing.

  I’ve always stayed away from such close material, have never written directly about my parents or my sister. Those experiences are so basic that I encircle them with a favorite word: I characterize these fundamental and primary experiences as crystals. The crystals can be simple or extraordinarily developed. But provided you don’t use them directly, you can sometimes send a ray of your imagination through the latticework in one direction or another and find altogether different scenarios. If you’ve got a relative in mind who’s, let’s say, a pretty tough kid, you can, if you don’t write about him head-on, make the boy a bullfighter or put him in Special Forces, even turn him into a bank robber or an honest cop. So long as you don’t use the core of your experience, you will be in command of many possibilities. But if you are determined to get it all accurately on paper, then at a given moment you will have to face the fact that you are going to hurt people who are close to you.

  When a surgeon operates on a young girl, he isn’t saying, “I’m going to make an incision on this young lady’s stomach that is not only going to scar her but will affect her future sex life to some degree for the next thirty years.” He just says, “Scalpel, nurse,” and does it. The surgeon is focused on the act, not its reverberations.

  Novelists are engaged in something analogous. If they start thinking of all the damage they are going to do, they can’t write the book—not if they’re reasonably decent.

  The point is that one is facing a true problem. Either you produce a work that doesn’t approach what really interests you or, if you go to the root with all you’ve got, there is no way you won’t injure your family, friends, and innocent bystanders.

  Some of my characters do come from real people. One might emerge out of five individuals, another from one person, greatly altered. Still another is imagined. No matter by which route, there’s pleasure when a character becomes, in a sense, independent of yourself.

  Graham Greene once said that there were certain characters who took care of themselves. He never had to bother about them in the writing. Others, he had to go to great pains with. He would work very hard on them. Later, when he’d read a review and it would mention one of his resistant characters as “well drawn,” he used to think, Well dragged.

  Up to now, I’ve not liked writing about people who are close to me, because their actual presence interferes with the reality one is trying to create. They become alive not as creatures in your imagination but as actors in your life. And so they seem real while you write, but you’re not developing their novelistic reality into more and more. For example, it’s not a good idea to try to put your wife into your novel. Not your latest wife, anyway. In practice, I prefer to draw a character from someone I hardly know, who excites my novelist’s instinct. I sense that I will be able to add a great deal to the portrait by what I’ve learned from other people.

  The question remains: How do you turn a real person into a fictional one? If I have an answer, it is that I try to put the model in situations which have very little to do with his or her real situations in life. Very quickly, the original disappears. The private reality can’t hold up. For instance, I might take somebody who is a professional football player, a man whom I know slightly, let’s say, and turn him into a movie star. In a transposition of this sort, everything that relates particularly to the professional football player quickly disappears, and what is left, curiously, is what is exportable in his character. But this process, while interesting in the early stages, is not as exciting as the more creative act of allowing your characters to grow once you’ve separated them from the model. It’s when they become as complex as real people that the fine excitement begins. Because now they’re not really characters any longer—they’re beings, which is a distinction I like to make. A character is someone you can grasp as a whole—you can have a clear idea of him—but a being is someone whose nature keeps shifting. In The Deer Park, Lulu Meyers is a being rather than a character. If you study her closely, you will see that she is a different person in every scene. Just a little different. I don’t know whether initially I did this by accident or purposefully, but at a certain point I made the conscious decision not to try to straighten her out; she seemed right in her changeableness.

  I’ve spoken of characters emerging. Quite often they don’t emerge; they fail to. And one is left with the dull compromise that derives from two kinds of experience warring with each other within oneself. A character who should have been brilliant is dull. Or even if a character does prove to be first-rate, it’s possible you could have done twice as much. A novel has its own laws. After a while, it becomes a creature. One can feel a bit like a rider who’s got a fine horse. Very often, I’ll suffer shame for what I’ve done with a novel. I won’t say it’s the novel that’s bad; I’ll say it’s I who was bad, as if the novel were a child raised by me, but improperly. I know what’s potentially beautiful in my novel, you see. Very often after I’m done, I realize that the beauty I recognize in it is not going to be perceived by the reader. I didn’t succeed in bringing it out. It’s very odd—it’s as though I had let the novel down, owed it a duty which I didn’t fulfill.


  Hearn’s death in The Naked and the Dead was supposed to be shocking. I haven’t thought of Hearn’s death in years. I stole the way of doing it directly from E. M. Forster. In The Longest Journey, he created a character who was most alive for the reader, then destroyed him on the next page. As I recall the line, it went: “Gerald died next day. He was kicked to death in a football game.” You get an idea what a rifle shot is like at that point. In my book, it may have been too big a price to pay, because the denouement of the novel was sacrificed. I don’t think I was aware of the size of the problem. Today I’d be much more alert to that. If I were to do the book now, I might keep Hearn alive until the very end, and it would probably be a phonier book as a result. One of the things you always have trouble with when you talk about “true” or “not true” is, of course, the relative truth of the novel. In a way, if you get a fairly good novel going, then you have a small universe functioning, and this universe lives or does not live in relation to its own scheme of cause and effect.

  Looking back on it, I can give you a good and bad motive that I had for killing Hearn where I did. The good motive is that it was a powerful way to show what death is like in war. The shoddy motive was that I wasn’t altogether sure in my heart that I knew what to do with him or how to bring him off.

  I think that I truly work on impulse in all of my writing. That’s why I don’t like to plan too far ahead. I’ve gotten into this before, but it’s worth repeating. Planning too carefully makes it almost impossible for one of your characters to go through a dramatic shift of heart, because it’s going to violate your larger scheme. It’s better if this larger scheme unfolds at a rate that is compatible with your characters.

  When it comes to entering a man or woman’s mind, a writer has to be good, even brilliant. So long as you stay outside that head, your character can retain a certain mystery. We walk around such figures with the same respect we offer strangers who come into a room with force. Part of the meaning of charisma is that we don’t know the intimate nature of the human presence we’re facing. Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively—don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader’s suppositions. To jump in only to offer banal material is a fatal error. It is the worst of best-sellerdom. Second-rate readers enjoying the insights of second-rate writers.

  I’d say try not to think of your characters as victims. That sort of classification narrows them. In reality, very few victims ever see themselves exclusively as victims, and when they do, their spirit turns stale. There is a certain sort of self-pitying victim one wishes to walk away from, and they can be even worse in a book. Unless one is Dickens. (Scrooge, Scrooge, Scrooge.)

  Hemingway suffered from the honorable need to be the equal of his male characters, particularly since he used the first person so much. It is not easy to write in the first person about a man who’s stronger or braver than yourself. It’s too close to self-serving. All the same, you have to be able to do it. Because if every one of your characters is kept down to your own level, you do not take on large subjects. You need people more heroic than yourself, more enterprising, less timid, sexier, more romantic, more tragic. You’ve got to be able to create people greater than yourself and not be ashamed of the damnable fact that the “I” who is being promoted is offering a false picture of himself to all those readers, who will predictably assume that the author is the man they are now encountering in the first person.

  I’ve been asked when the idea of using a hornet’s nest to thwart the climbers in The Naked and the Dead came to me. In truth, the idea was there before I wrote the first sentence of the book. The incident happened to my reconnaissance platoon on the most ambitious patrol we ever took. They sent out thirty of us to locate and destroy one hundred Japanese marines, but we did get stuck climbing one hell of an enormous hill with a mean, slimy trail, and when we were almost up to the ridge, somebody kicked over a hornet’s nest. Half of us went tearing up the hill, but the machine-gun squad was behind us and went flying down to the valley. We never did find each other again that day. We just slunk back to our bivouac.

  There are some who feel it was not a satisfactory device, but I think I’d do it the same way again. War is disproportions, and the hornet’s nest seemed a perfect one to me. We were ready to lose our lives that day, but we weren’t up to getting stung by a hornet.

  If a novelist can take people who are legendary figures and invent episodes for them that seem believable, then he has done something fine. There’s that meeting between J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime—I think it’s one of the best short chapters in American literature. It told me an awful lot about Morgan and an awful lot about Henry Ford, and the fact that it obviously never took place made it more delicious.

  The characters you create in a novel become as real in your mind as movie stars. That is no small equation. To a lot of people, Humphrey Bogart might, for example, be the psychic equivalent of an influential uncle, given the presence he exerts on those who love his work.

  INSTINCT AND

  INFLUENCE

  I am not sure it is possible to describe how it feels to write a novel. It may be that it is not an experience. It may be more like a continuing relation between a man and his wife. You can’t necessarily speak of that as an experience, since it may consist of several experiences braided together; or of many experiences all more or less similar; or indeed it may consist of two kinds of experiences that are antagonistic to one another.

  In large part, writing may be an instinctive process, but it’s not always clear what the instinct is saying. Sometimes you feel no more than a dull pressure to go in a certain direction for the oncoming chapter. You have to be able to hear the faint voice which prods you toward an honest continuation of the work. That can be hard to hear. A writer is also open to the temptation to take the immediate advantage, even if it doesn’t feel quite right. And we all do that in various ways. And pay for it with falsities that burrow directly into our intent.

  One example I always give to a writing class: A very young writer sits on a park bench with his girl. He kisses her. He’s seventeen. He’s never had such a kiss before. Later that night, he tries to capture the event. He writes:

  I love you, he said.

  I love you, she said.

  He stops, throws down his pen, and says, “I’m a great writer!”

  Sometimes you have to wait.

  I think Capote’s book and mine are formally similar, but vastly different. Obviously, I’ll be the first to state that if he hadn’t done In Cold Blood, it’s conceivable that I wouldn’t have thought of taking on The Executioner’s Song. Nonetheless, it’s also possible that something about The Executioner’s Song called for doing it in the way I chose. In any event, its flavor is different from In Cold Blood. Truman retained his style. Not the pure style—he simplified it—but it was still very much a book written by Truman Capote. You felt it every step of the way. The difference is that he tweaked it more, where I was determined to keep the factual narrative. I wanted my book to read like a novel, and it does, but I didn’t want to sacrifice what literally happened in a scene for what I would like to see happen. Of course, I could afford to feel that way. I had advantages Truman didn’t. His killers were not the most interesting guys in the world, so it took Truman’s exquisite skills to make his work a classic. I was in the more promising position of dealing with a man who was quintessentially American yet worthy of Dostoyevsky. If this were not enough, he was also in love with a girl who—I’ll go so far as to say—is a bona fide American heroine. I didn’t want, therefore, to improve anything. Dedicated accuracy is not usually the first claim a novelist wishes to make, but here it became a matter of literary value. What I had was gold, if I had enough sense not to gild it.

  If you find some theme that keeps yo
u working, don’t question it. Let that theme be sufficient to fuel your work. If you start using the value judgments of others, you’re never going to get much done. If I find something is stimulating to me and arousing my energy, that’s fine; I’ll trust it. If you’re a serious young writer and find that you’re writing a lot, then don’t listen to what anyone else says—do your book. There is probably a deeper truth than you’ll ever know in the fact that you’re able to work so well. Of course, you could be writing in absolutely the wrong direction. You could be doing a dreadful book.

  No matter what you find yourself writing about, if it’s giving you enough energy to continue, then the work bears a profound relationship to you at that point and you don’t question it.

  Let me take this further. You can write a book with a powerful sense of inner conviction and a year or two later say, “How could I have so deluded myself? This is awful.” Your instinct can betray you, but you still have to go with it. Very often the instinct sees some light at the end of the tunnel, but that’s because you’ve been trapped in a situation where your creative energies can’t get together. Now, at last, you’ve found a way to work. You may be writing out some very bad tendencies in yourself, but this can be good, too. You might be feeling happy because soon you’re going to be done with that malfunctioning side of yourself. That’s what your enthusiasm can be about.

  Only rarely is one’s instinct analogous to a fast highway, but that’s exactly when things get hairy. The slow twists and turns of one’s creative impulse can be a form of protecting oneself from the driving force, which sometimes is manic.