On Being a Writer
Excerpts from Letters to a Young Novelist, which condenses a lifetime of writing, reading and thought.
Deep down, you’ve felt a certain predilection, and you’ve bolstered it with an exertion of will and decided to devote yourself to literature. Now what?
The literary vocation is not a hobby, a sport, a pleasant leisure-time activity. It is an all-encompassing occupation, an urgent priority, a freely chosen servitude that turns its victims (its lucky victims) into slaves…literature becomes a permanent preoccupation, something that takes up your entire existence, that overflows the hours you devote to writing and seeps into everything else you do, because the literary vocation feeds off the life of the writer just as the tapeworm feeds off the bodies it invades.
Origin of Stories
The novelist doesn’t choose his themes; he is chosen by them. He writes on certain subjects because certain things have happened to him. In the choice of a theme, the writer’s freedom is relative, perhaps even non-existent… the novelist scavenges his own experience for raw material for stories…
Veiling Reality
Writing novels is the equivalent of what professional strippers do when they take off their clothes and exhibit their naked bodies on stage. The novelist performs the same acts in reverse. In constructing the novel, he goes through the motions of getting dressed, hiding the nudity in which he began under heavy, multicoloured articles of clothing conjured up out of his imagination.
Great Writing
“This is the great triumph of technical skill in novel writing: the achievement of invisibility, that ability to endow a story with color, drama, subtlety, beauty and suggestive power so effectively that no reader even notices the story exists; under the spell of its craftsmanship, he feels that he is not reading but rather living a fiction that, for a while at least and so far as he is concerned, supplants life.
Power of Persuasion
The more independent and self-contained the novel seems to us, and the more everything happening in it gives us the impression of occurring as a result of the story’s internal mechanisms and not as a result of the arbitrary imposition of an outside will, the greater the novel’s power of persuasion. When a novel gives us the impression of self-sufficiency, of being freed from real life, of containing in itself everything it requires to exist, it has reached its maximum capacity for persuasion, successfully seducing its readers and making them believe what it tells them. Good novels – great novels – never actually seem to tell us anything; rather, they make us live it and share in it by virtue of their persuasion.
Sculpting Your Story
The written part of any novel is just a piece or fragment of the story it tells: the fully developed story… covers infinitely more ground that is explicitly travelled in the text, more groundwork than any novelist, even the wordiest and most prolific, with the least sense of narrative economy, would be capable of covering in his text.
Originality is What’s Left Out
Let’s say that the full story of a novel (including all selected and omitted facts) is a cube and that, once the superfluous pieces of information and the bits omitted deliberately in order to obtain a specific effect are carved away, each particular novel takes on a certain form. That object, that sculpture, is an expression of the artist’s originality.
By Way of a P.S.
Just a few lines as a kind farewell, to reiterate something I’ve already expressed many times in the course of our correspondence as, spurred on by you stimulating missives, I’ve tried to describe some of the tools that good novelists use to cast the kind of spell that keeps readers in thrall. And that is that technique, form, discourse, text, or whatever you want to call it (pedants have come up with many names for something that any reader could identify with ease) is a seamless whole. To isolate theme, style, order, points of view, et cetera, in other words, to perform a vivisection, is always, even in the best of cases, a form of murder. And a corpse is a palled and misleading stand-in for a living, breathing, thinking entity not in the grip of rigor mortis or helpless against the onset of decay.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Lima, 10 May 1997