James Salter’s The Art of Fiction was published posthumously in 2016 by University of Virginia Press, one year following the author’s death. The collection is composed of three sections — “The Art of Fiction,” “Writing Novels,” and “Life into Art” — and is based on lectures Salter delivered at the age of 89 when he served as first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. An introduction by John Casey, an American novelist and friend of Salter whom he met while attending one of his lectures in Washington, opens the book. Casey respectfully calls attention to the mixed reception of Salter’s writing career, being defined by critics as both “luminous,” and “luminously depressing.” The Art of Fiction is a raw and honest account of the life of the writer, drawing upon Salter’s own moments of utter passion for literature and the melancholy of rejection.
Throughout, Salter opts for a colloquial tone, inviting readers and listeners into his mind as he thinks through the art of reading and writing. In his first lecture, “The Art of Fiction,” Salter references many of his favourite authors including Balzac, Flaubert, Babel, Dreiser, Celine, and Faulkner, to work through his own ideas of what it means to write. In order to express the importance of minute details in writing, Salter references Balzac as one of the first writers to not omit, “the details of everyday life that he so voraciously assembled and made use of as an essential part of the truth, of reality.” Through his various references to other authors, Salter expresses the reality of what he (and every single author) has faced in their lives – rejection. In reference to his own novel, Light Years, and the slander it received on publication, he notes that “it’s a rare writer who doesn’t experience rejection at one point or another, and the book was after all not anything sacred, through it had been sacred to me.”
Salter goes on to divide some of the most famous authors in history into two distinct classes: the naïve and the sentimental. Salter uses Friedrich Schiller’s theories from On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry to define these classes. The naïve writers are those whose writing comes naturally and easily to them, whereas the sentimental writers are those who tend to struggle more in the writing process and have to work harder to produce something worthwhile. In the naïve group, Salter places Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Sterne, and Goethe. Meanwhile in the sentimental group, he positions Tolstoy, Woolf, and Flaubert. For example, Salter references how it took Flaubert over four years to write Madam Bovary, detailing how “he weighed each sentence. He selected, rejected, [and] reselected each word.” Through his comparison of these two classes of writers, Salter concludes that the core of good writing is style.
For the sentimental writer, it tends to be more difficult to find style, “speech is a natural human attribute and for the most part comes forth easily, almost willy-nilly, but writing is not the same. Writing is more difficult.” Style, often interchangeable with “voice,” comes to writers through endless writing and rewriting: “to be a writer is to be sentenced to correcting.” However, voice also emerges through one’s engagement with other writers. New writers are essentially voiceless, and it is only through reading other writers and doing their own writing and rewriting that they can begin to whittle down and find their own voice.
In his second lecture titled, “Writing Novels,” Salter discusses the art of – and the “amplitude” of – the novel. The basic guidelines of the novel, according to Salter, is that they are a “narrative – that is to say linear in form and faithful in chronology – going forward in time or folded back and forth in it.” He then lists the individual aspects of the novel, from plot, to characters, to the importance and difficulty of that very first paragraph. All of these individual aspects collectively add to the amplitude of the novel, proving the novel-writing process a difficult one. There are several questions one needs to constantly ask themselves while in the novel-writing process, such as “have you said this before? Have you neglected to write that? Have you used this particular word too much?”
In his final lecture, “Life into Art,” Salter stresses the importance of finding the perfect time and place in your day to carve out for writing. He expresses his personal distaste for writing in the city, “in the city everyone was working or on their way to work, or it was afterwards, and they had done their work for the day. And there was always the faint hum of the city like some huge generators buried deep underground that fell silent sometimes but not really.” It is critical to check in with yourself and figure out where and when you do your best writing. Salter realized that the best place for his own personal writing was not within these “borrowed spaces” within the public, but at home “in the house early in the morning,” before his wife and young daughters had woken up or after they had gone to bed.
However, Salter also stresses that one should not do all of their writing at their desk, but also mix it up every now and then in order to find inspiration within the real world. Salter references his own “two thick notebooks” that he himself has filled up with various references regarding “[the] weather, places, conversation, faces, death, love, sex, [and] people” and urges all writers and aspiring writers to carry their notebooks with them wherever they go like a companion. When you actively engage with fellow writers, hone in on your voice, and gather inspiration from real life, you can begin your own unique writing journey.
Exercises/Prompts from The Art of Fiction:
- Think of one of your favourite authors or books. List the elements of their writing style that you admire.
- Do you consider yourself in the naïve or sentimental class of writers? Explain your reasoning.
- When/where is your ideal writing time/place? Write a paragraph describing this place in great detail.