Deadlines can give life to creative writing
The impetus provided by limited time can bring real urgency to some writers' work
In between reflecting on creative writing for this blog, and keeping up with the surge of new spring books, I have been reading Orhan Pamuk's 2009 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, just republished by Faber as The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (I note, en passant, that the last writer to use that formula in a book title was John le Carr, who last week gave his archive to the Bodleian library, striking a blow for British literary nationalism.)
Anyway, Pamuk starts from Schiller's famous distinction between "naive" poets who write spontaneously, serenely and unselfconsciously and "sentimental" poets who think about their art, ie who are instinctively reflective, emotional and questioning, alive to the artifice of the written word. (In the UK, you might contrast Hughes and Larkin along these lines.) All of this leads Pamuk into some interesting re-evaluations of Flaubert, Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Dickens as he explores the oscillations between "naive" and "sentimental" and the search for an equilibrium between these two poles.
As I was reading Pamuk I found myself reflecting on one aspect of creative technique he does not really go into, an aspect of composition that is much more important I believe than is generally acknowledged.
I'm talking about deadlines an appropriate subject for a blog published by a newspaper and the value/impact of creative pressure.
For the "naive" writer, a deadline is no big deal, and probably no hardship, possibly even a useful spur to composition. Dickens almost always subjected himself, self-consciously, to writing for serialisation, meeting a succession of deadlines with carefully constructed, and sometimes improvised, cliffhangers (a term that owes its origins to the serial fiction of Victorian England). Dickens's writing is always spontaneous, majestic and intrinsically comic, apparently without a care in the world, even when addressing momentous themes of life and death. But it is also urgent and driven, with a relentless momentum inspired by those looming deadlines. Dickens, then, is a novelist who benefits, creatively, from the restrictions placed on his art by the prevailing publishing conditions.
Off the top of my head, I can think of three other fictions that have benefited from the time pressure applied to the writer.
First, there's Brideshead Revisited. Waugh came up with this novel partly in response to a dismal experience as a soldier in the second world war. His deadline was self-imposed. In a letter to his superiors he said, in words that now seem astonishing, "I have now formed the plan of a new novel which will take approximately three months to write." The novel became a kind of creative survival tactic for him. Finally, in January 1944, an indulgent Commanding Officer gave him leave to write it and he took off to Chagford, in Devon, a favourite spot, to write. He was writing against a deadline, the inevitable return to military duty, completing an extraordinary number of pages each week, averaging 2,000 words a day. Repeatedly, towards the end, he had to appeal for extra time. When the proofs of the novel came through he had already been sent abroad. Brideshead Revisited can be seen as lush and over-indulgent in its prose, but its narrative certainly benefits from the urgent circumstances of its composition.
Second, there's Waugh's great contemporary, George Orwell! (aka Er ic Blair). Turn to the closing page of Animal Farm and you will see that it was written between November 1943 and February 1944. Agreed: this is a satirical novella, after Swift, and not a novel and runs to barely 100 pages. But the simplicity of the narrative, and its driving momentum, adds powerfully to the impact.
Finally, Mario Vargas Llosa once told me that he had written Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter in a matter of weeks, swept along by the exhilaration of composition. From all his novels, among his readers, this is often a favourite for its joie de vivre, its mad inventiveness and sense of fun. If Llosa had written this as a "sentimental" novelist not a "naive" one, how much less enjoyable it might have turned out to be.
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