How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein

Author:Sol Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

NINE

Do You Promise to Tell the Truth, So Help You?

A writer cannot write what he does not read with pleasure. He must write what he most loves to read. I recognize that I am speaking to two tribes of writers. There is the line that descends from Shakespeare—sometimes descending far too much in its attempts to be literary. And there is the line that descends from Marlowe, the melodramatist from whom Shakespeare cribbed some plots before he learned that writing is a way of exploring human nature.

Much has been written about the line that descends from Shakespeare. Less has been written about the melodramas that descend from Marlowe. This book is addressed to both lines, to those who are trying to write a good book and those who are trying to write a good read. They are different occupations, but both can profit from knowledge of their craft.

Trapdoors and pitfalls exist in both occupations. The would-be writer of literary fiction sometimes slides into passivity and inconsequence no reader will follow for long. The writer of melodrama is sometimes in such a hurry to get his plot on paper that he neglects the development of interesting characters and credible actions. If the writer of melodrama also neglects precision in his use of language, he can easily stumble into hackwork.

It is important to understand how melodrama differs from genuine drama. Melodrama can be thought of as opera without the music. It may emphasize spectacle, exaggerated physical action, sensational violence, and extravagant emotion, which come off both on stage and in books as lacking in credibility. Melodrama flourished onstage in nineteenth-century plays and in early-twentieth-century films. Anyone who today sits through any of the early films, even the ones considered great by film buffs, knows what melodrama is, and why its incredulity leaves us uncomfortable when its object is not laughter. Melodrama is naive in its perception of human nature. There is a certain hypocrisy in melodramatic fiction. People do not behave in life as they do in those books. Heroes and heroines in melodrama are virtuous to an extreme. Villains are of unmitigated evil. We have learned since that heroes and heroines are more convincing when they are vulnerable, and villains more credible when they use charm as well as guile with their victims.

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The stories that suffuse much thriller and mystery fiction cannot be looked at closely because they don’t ring true, they are “made up” of actions often closer to cartoons than to life. Their stereotyped heroes and villains are propelled by motives and emotions that seem spurious or sentimental. Characterization in melodrama is anything but subtle. Instead of the rounded characters of fiction who live on in memory, the characters of melodrama are maneuvered like puppets to suit the turns of a plot usually too far-fetched to be considered anything but entertainment of a transient kind. Melodrama attracts huge audiences who do not look to books for insight or the pleasures of language, and who are content with diversion.

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