I was rereading some Raymond Chandler the other day, for the first time in several years, when I came across the following sentence, in the middle of nowhere:

He put his head on one side and rubbed the back of his left little finger along the lower edge of his chin.

It reminded me of one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite books, Franny & Zooey by J D Salinger:

She released one hand from the phone and placed it, very briefly, on the crown of her head, then went back to holding the phone with both hands.

I love this line, because it occurs when Franny is just beginning to get the point of everything, when she is fully grasping the epiphany that changes her life, and Salinger trusts us to understand the emotion behind the action. The way that he describes such a trivial movement at such a critical junture makes it arresting, and forces us to try to interpret it. And when the reader is allowed to discover something for him or herself, the meaning arrives with much greater impact.

With Chandler, we are seeing the world through the eyes of a detective, and so are always being asked to tease out a meaning from tiny gestures. Chandler does not always tell us what the detective thinks, but leaves us to play detective ourselves.

Many other authors would just tell us what the character is feeling. I love this style, because I am forced to populate the world of the book with my own remembered library of gestures and expressions, and therefore the story seems much more real to me.

I cannot imagine Dickens using this technique. Tolstoy goes halfway, showing us the action, and then interpreting;

He said no more, but expressed his resignation to cruel fate by a gesture.

or

Anna Pavlovna almost closed her eyes to indicate that neither she nor anyone else had a right to criticize what the Empress desired or was pleased with.

Chandler or Salinger would have stopped the second example above at the fifth word. Where did this confidence come from? I am beginning to think that cinema might be the reason. And especially a style of acting which conveyed a lot with a little. Cinema, with its extreme close-ups, had started producing acting performances which are much more subtle and ‘realistic’ than stage acting.

An actor like Humphrey Bogart could be relied upon to convey a broken heart just by the way he turned up his collar. Perhaps the cinema, which borrowed so many plots from the literature of the day, also gave something back.

Every year in November I feel I really should be trying to write a novel like all the contestants of – or are they contributors to? –  NaNoWriMo. I am not sure why. I have not tried to write anything fictional since I left High School, and have no clear idea of a story I would like to tell. I do admire the people who try though, and look forward to a time when, perhaps, I do.

However, this year – no doubt they appear every year – I read an article which was critical of the project, arguing that the world needed less lousy, amateur writing, not more, and that novels should be left to the professionals. The article also suggests that the project would be better served trying to make us into better readers rather than better writers.

This was all, no doubt, deliberately controversial, the high-class equivalent of flame-bait, purely for the purpose of generating attention. And I couldn’t disagree with it more if I tried.

It didn’t seem far from suggesting that it was pointless to learn to play the piano, if you had no intention of becoming a concert pianist. When, surely, even if you only ever have one piano lesson in your life, you have a greater insight into what it takes to play professionally, and a deeper appreciation of piano music.

So with writing. I can imagine many NaNoWriMo-ers having the sudden insight that handling a plot is hard and that good dialogue is harder. And when they next read a novel, they might appreciate what the novelist has achieved more, and have become better readers.

Which is why I am blogging every day for a month (February – it is the shortest, after all). Not because the world is begging for the benefit of my trenchant insights. To help me to improve my writing skills, certainly, but also to get a sense of the discipline required in trying to put across a complicated point.To force me to think through ideas – no matter how trivial – to see whether they stand up to the scrutiny of the written word. The only reason I am blogging it, instead of simply writing it down in a private notebook, is that making something public changes the way we approach it. Even if only 5 people ever read it, it makes a difference. Rather like checking your fly is done up before you pop to the postbox. You might not see anyone during this brief errand, but if your fly was open, it alters the perceived success of the journey a great deal.

My findings so far, having blogged continuously for all of 5 days, suggests the following:

1. My writing style is far more formal and stilted than my spoken language. When speaking, I tend to pun, invent nonsense words and make childish jokes all the time. Here, I sound like Severus Snape. This is surprising. Five points from Gryffindor.

2. When I reread something I have written a few days previously, I easily spot grammatical errors and, more seriously, realise that I have often failed to make the very point I was trying to make. It seems that what I write down is everything surrounding the central idea, without any clear statement of what I am concluding. Some might call this style elliptical. I find it baffling. Perhaps it is because the idea is so much to the forefront of my mind, that I feel stating it would be overly obvious, forgetting that the reader does not share my mind.

We will see how – and if – I improve as time goes by.