William Faulkner once said, “Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.” I can imagine surgeons and bricklayers taking umbrage against such a remark, since there is probably no shortcut to get the surgery done and no shortcut to get the bricklaying done.
Technique refers to two things, mainly: The way one does something and the skill involved. Technique can also refer to doing something with skill, a succinct synergy of the last two definitions.
Perhaps what Faulkner disdained was writing he thought of as over-reliant on tools and schemas for success. “Over-reliant” in the sense that having the right tool or the right schema made you what you wanted to be. Of course, a scalpel doesn’t make a surgeon and bricks don’t make a bricklayer.
But no one has heard of surgeons without scalpels or bricklayers without bricks—just as no one has heard of writers without tools or techniques.
I have never been much for the idea of the “artist” as an entity set apart, as someone who simply spawns art. Working for a newspaper these past few years, this idea is anathema to me. I know from observing my own work and the work of my fellows, work does not spring fully made in an Athenian fashion.
And if writing doesn’t spontaneously explode from your forehead, then how do you do it? What are a writer’s tools? What constitutes their technique?
Writing material is an obvious one. Pen and paper, or maybe ostrich feather and vellum if it feels right. Or, these days, a laptop or some other sort of word processor. Maybe you do all your writing in your mind, precipitating story like some modern Homer. Words, of course, are tools, and the closest thing to a tool shed for words, besides your own head, is a dictionary.
Dictionaries are immensely useful when you’re hunkering down in text, even if you only crack it open every now and then. I know, writing these columns, how difficult it can be to recall the exact meaning of a word, or how definitions imbricate. Of course, talking about the dictionary brings us to its comrade in arms—the thesaurus.
Oh, the poor beleaguered thesauri of the world. They can never catch a break. Perhaps because, if misused, a thesaurus becomes a hobbling post for writers looking for a cheat for erudition, and the bane of every high school composition teacher. Not that thesauri are all that useful. It’s better to know what word you want to use before you go fiddling around with a list of synonyms. But, in conjunction with a dictionary, a thesaurus can be of immense aid.
Everything after that is optional. Faulkner (and many of his comrades in arms) used alcohol like a tool for their writing. In the same interview as the bricklayer quote, when asked about bourbon, Faulkner quipped, “I ain’t that particular. Between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.”
Some writers use money as a tool—without which they can’t buy the time to write. Some writers use location as a tool—back to Faulkner, and to every vagabond who has wandered into a place to sponge up the local color. Some writers use their own lives, good and bad.
Faulkner may have disdained people trying to decipher a shortcut to good writing via tools or techniques, but it’s nothing but a posture in light of his practices. He may not have regarded technique or tools as much, but he still used them, as any profession uses them.
Want to talk about tools? Tell Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
