The Practice of Writing

by David Lodge

Seventeen essays by the critic and novelist celebrate the contributions of his favorite authors, including D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov, and consider their influence on his own writings.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Essays, Criticism, Literary Criticism

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David John Lodge was an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View (Henry James), The Stream of Consciousness (Virginia Woolf) and Interior Monologue (James Joyce), beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.

Reviews

[Stela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whether we talk about a novel, a biography or a study of literary criticism, there is something about David Lodge’s “écriture” that appeals to any reader. He was blessed with it, that “something” that could never be taught by a literature teacher, because, as the author himself said, while answering the very question of ability to teach creative writing, it is not just a matter of technique. “It is like a chemical, or alchemical, reaction between form and content.”

Therefore, if you expect to learn tricks and magic receipts in order to improve your style, forget it, for the title is somehow deceiving. The book speaks about the author’s personal experiences – as a critic, a novelist, a playwright and a scriptwriter. Divided in two parts, The Practice of Writing reveals, as was rightly observed in KirKus’ review, the better side of two worlds: academic and journalistic.

Part one, mainly academic, gathers conferences and studies concerning general or specific literary subjects. Some ideas I noted:

• The classification of contemporary novel in four types: realist (in the traditional sense), fabulative (in the magic-realism descent), non-fictional and metafictional, nevertheless keeping in mind that most authors combine them, in what David Lodge genially calls “an aesthetic supermarket”:

The astonishing variety of styles on offer today, as in an aesthetic supermarket, includes traditional as well as innovative styles, minimalism as well as excess, nostalgia as well as prophecy. (The Novelist today: Still at Crossroads?)

• The tremendous originality of Kingsley Amis’s style, that makes Lucky Jim, the first British campus novel, a turning point in the evolution of English literature:

It is a style continually challenged and qualified by its own honesty, full of unexpected reversals and underminings of stock phrases and stock responses, bringing a bracing freshness to the satirical observation of everyday life. (Lucky Jim Revisited)

• the three most impressive traits of Joyce’s prose, which are the power of language to imitate reality, the use of heroic deeds as models for modern, ordinary life and the mixture of styles to describe the world. Very interesting also the observation that Joyce is a novelist only in Bakhtin’s definition of the novel: as a type of discourse (the dialogism or the polyphony interweaving a variety of voices and styles) and a frame of mind (the carnivalesque, questioning and subverting ideological systems by the power of laughter and the celebration of the body) ( Joyce’s Choices )

• finally, the classification of Nabokov’s novels in two types: a) experiments with crime novels (either the classic whodunit or the thriller) by focusing on the criminal instead of the “good” characters (Lolita); by portraying the criminal as an incompetent (King Queen Knave); by making the criminal completely innocent (Invitation to a Beheading; Transparent Things); making the criminal also the detective (The Eye) or refusing to apportion punishment justly (Laughter in the Dark); by making the hero a loser in his fight with evil (Bend Sinister); b) pseudo-memoir or pseudo biographical novels (Glory, The Defence, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Ada). One of the most impressive features of Nabokov’s fiction is the creation of the unreliable narrator, that reach perfection with Kinbote:

What is so fascinating and devilishly clever about Pale Fire is the way in which the reader is led to see that Kinbote’s notes are not what they purport to be, and to construct the truth from Kinbote’s distorted versions of events. (What Kind of Fiction Did Nabokov Write? A Practitioner’s View)

The second part, after an introductory chapter establishing the differences between novel, stage play and screenplay considering three criteria – point of view, time (with Genette subdivisions of chronology, duration and frequency) and text structure, shares his media experiences in adapting either his own works (Nice Work for television and The Writing Game for stage) or works of the classics (Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit). One memorable amusing quote from this second part I happily use as a conclusion of another satisfactory David Lodge reading, who, I’m absolutely sure now, will never ever bore me:

Taking their cue from Derrida’s assertion that ‘language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique’, deconstructionist literary critics, especially at Yale, have demonstrated, to their own satisfaction and in the teeth of traditional scholarship, that any text inevitably undermines its own claim to have a determinate meaning. Since this procedure opens up the text to endless multiple interpretations, its appeal to literary critics is perhaps obvious. (Through the No Entry Sign: Deconstruction and Architecture)

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of essays. Author focussed ones better. Really liked the Pinter sketch analysis (maddening really, but a nifty little case study and a good introduction to phatics, etc).

The final diaries about the 'Writing Game' production drag on a bit (theatre bores the arse off me and the labour required to cast and rehearse... I don't know why a novelist would want to bother with all that. And: actors).

All told, insightful, likeable and pretty accessible (fucking Barthes aside. Whenever Barthes appears in a sentence in any language - from Amharic to Zulu - it's fucking gibberish).

PS: some sloppy editing errors in mine. Zaha Hadid - not 'Zaha Hazid'. and 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' (not 'Who Killed Roger Rabbit).

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Lodge's book, The Practice of Writing contains much that is interesting, parts that do not fit together and little that related to the practice of writing. Because he is an interesting and intelligent writer it is easy to forgive the lack of unity across the parts of this book.

The first part, Novelists, Novels and The Novel covers more than ½ of the text and includes some of the best writing. This section opens and closes with essays about the Novel and its role in literature. There are six biographical and literary discussion of what he considers major English Novelists who presumably had the most effect on the future novelist: David Lodge.

James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov and etcetra, in other words all men; nothing about Rebecca West or Virginia Wolf. It is possible that his generation did not study these women. I would like to know if he missed them or dismisses them. Was Henry Green really more important than either of these women?

His essay on Kingsley Amis focuses on his first major novel, "Lucky Jim". This essay was of particular interest to me. It is routinely listed as a very funny book. I found it amusing but not great. Lodge explains much about placing the book into the context of its time and about how certain of the jokes work. I found his discussion illuminating but concluded that the book is not funny and the jokes tend to be too serious to be funny. Reading the book in the context of its time is a reminder that comedy does not always travel well. Yet writers like Wodehouse maintain a following. I enjoyed learning more about Amis, but I am still not the fan that Lodge is.

The closing essay of this section is: The Novel as Communication. This like most of the book is a reprint of material from other sources. It is a lecture on the question: is the Novel a form of communication? I think he eventually concludes that most likely is, sorta. Then in the next section: Mixed Media, He describes the difference from the writer's point of view, between writing novels, screen plays and stage plays. Lodge has had experience in adopting novels for stage and screen. This is an interesting analysis, but, parenthetically, almost every paragraph states explicitly that all writers in any of these pursuits is in the business of communicating.

The essay"Through the No Entry Sign: Deconstruction and Architecture" is heavily technical and laden with enough jargon and theoretical criticism as to render it almost unreadable. One wonders if Lodge would have to change more than a few words had he intended it to be comic. I like it better for the thought that he is pulling our leg rather than strutting his expertise with things architectural. To quote almost at random:

"Tschumi's approach to architecture is fiercely historicist in in the Popperian sense." I doubt it not and can hear the gagster Professor Irwin Cory insisting on exactly this point against the protests of Father Guido Sarducci.
Meantime what does this have to do with the practice of writing?

The longest single entry in the book is a selection of diary entries during the process of getting his play The Writing Game to the stage. If you intend to write for the stage, this section can be a warning or a set of instructions. Lodge does not dramatize the work of being a dramatist, but he makes very clear that the work of the writer of plays, unlike the novelist can never assume that his work is done. As long as he and his play have life, he can be expected to make changes or have changes imposed upon him. A play is far more a living thing, while a novel is almost static.

If this topic is interesting I recommend Neil Simon's Rewrites: A Memoir. It is much longer and more entertaining . But I also recommend reading them both.

As much as I have been critical of parts of The Practice of Writing, my reservations are not to be taken as condemnations. Lodge is a very educated and aware writer. He treats you as an educated reader. The essays about the writers were engaging and informative. He speaks not just of the writers, but points out the better biographers for each man. Other essays vary in their individual merit, but all are worth reading

[Thomas Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was hard work for me, I found most of it dull. If you are for some reason very interested in the personal life of Graham Greene, or are very well read in Joyce and Nabakov, then you'll probably get more out of it. Explanations about the practicalities of adapting a book for tv, and of putting a play on, had moments of interest but didn't for me justify the amount of words spent on them. Some of the essays had their moments but overall I didn't feel I got much from it (and I've read and enjoyed several Lodge novels).

[David Lai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revealing insight into a writing life.

[Neil Kenealy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's just one of the examples of David Lodge's essays in this book. Near the end is an essay on a structuralist reading of a Harold Pinter play. It has an introduction where he mentions meeting Pinter. Pinter said he never saw anything like his essay on the play and that he didn't think it was serious. Pinter said: "What I wrote was just a sketch.".

It's brilliant that before you read the piece about the sketch, the author tells you that the author of the sketch thinks the piece about the sketch is bullshit. Of course, that really made me want to read the piece about the sketch.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first half more, it was more about literature, whereas the second half was more about adapting fiction for television and writing for the stage.

One of the pieces was a foreword to an edition of Kingsley Amis's novel 'Lucky Jim', it probably was in the edition which I read of that particular novel. Reading the foreword again, now after having actually read the novel, it did reveal a bit why I did not find the novel particularly funny. Apparently much of the "comedy" in 'Lucky Jim' is down to the situations. The situations mentioned in the foreword were in my opinion more embarrassing than anything else and made me feel a bit uncomfortable. So therefore, I did not find them funny, not even smile-a-bit funny.

Ah well.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't find this book as helpful as Lodge's The Art of Fiction, however, that's not as much of a fault with this book as it is a credit to the other. Once again, Lodge takes an academic look at writing and craft.