The best-written new release
Priya Parmar answers our questions on prose style
Photo: JD Cohen
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‘The prose is not just the descriptive wording, it is in charge of the whole experience, the traffic lights dictating rhythm, sound, diction, imagery, compression.’
Priya Parmar is the author of the novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, a New York Times Notable Book, as well as co-author of the musical, Sylvia (London Old Vic), nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Original Musical.
We chose her new novel The Original as a best-written recent release in literary fiction.
‘Luminous, stylish, insightful… Anyone interested in Hepburn's early career will have a hard time resisting this stylish, insightful deconstruction of her carefully crafted public persona'’ - New York Times
You obviously believe that the quality of prose matters. Could you explain why this is so?
Lately I have heard people discuss prose and story as if they were separate creatures, or one is substance and the other decoration? So, one gets to be the table and the other the tablecloth. The prose would probably be cast as the tablecloth. For me, as a reader and as a writer, it does not work that way. They are the same thing. As a writer, I cannot find the story without the right prose and, as a reader, I cannot enjoy a story if I do not also enjoy the prose.
A novel’s deepest meaning lives in how the reader experiences what happens, rather than the bare events themselves. Two writers can describe the same moment – whether it is wedding, a death, a betrayal – and the results will be entirely different. The prose is not just the descriptive wording, it is in charge of the whole experience, the traffic lights dictating rhythm, sound, diction, imagery, compression. The whole way the author grabs your attention and endeavours to hold it.
I have always been drawn to writers whose sentences carry a distinct intelligence. Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Daphne du Maurier, Michael Ondaatje, Hilary Mantel. As a reader, I can forgive many things if the prose is alive. What switches me off as a reader is inert language. Once a sentence feels generic, I mentally wander away from the story. So, for me, prose is everything. It is the thing and the delivery system in one which is just glorious.
When did you realise you had found your writing voice? What exactly had you found? Has this happened more than once?
It would be so lovely if it were a single, reliable moment of discovery. Instead, for me, it is a practice of writing to my own ear. A zeroing in on what sounds right to me. For this novel, early on, adverbs felt very wrong. They were too inexact, too loose. If I needed an adverb, the verb was not strong enough and so, instead of boosting it with an adverb, I found a better verb.
For each novel it is different and the right voice is something I have had to locate again and again in the writing phase, and then get even more specific and exacting in the editing phase. I can let things slip through in the writing phase, allow a less right phrase to lead me to a more right phrase but, by the edits, they all have to be right. Killing the darlings is zero fun in the doing but I am always glad I did it in the end.
I have been so lucky and for each novel, a sense of rightness has emerged in terms of my ear and the voice. I do not know quite how it works. I am not sure I would want to know how it works. That would strip out all the pixie dust.
But for each novel I was able to hear what was wrong. It is interesting that the rightness is entirely dislocated from sense or grammar. A sentence could sound right to me, and move the story where I wanted it to move, but it could live entirely without reason or verbs or, sometimes, a subject. I have found that the more I trust my ear, the more I like my writing.
Continued below.
‘Any time my brain can guess the end of a sentence, something in me disengages from the writing. It feels like a bit of a betrayal of trust.’
Talk us through the stylistic choices you made for The Original’s opening lines:
We don’t take cowards here. In the young, we accept vice, avarice, stupidity and vanity, but not cowardice. We will spit you out for that and send you back on the dusty bus to wherever you came from. Not her. She was brave and was always going to end up here.
When she was young, before the suicides, she preferred the sunshine sports: golf, sailing, swimming, croquet, climbing trees. She could ski – all the old money kids in Connecticut can ski – but she didn’t like it. She liked hot air on her arms, sweat, and the way her scalp itched after a day in the sun. She wore her brother’s clothes and never looked in the mirror.
When she was older, we reached for her. She was on Broadway then. Arguing with directors, getting fired, quitting, getting married. She could have stayed that course; she had already married a Main Line man. Their address was listed in the Philadelphia phone book: Mr and Mrs Ludlow Ogden Smith. ‘Luddy’ – prep school boys always have names like that. They ordered letterpressed writing paper, opened joint bank accounts, the works. Would a child have changed her mind? No? Maybe. Regardless, the scooped-out belly and the thin white scar were inevitable. Anatomy is anatomy. It cannot be persuaded.
At some point research stops being vital and becomes a place to hide. I had reached that point and was very much hiding from the writing. I knew I just had to start.
This would probably be a good time to point out that I do not outline. I always imagine life would be so much easier if I did. I genuinely do not know why I don’t. It might be a trauma response to all the outlining I did as an academic, or it might be that after I get to the end of the outline, the writing feels like a flat soda without any bubbles. Either way, I always have the sense that I have to earn my ending rather than plan it. And that is the ending to a sentence, a chapter a novel.
I was steeped in Hepburn research and had reached that critical mass when it is time to start, but I was terrified. This is the first historical figure I have fictionalised, when I knew how they had sounded. As in, I knew Hepburn’s actual voice. That specificity was difficult for me. How to conjure a fictional version of someone so known?
I was stuck, but then decided that being terrified was a huge gift. I flipped it over in my head. Terrified meant the stakes were high, if the stakes were high, it meant I was near the third rail where I could get it hugely wrong, but the third rail is also where the power lives.
That day I started writing and this is what came out. Exactly. It never changed. I was not expecting Los Angeles to speak. I was not expecting Los Angeles to be so tough, but it was right to my ear. I had needed a Greek Chorus in the city of Los Angeles and had not known it before I wrote my way there.
In terms of technique, again, it was about writing for my ear and in this case, my ear wanted an opinionated, omniscient, partisan voice. The voice is very much influenced by four minutes at the start of an interview Katharine Hepburn did with Dick Cavett. She was older and did not give many interviews, especially not on television. She went to his studio to see how it felt and ended up agreeing to do the interview then and there.
But first, there were four minutes when she stage managed that whole room. Move this table, that rug is ugly, I need my hair to do this, I want that chair. She was definite and she was fabulous. I wanted that voice. But the Hepburn at the start of my novel had not earned that voice yet. She was not that human yet. So that voice came through in the character of Los Angeles.
Can you give our readers any stylistic advice on writing dialogue?
I once read a quote from Bret Easton Ellis about dialogue. He believed that “said” was the only viable dialogue tag. I am not sure I agree with him, but it made me very wary of dialogue tags and the more I write, the more rarely I use them. For me, trusting the reader and making big leaps is everything in dialogue.
Should writers always avoid cliché? If not, could you quote for us a use of cliché that you admire?
Like all writing, it is a matter of taste. I do not like cliches because they feel hackneyed, lazy. Any time my brain can guess the end of a sentence, something in me disengages from the writing. It feels like a bit of a betrayal of trust. As the writer, we are asking for a reader’s trust, promising something new, something real that lives in just us, otherwise, why would a reader trust us with their time?
If you are using a cliché because it is a cliché, that is different. If you are showing how a character is flat, or nervous, or not themselves by using a cliché that is fine. You are using the cliché because it is hackneyed, not because you cannot think of anything more real or vital or true. And it can be tricky, because clichés are clichés because they get the job done. They convey something big in shorthand.
Freshness, virtuosity, wit, and that elusive stylistic quality known as charm: how might a writer whose prose lacks these qualities go about learning them?
For me, the best way to learn anything as a writer is to read. Read widely, read everything and read deliberately. Look for the puppet strings, rip it apart, understand how it is built. If you want to write with more charm, figure out what you find charming and read it, lots of it. And for me, that is true of every facet of writing.
But also, read to understand your own taste. What do you like? What exactly? Why do you like it? I cannot read without a pen or pencil in my hand, and I scribble all over my books, it is awful. I read to understand how it works. As a reader, I am being manipulated, fantastic, that is why I am reading, but how does it work? That pay off on page 342 has its roots on a brief scene on page 6. The dropped handkerchief in the first act. Go back and follow it.
The other thing that works for me is to figure out what I don’t like. What switches off the gravitational pull in a novel. Why did I stop caring about a character? I left a novel on a plane once and I did not replace it. It came out in paperback and I still did not replace it. Why didn’t I care what happened to these characters? Once I realised I did not care, I replaced the novel to find where I had stopped caring and why. Figuring out your own taste can help so much.
Name a book published in the past year that you admire for the quality and originality of its sentences, and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.
The way repetition and precision is used in The Safekeep is fantastic.
We’re running a series on the best-written works of fiction of the 21st century to date, and the best-written works of nonfiction. Could you nominate one or more of each for us?
For fiction, I love the embodied feel of Song of Achilles and for non-fiction, The Year of Magical Thinking is a book I think about every day.
More information on The Original (US)»
UK/Ireland»
When I was still boozing a friend’s sister gave me a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous’s Big Book and I read it in a single go, and for months carried it around with me, including in the bars and clubs I stole people’s drinks in.
I compulsively re-read its portrayals of denial and nodded and smiled along drunkenly at its wisdom and warmth, before sticking it under the noses of fellow drunks who seemed as though they needed a bit of wisdom to puncture their alcoholic denial, sometimes the very drunks whose beers or nips I’d just slyly stolen and who needed some warmth to cheer them up.
Read more here»
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Sean McNulty
