Craft isn't Everything

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, August 11, 2005
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There is more to writing than technique. Arnold Bennett says as much in The Author's Craft (1914). I'm making a note of Bennett's observation so that I don't forget it. Hopefully I will learn from his mistakes and not fall into the error of elevating craft above all:

It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose artists have shown contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as the years pass, I attach less and less importance to good technique in fiction. I love it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern history of fiction will not support me. With the single exception of Turgenev, the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have either ignored technique or have failed to understand it.

The great novelists -- Bennett mentions Balzac, Stendhal and Dostoyevsky -- are capable of every manner of offense against form, while unrivaled prose stylists like Flaubert and de Maupassant are second rate fiction writers. They lack nobility of mind, in Bennett's view. And look at this:

I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the mysterious nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There may be something of the amateur in all great artists. I do not know why it should be so, unless because, in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study and the mere bother of repeated attempts to arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great artist was ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his conscience that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to proceed rapidly with teh affair of creation, and an excusable dislike of re-creating anything twice, thrice, or ten times over -- unnatural task! -- are responsible for much of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to Shakespeare, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakespeare has been mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care. If Flaubert had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur.

Thank you, Arnold Bennett. What more is there to say?