Native Son - Richard Wright [206]
The first draft of the novel was written in four months, straight through, and ran to some 576 pages. Just as a man rises in the mornings to dig ditches for his bread, so I’d work daily. I’d think of some abstract principle of Bigger’s conduct and at once my mind would turn it into some act I’d seen Bigger perform, some act which I hoped would be familiar enough to the American reader to gain his credence. But in the writing of scene after scene I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it. That is, to objectify in words some insight derived from my living in the form of action, scene, and dialogue. If a scene seemed improbable to me, I’d not tear it up, but ask myself: “Does it reveal enough of what I feel to stand in spite of its unreality?” If I felt it did, it stood. If I felt that it did not, I ripped it out. The degree of morality in my writing depended upon the degree of felt life and truth I could put down upon the printed page. For example, there is a scene in Native Son where Bigger stands in a cell with a Negro preacher, Jan, Max, the State’s Attorney, Mr. Dalton, Mrs. Dalton, Bigger’s mother, his brother, his sister, Al, Gus, and Jack. While writing that scene, I knew that it was unlikely that so many people would ever be allowed to come into a murderer’s cell. But I wanted those people in that cell to elicit a certain important emotional response from Bigger. And so the scene stood. I felt that what I wanted that scene to say to the reader was more important than its surface reality or plausibility.
Always, as I wrote, I was both reader and writer, both the conceiver of the action and the appreciator of it. I tried to write so that, in the same instant of time, the objective and subjective aspects of Bigger’s life would be caught in a focus of prose. And always I tried to render, depict, not merely to tell the story. If a thing was cold, I tried to make the reader feel cold, and not just tell about it. In writing in this fashion, sometimes I’d find it necessary to use a stream of consciousness technique, then rise to an interior monologue, descend to a direct rendering of a dream state, then to a matter-of-fact depiction of what Bigger was saying, doing, and feeling. Then I’d find it impossible to say what I wanted to say without stepping in and speaking outright on my own; but when doing this I always made an effort to retain the mood of the story, explaining everything only in terms of Bigger’s life and, if possible, in the rhythms of Bigger’s thought (even though the words would be mine) Again, at other times, in the guise of the lawyer’s speech and the newspaper items, or in terms of what Bigger would overhear or see from afar, I’d give what others were saying and thinking of him. But always, from the start to the finish, it was Bigger’s story, Bigger’s fear, Bigger’s flight, and Bigger’s fate that I tried to depict. I wrote with the conviction in mind (I don’t know if this is right or wrong; I only know that I’m temperamentally inclined to feel this way) that the main burden of all serious fiction consists almost wholly of character-destiny and the items, social, political, and personal, of that character-destiny.