Writers: how do they do it?

Author Claire Messud knocked our socks off when we read her 2006 novel of 9/11 New York, The Emperor's Children. The New York Times' reviewer led with, "Claire Messud is a novelist of unnerving talent."

Whenever we read books like that, we wonder, "how do they do it?"

In the first of an occasional series, we share that question, and an answer- this time, by Messud, writing for Lit Hub:

Here’s the first paragraph of Tolstoy’s Childhood, his first-published novel (1852):

On the 12th of August, 18—(just three days after my tenth birthday, when I had been given such wonderful presents), I was awakened at seven o’clock in the morning by Karl Ivanitch slapping the wall close to my head with a fly-flap made of sugar paper and a stick. He did this so roughly that he hit the image of my patron saint suspended to the oaken back of my bed, and the dead fly fell down on my curls. I peeped out from under the coverlet, steadied the still shaking image with my hand, flicked the dead fly onto the floor, and gazed at Karl Ivanitch with sleepy, wrathful eyes. He, in a parti-coloured wadded dressing-gown fastened about the waist with a wide belt of the same material, a red knitted cap adorned with a tassel, and soft slippers of goat skin, went on walking round the walls and taking aim at, and slapping, flies.

So swiftly, intimately, Tolstoy draws us into the experience of young Nikolai, his semi-autobiographical protagonist. Specificity is essential—from the first, we know it’s the 12th of August, the late summer—and if we pause there, we can feel the light of a late summer morning, the sleepy air before the day’s full heat, and what it is to waken into it. We can hear the intermittent buzzing of the flies, now swooping, now crazy against a windowpane. We know, too, that our narrator has just turned ten, and his “wonderful presents” are still in his mind: he evokes, in passing, the particular delight of that birthday, of reaching the double-digits, of the pure joy of one’s birthday presents, if they’re the right ones, when you’re ten—and this simple Tolstoyan specificity renders Nikolai’s world both present and vivid to us. We, too, have been ten years old; we, too, have been wakened, unwilling, at seven in the morning; we, too, have felt the laziness of late summer, as we have been irritated by the buzzing of its flies; and although we may never have seen one made of “sugar paper and a stick”, we have surely wielded, or at least seen, a fly-swatter.

Each of us, then, can imagine the particular displeasure of opening an eye—on what should be such a glorious morning—to the sound of the swatter’s slap, to the faint but unmistakable sensation of a fly’s corpse falling in our hair. The particular image of Nikolai’s patron saint may be unfamiliar, but we can sense its frame trembling on the bedstead above our head, and can imagine, too, raising a hand to steady it. In a matter of sentences, we are fully in this room, with this boy, seeing, hearing and feeling as he sees, hears and feels. This Tolstoy gives us in a shared language, in familiar words, if you will. His simple, lucid descriptions insist upon the transparency and commonality of his words.

But key to this particular August morning is the zeal of Karl Ivanitch. Now, Karl Ivanitch is thus far, to the reader, merely a name, a void. But we understand, simply by the way that name is evoked, that for Nikolai, the words ‘Karl Ivanitch’ imply much more. The physical description Tolstoy offers us will evoke him as clearly as any photograph, in his gown, cap and slippers; but it’s his restless fly-baiting wander that gestures towards the tutor’s personality that we will come to know: fierce, even obsessive, crucial in young Nikolai’s life, but also petty, and somehow absurd. All this is here, from the outset.

What Tolstoy achieves—and what any fiction writer hopes to achieve—is, in fact, magic. I use this term not sentimentally, but literally. Tolstoy conjures for us a world familiar enough that we can place ourselves in it; and then, more profoundly, he conjures its inhabitants. Nikolai knows Karl Ivanitch; and the promise, if we read on, is that we shall know him too, that Karl Ivanitch will enter our private imagined world and live there along with the jostling population of characters, real and fictional, who fill our consciousness and shape our lives.