One Snail: Writing Lessons From the Bell Jar

In mid-January 2023, I flew to Manchester, England on my own, then found my way to a train station, the ticket office, and the correct track. Did you know that the lock for UK traincar bathrooms is cleverly hidden and NOT ON THE DOOR? Well, after one episode, you will remember that, trust me. The train delivered me, after several delays and transfers, to West Yorkshire. I arrived in the early afternoon and, with jet lag and a cast on my wrist, rolled my carry-on along a canal, past house barges, through a winter-quiet park and into the charming village of Hebden Bridge. If you watched the British series Happy Valley, you can picture it. I had lunch and left my bag at a pub called The Shoulder of Mutton Inn, where Dachshunds in tiny tartan coats sat on barstools. I went in search of a wine shop. At about three o’clock, I took a cab from the village through the tinier, even-more-quaint village of Heptonstall. From the top of a snowy lane, the cab zigzagged down a very steep cobblestone drive where the driver made a seemingly impossible K turn and let me out. He remarked that he usually wouldn’t come down the drive in winter because of the treacherous ice.

The house, called Lumb Bank, is an 18^th-century stone mill owner’s house that was once the home of the late British Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. It overlooks bucolic pastures with grazing sheep, and is set in twenty acres of woodland. I would spend a week there with fellow writers and two instructors and the following week, I would move north to Scotland for another writing retreat with strangers. Over those weeks, I would meet and live with more than twenty writers.

Arvon is the British charity that runs Lumb Bank and a non-profit program that promotes creative writing with classes and retreats held at three country houses in England (the others are in Devon and Shropshire). The fees are affordable and they offer grants. The program I signed up for was for novel writers, and we had workshops with two British novelists and a mid-week visiting writer, who turned out to be Maddie Mortimer, wunderkind author of the fabulous Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies.

At Lumb Bank, our rooms were small and simple, bathrooms were shared, and we had to bring in firewood and coal and each had to help cook dinner for the group on one night. My room had a twin bed, a dresser, and a small desk in front of a drafty window overlooking a hillside populated with sheep. We went twenty-four hours with no heating when the boiler broke, and for one very cold night we stayed up late around the stone fireplace, drinking Scotch and reciting poetry. I don’t know any poems by heart, so instead, as the only American in the group, I read the opening paragraphs of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.

On my cooking night, I was tasked with preparing a vegan chocolate cake, which I ruined so completely that it had to be chucked in the bin. (The next week, at a Scottish farmhouse called Moniack Mohr, I would cook haggis, neeps, and tatties for Burns Night, but that’s a whole other post…)

At Lumb Bank, one bright, snowy January afternoon, four of us went for a hike and visited the grave of Sylvia Plath in Heptonstall. Her headstone says, “Sylvia Plath Hughes” and over the years fans have attempted to obliterate the “Hughes”. I remembered reading The Bell Jar in college, and all I really knew about Sylvia Plath was that she’s committed suicide. I resolved to read it again.

Skip ahead to January 2024. I started listening to the audiobook of The Bell Jar, brilliantly read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. The MC of my current WIP novel is twenty, in 1953, and so is Plath’s MC, Esther Greenwood.

When I’m writing historical fiction, I like to read novels contemporaneous to the period I’m writing about, say, Fitzgerald, when writing about the 1920s. Although there are always regional variations, I can often glean slang and common phrasing of the era. The Bell Jar was a loosely autobiographical retelling of Plath’s twentieth summer in 1953, and it was published when she was thirty. I set out looking for period details and slang, but I came away with much more.

Here are three takeaways from my recent re-read/listen:

Voice

I was charmed by the 20-year-old cynical innocence of Esther Greenwood in 1953. Plath’s Esther, at twenty, sounds simultaneously guileless and world-weary, and utterly authentic. As the novel opens, Esther is in New York for a prestigious month-long guest-editorship at a magazine, a prize she’s competed for and won, along with twenty other college-age women. She remarks from the first page that she should be having the time of her life, but she isn’t. Here are the first five sentences:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers—goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

If you Google “great first lines from novels”, this opening is often listed. Esther has a distinctive voice from line one. As the story progresses, she becomes more detached and (spoiler alert) ends up deeply depressed and in an asylum. Are you intrigued enough to read on?

We often read (and write) here at WU about Voice, and how it needs to be distinctive and consistent. Donald Maass in WU [May 1, 2019] wrote about a novel’s first five lines: “No matter what type of novel you’re looking at, if you are immediately falling into the dream state then I have a strong suspicion that those openings use both magical language and a palpable promise of adventure.”

Plath starts with interiority, and it is revealed in the next few paragraphs that the person having the grim thoughts expressed in her opening lines is a college student spending a summer month in New York. Already, we sense a looming darkness, maybe a tendency to obsession. Her first comment on New York is that the subway entrances are “peanut-smelling”. In this opening, I find the voice confident and commanding, and also, what really hooks me is the vulnerability of “I’m stupid about executions”.

Esther’s voice throughout is not whiny or self-centered, even when some pretty terrible things happen to her. The reader observes a young woman falling apart and, as a narrator, becoming less and less reliable.

Economy in Scene

Aside from voice, I learned something about economy in scene from Sylvia Plath. She often used “scenelets” (a term I learned from my author/editor friend, Jenna Blum).

For instance, if you’re intending to write a scene where a man and a woman are having dinner,  where do you start? With her deciding whether to walk or Uber? With him calling the cafe to make a reservation? With the two characters meeting outside on the sidewalk and entering the restaurant (will he hold the door for her, and how will she feel about that?). Do we zoom in on them receiving menus and hear the daily specials and the characters’ food allergies and that he’s a lactose-intolerant pescatarian?

Here is where Plath begins the scene:

“I suppose you have lots and lots of affairs in Cambridge”, I told Irwin cheerily, as I stuck a snail with a pin in one of Cambridge’s determinedly French restaurants.

“I seem,” Irwin admitted with a small, modest smile, “to get on with the ladies.”

I picked up my empty snail shell and drank the herb-green juice. I had no idea if this was proper, but after months of wholesome, dull asylum diet, I was greedy for butter.

Here’s what struck me: Plath gives us one snail, and with one snail, we learn all we need to know. Esther has had snails before; she’s not unaccustomed to fine dining. Plath doesn’t need to show Esther looking at the menu. You get my drift. One snail! Her description of the restaurant as “determinedly” French is snide and judgmental, and coming from a twenty-year-old, shows some sophistication. We get the contrast between escargot and asylum food and the weird dynamic that she will return to the institution after her dinner date.

So with this sort of scenic economy in mind, I took to my 109,000-word novel MS and began to prune. I ended up cutting around 4,500 words. I tried to implement Plath’s use of short, pithy scenes and eliminate some interior analysis.

Carefully Chosen Adjectives and Verbs

Plath the poet was evident in her choices. Here, Esther wakes up on her first morning home at her mother’s house after her return from New York:

The soprano screak of carriage wheels punished my ear. Sun, seeping through the blinds, filled the bedroom with a sulphurous light. I didn’t know how long I had slept, but I felt one big twitch of exhaustion.

Her use of “soprano screak”, “punished”, “sulphurous”, and “twitch” is so wonderfully mood-setting. The reader doesn’t need to know the thread count of the sheets or any other details.

In another scene, Esther has just fallen down an expert ski slope on her first day on skiis and doesn’t yet realize she’s broken her leg. She’s lying in the snow before help arrives. Plath writes:

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

Having broken a few bones myself, this line really captures that temporary shock or distance from reality we experience in the moments before we realize we are truly injured, before the pain registers. This scene is something of a turning point in the novel, even though it is told in flashback. The line above is on page 98. Wait! Page 98! Let me digress here, with a reference to Donald Maass’ great article on “Page 98” for WU HERE). Donald says, “When we are that deep into your novel, is page 98 still bringing us stuff which engages, intrigues, informs, sways, and suggests to us that there is more to come? Is there still a strong feeling of character, sensibility, and promise? Do we find ourselves in a particular mood or frame of mind?”

With The Bell Jar, I absolutely did. Almost halfway through the novel the reader sees Esther’s reaction to her reckless attempt to ski an expert slope and her disconnected, dissociative reaction to her injury, foreshadowing the mental break that’s coming.

Maybe you’re not looking to cut word count, but even so, we can look at ways we describe action and scene. If I’m writing, say, someone plopping down onto a chaise lounge and flinging a beach bag onto the next chair, how many actual movements need to be described? What adjective or verb might lead us as readers to see the series of motions and fill in the blanks?

For all of Plath’s genius, like her protagonist Esther, she had demons. She suffered impostor syndrome and wrote to a friend, “For the few little outward successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgiving and self-doubt.”*

The Bell Jar was published in January 1963, when Sylvia Plath was thirty. She had two small children, was separated from her husband, (who was living with a pregnant mistress), she wasn’t making money on her writing; she had a string of illnesses, and she was despondent over the sales of her first novel. She committed suicide in February of that year.

What writing lessons have you gleaned from close reading of classic novels? Have you read The Bell Jar, and if so, how did it affect you?

*From The Bell Jar and the Life of Sylvia Plath, A Biographical Note by Lois Ames from the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, 2005