Equipped to be a novelist

From John Buchan’s Sir Walter Scott: His Life and Works, as Buchan narrates Scott’s turn from the craft of poetry and long ballads to historical fiction in his early forties:

“Few men have been better equipped than Scott for the task of novelist. To begin with, he had been from his earliest youth a skilled storyteller. Again, from his huge antiquarian reading, he was perfectly equipped for the reproduction of historical scenes and an older life. Moreover, his easy friendliness with every class and condition of society, his love of the ordinary man, his quick perception of everyday humours and oddities, made him an adept in the drawing of character.”

Writers—especially beginning writers—often worry whether or not they have what it takes to write novels. What Buchan writes of Scott is not a bad description of the fundamental tools, foremost among them a built-in talent for telling stories and the desire to do so. (It’s also a decent description of Buchan himself.)

Scott’s deep love of history provided plenty of raw material for stories and his familiarity with people—both through his “easy friendliness” with them as well as his work in the law—kept his stories true to life. But had he lacked a natural disposition and knack for telling stories, these latter qualities would have been moot.

Buchan wrote two biographies of Scott. This passage comes from the first, shorter one, originally published as The Man and the Book in 1925. I’m reading a nice recent paperback edition from Luath Press, a Scottish publisher. Buchan published a longer biography titled simply Sir Walter Scott in 1932. That one is available for free from Project Gutenberg.