Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

  I’ve known several writers of category fiction who have tried to break through into the world of bestsellerdom, a natural ambition in a world where success is largely measured in dollars and cents. Some writers manage this rather neatly; they’d written category fiction as an apprenticeship, or their development carried them to a point where they are comfortable working on a broader canvas—for one reason or another, their books work. Others of us have found ourselves trying to be something we’re not in order to attain a goal to which we unwisely aspire. The result, more often than not, is a book which is satisfying to neither its authors nor its readers, a financial and artistic failure. The Peter Principle seems to apply; we extend our literary horizons until we reach our level of incompetence.

  I’m sorry to say that I know whereof I speak, and the knowledge was not gained painlessly. What I have learned to my cost is that I do my best work when all I am trying to do is my best work. And it is when I do this that I incidentally achieve the most critical and financial success in the bargain.

  There’s a moral there somewhere, and I have a hunch it shouldn’t be too hard to spot.

  Suppose I don’t want to write category fiction? I want to write a serious mainstream novel. But I don’t know what I want to write about. I don’t have a setting or a plot or a character. I just know that I want to write a serious novel. How do I get started?

  Maybe you’re not ready yet.

  Give yourself time. Read the sorts of novels you enjoy and admire, and try to spot those which afford a measure of the author-identification we’ve discussed. You may not want to write books which specifically resemble what you’ve read, but this identification process, this reading from the writer’s point of view, may help your subconscious mind to begin formulating ideas for your own book.

  Sooner or later, you’ll begin to get ideas—out of your own background and experience, out of your imagination, out of some well of story material within yourself. This process will happen when the time is right. Until it does, there’s not very much you can do.

  Chapter 3

  Read … Study… Analyze

  Let’s suppose that you’ve managed to zoom in on a type of novel you think might make for comfortable writing. You don’t know that you’re ready to embark on a lifelong career as a writer of sweet savage romances, say, or shoot-’em-up westerns, but you feel it might be worthwhile to take a shot at writing one of them. You’ve found something you enjoy reading and it’s also something you can see yourself writing. The talent you perceive yourself having seems likely to lend itself to this particular sort of book.

  Now what do you do?

  Well, it’s possible you’re ready to sit down and go to work at the typewriter. Maybe you’ve already got your book firmly in mind, plot and characters and all. If that’s the case, by all means sit down and start hitting the keys. The book may or may not work, depending on the extent of your readiness, but in any event you’ll learn a great deal from the experience.

  It’s very likely, though, that you’d do well to take another step before plunging in. This step consists of subjecting your chosen field to a detailed analysis by reading extensively and submerging yourself in what you read. The analytical process is such that you wind up with both an ingrained gut-level understanding of what constitutes a successful novel of your chosen type and a mind trained to conceive, produce and develop the ideas for such a novel.

  I can’t think of a better name for this process than “market analysis,” yet something in me recoils at the term. It’s too clinical, for one thing, and it seems to imply that writing a salable gothic novel lends itself to the Harvard Business School case-study approach. We’re talking about writing, for Pete’s sake. We’re dealing with creativity. We’re artists, aren’t we? Market analysis is something they do in Wall Street offices, not Greenwich Village garrets.

  Besides, the process I’m talking about is oriented more to the work than to the market. What we study here is the individual novel, and our concern is in discovering what makes it work, not what has induced some particular editor to publish it or some group of readers to buy it.

  Okay. Whatever you call it, I want to do it. What do I do first?

  Good question.

  As I said, what you do is you read.

  When you picked a type of book to write, one of the criteria was that it was one you were capable of reading with a certain degree of pleasure. This had better be the case, because you’re going to have to do some intensive reading. Fortunately, the odds are that reading is a habit for you from the start. That’s true for most people who want to write, and it’s especially true for most of those who wind up successful at it. Some of us find ourselves reading less fiction as time passes, and many of us are inclined to avoid reading other people’s novels while writing our own, but I rarely encounter a writer who’s not a pretty enthusiastic reader by nature.

  So there’s a fair chance that you’ve been reading books in your chosen field for some time now, beginning long before you selected this field for your own novelistic endeavors. I’d had this sort of prior experience with suspense novels, for example, before I seriously attempted one of my own. On the other hand, I had not read widely in the soft-core sex novel field when the opportunity arose for me to write one. Few people had; the genre was just beginning to emerge.

  Makes no difference. Either way, you have fresh reading to do. You have to read not as a normally perceptive reader, but with the special insight of a writer.

  My first venture into this sort of reading came when I first began writing stories for the crime fiction magazines, but the process is pretty much the same for both short stories and novels. What I did, having made my first short story sale to Manhunt, was to study that magazine and every other crime fiction magazine far more intensively than I have ever studied anything before or since. I bought every magazine in the field the instant it appeared on the stands. In addition, I made regular visits to back-magazine shops, where I picked up every back issue of the leading magazines that I could find. I carried check lists of these publications in my wallet to avoid buying the same issue twice, and I carted the magazines home and arranged them in orderly fashion on my shelves. At night when I got home from the office I read magazine after magazine, going through every last one of them from cover to cover.

  Understand, please, that I did not learn any formulae. I don’t know that such things exist. What I did learn, in a manner I cannot entirely explain, is a sense of the possible variations that could be worked upon the crime story, a sense of what worked and what didn’t.

  Does this mean I have to read hundreds and hundreds of novels? I’ll be spending eternity in the library.

  You won’t have to read as many novels as I read short stories. You’ll probably read hundreds of them over the years—I think it’s vital to continue reading in one’s field, even when one’s established oneself as a writer in the field. Remember, though, a distinction we observed earlier between the short story and the novel. The short-story writer has to come up with a constant supply of ideas. The novelist, on the other hand, deals with a smaller number of ideas but must be far more concerned with their extensive development.

  So you won’t have to read so many novels. Eight or ten or a dozen should give you a sufficient reading background for your own first attempt. But you’ll have to read them far more exhaustively than the beginning short-story writer has to read examples in his field. It’s not enough simply to read these books. You’ll have to take them apart and see what makes them work.

  How do you go about that?

  Well, let’s say you’ve decided to take aim at the gothic novel. Chances are you’ve read more than a few of them in reaching this decision, but maybe not; perhaps you read one and knew in a flash it was your kind of thing. Whatever the case, you’ll want to have half a dozen books on hand in order to launch this project of analyzing the gothic novel. You may elect to use your favorites among the books you’ve already read or make a tr
ip to the newsstand for some new material. I’d suggest that you pick books by six different writers, choosing a mixture of established names in the field and neophytes, but that’s not necessary. I’ve heard tell of a writer, for example, who sat down and pored over the gothic novels of Dorothy Daniels as if they were holy writ. Then he turned out a book that was described by the editor who bought it as an absolutely perfect example of second-rate Dorothy Daniels. Second-rate Dorothy Daniels is still good enough to sell, and sell it did.

  I wouldn’t recommend so limited an approach. While it may not be the worst way in the world to break into print, it can’t do much to bring out the writer within oneself. What we’re trying to achieve by this market analysis is not slavish imitation but synthesis. By digesting a genre and absorbing its parameters into one’s system, one prepares oneself to write one’s own books within the particular confines of that genre.

  That’s theoretical. Let’s get down to practical matters. Having bought a half-dozen suitable gothics, what do I do?

  Read them, for openers. Read them one after the other, without reading anything else in between. And don’t rush this reading process. Forget any speedreading courses you may have taken. If you’ve gotten in the habit of skimming, break it. Slow yourself down. You want to find out more than what happens and who’s the bad guy and whether or not the girl gets to keep the house at the end. You want to find out what the author’s doing and how he’s doing it, and you can only manage that feat by spending plenty of time with the book.

  Reading slowly and deliberately is something that’s come on me over the years, and I can relate it directly to my own development as a writer. Before I got into this business, and during my early years in it, I raced through books. The more I have come to read like a writer, the more deliberate the pace of my reading.

  Once you’ve read all of the books at a thoughtful pace, it’s time to take them apart and see how they work. First, try summing up each book in a couple of sentences, like so:

  A young widow is hired to catalogue the antique furniture in a house on the moors in Devon. The chauffeur-handyman tries to warn her off and she knows he’s up to something. She’s drawn to the son and heir, whose wife is coughing her lungs out in an attic bedchamber. Turns out the son has been selling off the good furniture, replacing it with reproductions and junk, and slowly poisoning his wife. He tries to kill our heroine when she uncovers the truth but she’s saved by the handyman, who’s actually the disguised second son of the Earl of Dorset, and ….

  Well, you get the idea. I don’t write gothics myself, and I see no reason why I should squander my creativity plotting this one just as an example of what a summary is. Boil each of the six novels into a paragraph. The length doesn’t matter terribly much. No one else is going to read these things. The object is to reduce the sprawl of a novel to something you can grasp in a hundred words or so.

  This method is useful in analyzing short fiction, too. A short-story writer would do well to write out brief summaries of dozens of short stories, paring away the writer’s facility with prose and dialogue and characterization and reducing each story to its basic plot. The novelist-to-be works with a smaller number of examples and winds up studying them rather more intensively.

  By this I don’t mean you have to examine the plot summaries you’ve prepared like a paleontologist studying old dinosaur bones. Instead, you’ll return to the books you’ve summarized and go through them again, this time outlining them chapter by chapter. For each chapter you’ll write down what happens in a couple of sentences. To return to our mythical gothic, we might see something like this:

  Chapter One—Ellen arrives at Greystokes. Liam meets her at the train and tells her the legend of the ghost in the potting shed. She is interviewed by Mrs. Hallburton who explains her duties and shows her to her room. She lies down on her bed and hears a woman coughing and sobbing on the floor above.

  Chapter Two—Flashback. The cough triggers her recollection of her husband’s death. She remembers their meeting, tender moments in their courtship, the discovery of his illness, and his final days. She recalls her determination to resume her life and the circumstances that brought her to Greystokes.

  Chapter Three—Dinner the first night. She meets Tirrell Hallburton, whose wife is coughing in the room above her own. After dinner she goes to the attic to look in on Glacia, the invalid. Glacia tells her that Death is on his way to Greystokes. “Someone will die soon—take care it isn’t you!” Ellen leaves, certain Glacia has a premonition of her own death ….

  Maybe I ought to write this thing after all. It’s beginning to come to life for me in spite of myself.

  I think you see how the process works. The outline may be as sketchy or as comprehensive as you want it to be—and the same rules will apply when you prepare an outline for your own novel. Because these outlines, like the outline you create for your own book, are designed to be tools. You’ll use them to get a grasp on what a novel is.

  Although they’re often easier to write than short stories, for reasons we’ve already discussed at sufficient length, novels are often harder to master. So much more goes on in them that it’s difficult to see their structure. Just as our summaries served to give us a clear picture of what these several novels are about, so will our outlines show us their structure, their component parts. Stripped to outline form, the novel is like a forest in winter; with their branches bare, the individual trees become visible where once the eye saw nothing but a mass of green.

  To repeat, your outlines may be as detailed as you wish. I would suggest that you make them as complete as possible in terms of including a scene-by-scene report of what is actually taking place. There’s no need in this sort of outline for explanation—why the characters do what they do, or how they feel about it—so much as there’s a need to put down everything that goes on, every scene that exists as a part of the whole.

  In this fashion, you’ll develop a sense of the novel as a collection of scenes. God knows it’s not necessary to do this in order to write a novel, or even to understand how novels are constructed, but I think it helps.

  It helps in an even more obvious fashion when you set out to outline your own novel. We’ll discuss this point at more length in Chapter Six; meanwhile, suffice it to say that the best way to prepare yourself to outline your own book is by outlining someone else’s book first.

  Question—with all this reading and analyzing and outlining, all this mechanical swill, aren’t we stifling creativity? I have a feeling I’ll be trying to duplicate what’s been written rather than write my own novel.

  That’s not how it works. But it’s easy to understand the anxiety. I’ve heard young would-be writers explain that they want to avoid reading fiction altogether in order to avoid being influenced by what’s already been done. They use phrases like “natural creativity” a lot. What happens, more often than not, is that such writers unwittingly produce trite stories because they haven’t read widely enough to know what’s been done to death already. An isolated tribesman who spontaneously invents the bicycle in 1982 may be displaying enormous natural creativity, but one wouldn’t expect the world to beat a path to his door.

  The outlining process I’ve discussed doesn’t stifle creativity. At least it shouldn’t. I suppose a person could copy a character here and a plot line there and a setting from somewhere else, jumbling things up and putting together a novel from the chopped-up corpses of the novels he’s read. But that’s certainly not what we’re trying to do, and it’s not the best way to write something that will be commercially and artistically successful. Our object is to learn how to cast our own stories within the framework of a particular kind of novel, to stimulate our unconscious to produce plot and character ideas which lend themselves to this chosen type of novel so that it will be natural for our minds to think in these terms.

  The best defense I can offer is the following exchange which appeared in an interview in the New York Times Book Review for December 24, 197
8. The interviewer is Steve Oney; the writer interviewed is Harry Crews, the highly regarded author of A Feast of Snakes and several other novels noted for their imagination, originality, and technical proficiency:

  Q. For someone who had been exposed to very little literature, how did you actually learn how to write?

  A. I guess I really learned, seriously learned, how to write just after I got out of college when I pretty much literally ate Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair.” My wife and I were living in a little trailer … in Jacksonville, Fla., where I was teaching seventh grade … I wrote a novel that year, and here’s how I did it. I took “The End of the Affair,” and I pretty much reduced the thing to numbers. I found out how many characters were in it, how much time was in it—and that’s hard to do as there is not only present time in a book but past time as well. I found out how many cities were in the book, how many rooms, where the climaxes were and how long it took Greene to get to them.

  And there were a lot of other things I reduced to numbers. I read that book until it was dog-eared and was coming apart in my hands. And then I said, “I’m going to write me a damn novel and do everything he did.” I knew I was going to waste—but it wasn’t a waste—a year of my time. And I knew that the end result was going to be a mechanical, unreadable novel. But I was trying to find out how in the hell you did it. So I wrote the novel, and it had to have this many rooms, this many transitions, etc. It was the bad novel I knew it would be. But by doing it I learned more about writing fiction and writing a novel and about the importance of time and place—Greene is a freak about time and place—than I had from any class or anything I’d done before. I really, literally, ate that book. And that’s how I learned to write.