Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

  I have no trouble believing the method Crews describes was every bit as instructive as he says it was. I don’t know that I would care to write a book in this fashion, or that I would be able to discipline myself sufficiently to complete a book I knew would be unsalable by definition, but I would surely imagine that the educational potential of the process is considerable. Even without going so far as to write an imitative novel of one’s own, a writer could greatly increase his understanding of what novels are and how they work by following the first stages of Crews’ system—i.e., by taking an admired novel apart, reducing it to numbers, and learning how the author handles such matters as time and place and action and pace and so forth.

  Getting back to the question you asked a couple of pages ago, it’s evident that Crews’ approach did stifle creativity in the particular novel he describes. His purpose was not creative development but technical progress—he wanted to learn what made a novel tick so he took one apart to find out, then tried putting it back together again. But you’ll be studying not one but half a dozen books, books which may have the common features of their genre but which differ considerably each from the other. The book you write will in turn differ from each of them while presumably retaining those elements which make them a satisfying experience for the people who read them. That’s not a matter of stifling creativity but one of finding the right frame for it and lighting it properly.

  This outlining sounds like a WPA project. I can see doing some extensive reading, sort of soaking up the market that way, but I hate the idea of purposeless work. Is it absolutely essential to do this?

  Of course not.

  I think outlining other people’s novels as I’ve described it is as effective and expedient a way as I know to learn what a particular sort of novel is and how it works. But it’s not the only way, and it’s certainly no prerequisite for writing your own novel. If you find it tedious to such an extent that it seems counter-productive, by all means give it up.

  You don’t even have to read widely in your chosen field, as far as that goes. The only thing you absolutely have to do to produce a novel is sit down and write the thing. Some people profit greatly by such preparatory work as I’ve described. Others get along just fine without it.

  I wouldn’t be so sure, though, that outlining is purposeless work, or a waste of time. On the contrary, I’d be inclined to guess it saves time for most of the people who do it—time spent repairing mistakes and reworking false starts that might not have occurred had they laid the groundwork properly before starting their own novels.

  But pick the approach that feels right for you as a writer. That, ultimately, is the most important thing you can do.

  Chapter 4

  Developing Plot Ideas

  “Where do you get your ideas?” is one of the questions writers get asked all the time. What’s galling about it, in addition to its banality, is the questioner’s implicit assumption that coming up with a clever idea is all there really is to the business of being a writer. Turning that idea into a book—well, that’s just a matter of typing, isn’t it?

  But of course not. Were that the case, I’d run books through my typewriter at seventy or eighty words per minute, not four or five agonizing pages per day.

  While ideas are not the sine qua non in the novel that they often are in the short story, they are nevertheless essential.

  A handful of writers can produce books that are not specifically about something and make them work. It scarcely matters what Finnegan’s Wake is about, for example. For the rest of us, a strong central idea is basic to our novels. How we are to get these ideas, and how we can best develop them into strong plots, is something with which we might well concern ourselves.

  It’s my own conviction that we do not get our ideas. They are given to us, bubbling up out of our own subconscious minds as if from some dark and murky ferment. When the conditions are right, it is neither more nor less than the natural condition of things for a writer’s imagination to produce those ideas which constitute the raw material of his fiction.

  I don’t know that I have much control over this process of generating ideas. This is not to say that I don’t want to control the process, or even that I don’t try to control it. But I’ve gradually come to see that I can’t stimulate ideas by hitting myself in the forehead with a two-by-four.

  This does not mean that there’s nothing the writer can do to foster the development of novelistic ideas. Note, please, my argument that the process occurs of its own accord when the conditions are right.

  My job, when I want ideas to bubble up, is to make sure the conditions are right. Then I can let go of the controls and pick ideas like plums when they come along.

  That’s a little hazy. Can’t we get a bit more specific? How do I adjust the conditions?

  We can get a whole lot more specific. And as far as adjusting the conditions is concerned, you’ve already been doing that. The reading and studying and analysis we talked about in the preceding chapter has as one of its functions the development of fictional ideas. By immersing ourselves in these books and turning them inside out, we come to know them on a gut level, so that our imaginations are encouraged to toy with the kinds of plot material which will be useful to us.

  There are other things we can do as well. For instance:

  Pay attention. The little atoms of fact and attitude which can link up into the molecules of an idea are all over the damn place. Each of us sees and hears and reads a dozen things a day that we could feed into the idea hopper—if we were paying attention.

  Back in the early sixties I was reading one of the newsmagazines when I happened on an article on sleep. I learned no end of things, all of which I promptly forgot except for one delicious nugget of information—there seems to be a certain number of cases in medical literature of human beings who do not sleep at all. They get along somehow, leading lives of permanent insomnia, but otherwise not demonstrably the worse for wear.

  Fortunately, I wasn’t sleeping when I read that item. I rolled it around in my brain, filed it for cocktail-party conversation, and never dreamed I’d wind up writing seven books about a character named Evan Tanner, a free-lance secret agent whose sleep center had been destroyed during the Korean War.

  A few million people probably read that article without writing a book about an insomniac. Conversely, I’ve undoubtedly come up against a few million facts which might have sparked a character or a setting or a plot, but didn’t. What made the difference, I think, is that I happened to find this particular fact oddly provocative. My unconscious mind was eager to play with it, to add it to the murky ferment we talked about earlier. That my mind ultimately made Tanner the particular character he is is very likely attributable to the particular character I am—as we’ll observe when we look at the process of character development more closely in another chapter. That the plot in which I put Tanner took the shape it did is attributable to two things. First, I’d schooled myself and/or had been inclined by nature to develop plots that lent themselves to suspense fiction. Second, another key principle operated, to wit:

  Two and two makes five. Which is to say that synergy is very much at work in the process of plot development. The whole is ever so much greater than its parts. The writer, in possession of one fact or anecdote or notion or concept or whatever, suddenly gifted with another apparently unrelated fact or anecdote or et cetera, takes one in each hand and automatically turns them this way and that, playing with the purposefulness of a child, trying to see if they’ll fit together.

  Let’s get back to Tanner. A full three years after that newsmagazine item, I spent an evening with a numismatic journalist just back from Turkey, where he’d spent a couple of years earning a very precarious living smuggling ancient coins and Roman glass out of the country. Among the stories on which he was dining out was one about a rumor he’d heard of a cache of gold coins secreted in the front stoop of a house in Balekisir, where the Armenian community had presumably hidden its wea
lth at the time of the Smyrna massacres. He and some associates actually located the house as described by a survivor, broke into the stoop in the dead of night, established that the gold had been there, but also established, alas, that someone had beat them to it by a couple of decades.

  Now I hadn’t consciously been carrying my insomniac character around in the forefront of my mind, waiting for a plot to materialize for him. But I must have been carrying him around subconsciously, because shortly after my evening with the journalist I began a book about a young man, his sleep center destroyed by shrapnel, who goes to Turkey and finds that elusive Armenian gold.

  Fawcett published that book as The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. For my part, I decided to write more books about Tanner, and there was a point when I could barely pick up a newspaper without running across something that would turn into plot material. Tanner was a devotee of political lost causes and national irredentist movements, and it seemed as though every other story in the first section of the daily New York Times was grist for my mill. By perceiving news stories this way, picking them up and seeing what I could do with them, I was following yet another principle:

  Remember what you’re looking for. Here’s an example that happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was with a group of people, and one woman complained about a problem she was having with her upstairs neighbor. He was evidently a drunk, and was given periodically to turning his radio on at top volume and then either leaving the apartment or passing out cold on the floor. Efforts to reach him invariably failed, and the radio blared all night, keeping the woman awake and doing very little for her peace of mind.

  People suggested a variety of things—that she call the police, kick the door in, report him to the landlord, and so on. “Get a flashlight,” I told her, “and go down to the basement and find the fuse box and remove the fuse for his apartment. Just turn him off altogether. Pull the plug on the clown.”

  I don’t know if she did this. That’s her problem, not mine. But after the conversation shifted, I was left to think about the basic problem and let my mind wander with it. That I’d thought of the fuse box ploy was not inconsistent with my choosing burglars and such types as viewpoint characters; I’m blessed or cursed, as you prefer, with that type of mind. I thought of that, and I thought that my burglar hero, Bernie Rhodenbarr, would certainly offer the same suggestion if a friend called him in the middle of the night with that particular problem.

  And then, because I’ve learned not to walk away from thoughts along these lines, I asked myself what Bernie would do if, for some reason or other, his friend couldn’t pull the fuse, or get access to the fuse box, or whatever. Some fuse boxes in New York apartments are located within the individual apartment, for instance. Suppose Bernie’s sidekick Carolyn Kaiser called him because of this blaring radio, and suppose Bernie was obliging enough to trot over with his burglar’s tools, and suppose he did what he does best, letting himself into the offending apartment just to turn off the radio, and suppose there was a dead body spread out on the living room rug, and suppose ….

  I may or may not use it. But a few minutes of rumination had provided me with the opening for a novel. It’s not a plot. It’s not enough for me to sit down and start writing. I’m not ready to write another book about Bernie just now and won’t be for six or eight months. By then, if I remember who I am and what I’m looking for, I’ll very likely have picked up other stray facts and thoughts and bits and pieces, and I’ll have played with them and tried fitting them together, and if two and two makes five I may have a book to write.

  Stay awake. I heard very early on that a writer works twenty-four hours a day, that the mind is busy sifting notions and possibilities during every waking hour and, in a less demonstrable manner, while the writer sleeps as well. I liked the sound of this from the start—it was a nice rejoinder to my then wife if she said anything about my putting in only two hours a day at the typewriter, or skipping work altogether and going to the friendly neighborhood pool hall for the afternoon. But I’m not sure I believed it.

  I believe it now, but with one qualification. I believe we can be on the job twenty-four hours a day. I believe we can also choose not to, and those of us who make this choice severely limit ourselves.

  A great many writers use alcohol and drugs, ostensibly to stimulate their creativity. This very often seems to work in the beginning; the mind, jarred out of its usual channels by this unaccustomed chemical onslaught, may respond by digging new channels for itself. Similarly, some artists early in their careers find hangovers a creative if hardly comfortable time. The process of withdrawal from the drug evidently has a stimulating effect.

  Eventually, these same writers commonly use alcohol and drugs to unwind, to turn off the spinning brain after the day’s work is finished. The process is not true relaxation, of course, but anesthesia. One systematically shuts off the thinking and feeling apparatus for the night. For those who ultimately become drug- or alcohol-dependent—and a disheartening proportion of the members of our profession wind up in this category—the results are devastating. One reaches a stage wherein work is impossible without the drug or the drink, and this stage is in turn succeeded by one in which work is impossible with or without the substance. Alcoholism and drug dependency have ended too many successful careers prematurely, while they’ve nipped no end of promising careers in the bud.

  It’s hardly revolutionary to advise an alcoholic writer not to drink, anymore than it’s a controversial stance to urge diabetics not to binge on sugar. But I’d suggest further that heavy drinking or drug use is severely detrimental even to the writer who does not become alcoholic or drug-dependent, simply because it shuts off his mind.

  For years I drank when my day’s work was done, convinced that it helped me relax. One thing it indisputably did was take my mind off my work. This, to be sure, was one of the things I wanted it to do; I felt I ought to be able to leave the work behind when I left the typewriter.

  But writing, and especially novel writing, just doesn’t work that way. Writing the novel is an ongoing organic process, and we carry the book with us wherever we go. It’s during the period between one day’s work and the next that our minds play, both consciously and subconsciously, with the ideas that will enable us to perform creatively when we resume writing. We may rest the mind during these times but we hurt ourselves creatively if we shut our minds off completely. Later on we’ll talk about the value of daily writing. It’s similarly related to the notion of keeping oneself present in one’s book, day in and day out. Extended breaks in the writing interrupt this continuity, and so do those interruptions of consciousness or attentiveness or awareness caused by heavy drinking and drug use.

  More recently, marijuana has been touted as a creative stimulant, presumably nonaddictive, harmless, etc. Its addictive properties and harmlessness aside, I have found that its potential for creative stimulation is largely illusory. The common marijuana experience consists of making marvelous seminal mental breakthroughs which, hard to grasp as the smoke itself, are gone the next morning. If only one could remember, if only one could hold onto those fantastic inspired insights….

  Well, one can. The story’s been told of the fellow who kept paper and pencil at the ready, determined to write down his brilliant insights before they were lost. He awoke the following morning, recollected that he’d had a fantastic insight and that for once he’d managed to write it down. He wasn’t sure that it contained the absolute secret of the universe, but he knew it was dynamite.

  He looked, and there on the bedside table was his pad of paper, and on it he had written, “This room smells funny.”

  Whether to smoke or drink or pop pills is an individual decision, as is the extent to which you may care to employ these substances. I would suggest, though, that if you do elect to drink or drug heavily, you do so between novels, not during them. And recognize that whatever excellence your work has is in spite of the substances that you’re using, not because of them.

/>   Stay hungry. Some time ago a friend of mine was on a television talk show with several other mystery writers, Mickey Spillane among them. After the program ended, Spillane announced that they’d neglected to talk about the most important topic. “We didn’t say anything about money,” he said.

  He went on to explain that he’d spent several years on an offshore island in South Carolina, where he did nothing too much more taxing than swim and sunbathe and walk the beach for hours at a time. “Every once in a while it would come to me that it’d be fun to get started on a book,” he said. “I thought I’d keep my mind in shape and I’d enjoy doing it. But I could never get a single idea for a story. I’d sit and sit, I’d walk for miles, but I couldn’t get an idea.

  “Then one day I got a call from my accountant to say that the money was starting to get low. Nothing serious, but I should start thinking about ways to bring in some dough. And boy, did I get ideas for books!”

  Money makes the mare go. It’s very often the spur for what we might prefer to think of as pure creativity. I don’t believe for a moment that financial insecurity is essential to a writer’s imagination. In my own case, really severe money problems have occasionally kept me from thinking of anything beyond the desperate nature of the situation, leading to a vicious circle verging on writer’s block. Money doesn’t have to be the spur or the genuinely rich members of our profession would not continue to write productively and well. A man like James Michener, who consistently gives away most of what he earns writing best sellers, is certainly not driven by the desire for cash.

  But he’s spurred on by something. There is a hunger at the root of all our creative work, whether it is for wealth or recognition or a sense of accomplishment or some tangible proof that we are not worthless human beings after all. To return to an earlier metaphor, we might call that hunger the yeast that starts that dark ferment working down in the unconscious.