Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

  This gave me a considerable advantage in breaking into print. I can see now that a lot of my early pulp stories had rather little to recommend them in terms of plot and characterization, but the fact that they were relatively well-written in comparison to the efforts of other tyros got me sales I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But a smooth style in and of itself is no guarantee of true success. For years I was accustomed to a particular message in letters of rejection. “The author writes well,” my agent would be advised. “This book didn’t work for us, but we’d be very interested in seeing something else he’s written.” That sort of response is encouraging the first few times you receive it. When it becomes a common refrain, all it sparks is frustration.

  I know several writers who were similarly gifted stylistically and who report similar early experiences. Over the years we’ve worked to develop our abilities at plotting and characterization, though for some of us the disparity is still in evidence. In my own case, it hasn’t been all that long since an editor last explained how much he liked my writing—but that he didn’t like my book.

  Other writers have the opposite problem. A friend of mine has an extraordinary natural sense of story, coupled with an enthusiasm for his plots and characters which communicates itself in the drive of his narrative. From a technical standpoint, however, he’s almost numbingly maladroit. His first novel was rewritten several times prior to publication, and received extensive textual editing from his publisher; even so, it remained a crude book. He has improved considerably since then, but to this day, ten books later, he is still very much the heavy-handed writer. Nevertheless, his books are almost invariably best sellers because of the particular strengths they do possess.

  My point here is that someone like my friend, who has had to teach himself so much about the nuts-and-bolts side of writing, might well be better equipped than I to discuss the subject. It’s harder to discourse effectively upon something when one’s approach to it has always been intuitive.

  That said, perhaps we can have a look at a handful of subjects which fit under the general umbrella of style. Perhaps you’ll find something here of some value, whether you yourself are a natural literary athlete or whether you have to work very hard to make it look easy.

  Grammar, Diction and Usage

  A fiction writer doesn’t have to be the strictest grammarian around. He can get by without a clear understanding of the subjunctive. Indeed, the sort of slavish devotion to the rules of grammar that might gladden the heart of an old-fashioned English teacher can get in the way of the novelist, giving his prose a stilted quality and leading his characters to talk not as people speak but as they ought to.

  In my own case, I’m aware that I make certain grammatical errors, some of them deliberate, others through sheer ignorance. I have a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a book I unhesitatingly recommend, and yet months pass without my referring to it. When I’m hammering away a the typewriter keys, trying to get a scene written and to get it right, I’m not remotely inclined to interrupt the flow for the sake of what Churchill called “the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

  In first-person writing, I would maintain that the writer is fully justified in breaking grammatical rules and regulations at will. How the narrator expresses himself, the words he uses and the way he puts them together, is part of the manner in which his character is defined. I will argue further that a first-person narrator may follow a particular precept on one page and violate it on another. If our characters are to be lifelike, we can hardly demand absolute consistency of them.

  The same principle applies, and rather more obviously, in dialogue. Most people don’t express themselves the way English teachers wish they would, and it’s part of the novelist’s license to make their speech as grammatical or ungrammatical as suits his purpose.

  You’d think this would go without saying. I’ve far too often had my characters’ grammar corrected by overzealous copyeditors to believe that anything in this area goes without saying.

  Copyeditors are even more of a nuisance when it comes to punctuation. Various rules for punctuation have grown up over the years, but it’s a moot point whether they apply to fiction, where punctuation may be properly regarded as a device the writer can use to obtain the effect he desires. You can choose to write this sentence:

  She was angry, and not a little frightened.

  Or you can write it this way:

  She was angry and not a little frightened.

  The decision, I maintain, is personal. The presence or absence of a comma in this sentence determines the rhythm of its reading, and that’s a choice the author is fully entitled to make. It will hinge on the rhythm of the sentences which precede and follow it, on the author’s natural style, on the effect he’s trying to achieve, and on such intangibles as the weather and the astrological aspects. It should not hinge on what someone with a red pencil was taught in English Comp 101.

  I get rather emotional on this subject. For years copyeditors have gone through my manuscripts, arbitrarily deleting commas of mine and inserting commas of their own. I don’t put up with this sort of thing anymore. Brian Garfield, similarly infuriated, has taken to writing before-the-fact memos to copyeditors, explaining that he’s been in this line for a few years now and knows the rules of punctuation sufficiently well to break them at will.

  And yet, and yet….

  I remember, back in school, a student’s inquiring of a teacher as to whether spelling errors would lower one’s grade on a particular examination.

  “That depends,” the teacher explained. “If you spell cat with two t’s, I might let it pass. If you spell it D-O-G, it’s a mistake.”

  Some writers approach grammar and usage and punctuation like the kid who spelled cat D-O-G. I’ve been trying lately to read what is either a memoir of Hollywood or a novel in the form of a memoir—the publisher’s blurb leaves the question open—and the author’s cavalier disregard for matters of usage makes the book sporadically unreadable, for all that’s interesting in the material.

  Consider this sentence, a personal favorite of mine: They didn’t even say “Presbyterian Church”—they called it “the First Pres,” that’s how the texture of even as innocuous as watered-down Protestantism was watered down.

  Now the trouble with that sentence is that you can read it three times trying to figure out what it means and you won’t get anywhere. I can’t even figure out how to fix it. The whole book is full of stuff like this, and it’s enough to give you a headache.

  A reputable publisher issued this one, and I can only assume the author had strong feelings about the integrity of her prose. Otherwise a copyeditor would have made any number of changes, most of which could only have been for the better. When a writer’s style is at the expense of clarity, when the prose obscures the meaning, something’s wrong.

  Dialogue

  When you’re looking for something to read at a library or bookstore, do you ever flip through books to see how much dialogue they have? I do, and I gather I’m not alone.

  There’s a reason. Dialogue, more than anything else, increases a book’s readability. Readers have an easier and more enjoyable time with those books in which the characters do a lot of talking to one another than those in which the author spends all his time telling what’s happening. Nothing conveys the nature of a character more effectively than overhearing that character’s conversation. Nothing draws a reader into a story line better than listening to a couple of characters talking it over.

  A good ear for dialogue, like a sense of prose rhythms, can be a gift. Ear is the right word here, I believe, because I think it’s the ability one has to hear what’s distinctive in people’s speech that expresses itself in the ability to create vivid dialogue in print. (Likewise, I think it’s the ear that enables some people to mimic regional accents better than others; the acuity with which you perceive these things largely determines your ability to reproduce them.)

  I think a wri
ter can improve his ear by learning to keep it open—i.e., by making a conscious effort to listen not only to what people say but to the way they say it.

  It’s worth noting that the best dialogue does not consist of the verbatim reproduction of the way people talk. Most people, you’ll notice, speak in fits and starts, in phrases and half-sentences, with “uh” and “er” and “you know” tossed in like commas. “I was, see, like the other day I was goin’ to the store, see, and uh, and like I was, you know, like, walkin’ down the street, and ….”

  People do talk this way, but who the hell would want to read it? It’s tedious. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a character express himself in this fashion, but that you would do so not by holding a tape recorder in front of him but by suggesting his conversational manner: “Like the other day I was goin’ to the store, see, and I was like walkin’ down the street….”

  A little goes a long way. Same thing with phonetic spelling of dialogue. There was a great vogue for that sort of thing a while back, when regional fiction was in its heyday, and there are still people who are crazy about it. Most people find it off-putting. There’s no question that it slows things down for the reader; he has to translate everything before going on.

  Here again, the answer lies in suggestion, in picking a couple of key words and using them to illustrate the character’s unorthodox speech patterns. You might indicate a West Indian accent by spelling man M-O-N, for example, or a Puerto Rican inflection by rendering don’t doan or affixing an E to the front of a word like study. A light sprinkling of this sort of thing reminds the reader that the speaker has a particular accent; he’ll then be able to supply the rest of the accent, hearing it in his mind as he reads the character’s dialogue, even though the rest of the words are spelled in the traditional manner.

  Remember, less is better, and when in doubt, forget it.

  Richard Price handles dialogue brilliantly. His first book, The Wanderers, traces the lives of members of a Bronx street gang. Their speech patterns are faithfully rendered and add greatly to the book’s impact. Recently, though, I happened on a back issue of a literary quarterly in which a chapter of The Wanderers appeared prior to the book’s publication. In that version, Price made extensive use of phonetic spelling, and while other elements of the story were identical, the spelling put me off. Evidently the book’s editor reacted similarly. Whether Price or his editor made the actual changes is immaterial. The book gained greatly by them.

  Good dialogue differs from real-life dialogue in another respect. It’s written out. The reader gets the words without the inflection. If you just put down the words, the result can be ambiguous. You can italicize a word to show that it’s being stressed by the speaker, or you can include the occasional notation that a given sentence was said lightly or seriously or heavily or archy or whateverly, but sometimes you have to restructure a sentence so that the reader will not have trouble getting your meaning.

  Another thing you have to do in dialogue is compress things. People generally have more time for conversation in real life than in books. You have to speed things up in the actual dialogue, cutting out a certain amount of the normal volleying, and you also have to do a certain amount of summing up. In my Scudder novels, for example, Scudder receives the bulk of his information by going around and talking to people, and the reader overhears much of this in the form of dialogue. But from time to time Scudder will break off reporting exactly what was said in dialogue form and simply give the gist of a conversation in a sentence or two.

  When this isn’t done, when a book’s all dialogue, it feels puffy and padded. It moves fast and it’s easy to read, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying. One’s left with the feeling that nothing has happened at great length.

  Past versus Present Tense

  The great majority of fiction is written in the past tense. The effect is that one is being told a story which has taken place. Even if the story is set in future time, as in most science fiction, either the narrator or the disembodied voice recounting the story is presumably speaking at a later time than the action occurred.

  There is an alternative to this which is achieved through the use of what is known as the historical present tense. Those who prefer this tense argue that it makes the story a more immediate experience for the reader; it is going on as he reads it.

  They are also apt to take the position that it is more contemporary, less old-fashioned. There is, as it happens, nothing particularly new about the historical present. Offhand, I can recall that the Marquis de Sade used it in his novels in the eighteenth century, and it may for all I know go back halfway to Homer. In our own time, there is something distinctly cinematic about writing in the present tense. It has a screenplay feel to it.

  There’s rather more to the use of the historical present than a simple change of tense. This becomes clear when you take a patch of prose written in the past tense and change it to the present. It will very likely be stiff and awkward, unnatural. In order for the historical present to be effective, the whole narrative attitude changes in subtle ways.

  Whether or not to employ the historical present is entirely a matter of choice. In genre fiction I would consider it a poor idea, if only because category novels are hardly ever written in present tense. I wouldn’t care for the job of trying to sell a gothic or a western, say, written in the historical present, though I do not doubt for a moment that such a novel could be written effectively and might even find its way into print.

  My own personal bias against the historical present is a very strong one, so much so that, when I’m browsing paperback racks looking for something to read, I’m inclined to pass up books written in present tense. The one time I tried to write a novel in the present tense I found myself incapable of sustaining the voice past a couple of pages. But that’s my personal reaction, and has nothing much to do with the relative merits of the two tenses.

  First versus Third Person

  Correspondingly, I’ve noticed in my paperback rack browsing that I’m distinctly biased in favor of books written in the first person. Perhaps this is not surprising in view of the fact that a majority of my own novels have been first-person narratives.

  The conventional advice to beginning writers of fiction is to abjure the first person. It’s allegedly full of pitfalls for the tyro, serves as a distancing mechanism between the reader and the story, limits the scope of the narrative, and causes dental caries in children and skin tumors in laboratory mice.

  For my part, I find I’m more likely to enjoy a novel by an unfamiliar writer if it’s written in the first than the third person because the writing itself is more likely to have a natural flow to it. The first-person voice is, after all, the one we all grow up using. First-person novels have an immediacy to them that helps close the gap between writer and reader. It’s as if the writer, clothed in the flesh of his narrator, is holding me by the elbow and telling me the story.

  Some novels, to be sure, cannot be written in the first person. It’s only an option when your novel is to be told from a single point of view, and it becomes a sensible choice in direct proportion to your ability to identify with that particular character. If your lead’s larger than life—the President of the United States, a glamorous movie star, Al Capone, or whoever—the third person might be a wiser choice; you might be more comfortable writing the character from the outside, and the reader might be more comfortable reading about him that way.

  Single versus Multiple Viewpoint

  It’s probably easiest, in a first novel, to show everything through the eyes of a single lead character—whether the voice you choose is first or third person. Single viewpoint keeps a novel on a true course. It limits options and cuts down the opportunity for diffusion of the force of the narrative.

  This does not mean that it’s perforce the right choice for your novel. Some books depend upon a broad scope for a measure of their strength. The story you choose to tell will very often dictate whether it is to be told from
one or several points of view.

  Whether you select single or multiple viewpoint for your novel, you would probably do well to avoid changing point of view within a scene, switching back and forth from one character’s mind to another’s. In a book in which the author maintains a consistent overview, never really getting inside the skins of his characters but describing all their actions from without, it may be permissible to move around the room within a scene, telling what the various characters in turn are thinking or feeling. But when you make this sort of viewpoint switch within a scene in a book where characters are shown from within, the result is apt to be confusion—the reader can’t remember who’s thinking what—and a slowdown in the book’s pace. I was most recently made aware of this while reading True Confessions, John Gregory Dunne’s generally successful novel of clerical and police political machinations.

  An advantage of multiple viewpoint lies in the fact that the author is not stuck with a single character for the duration of the book. When a scene winds to a close, and when there’s nothing further to be said about the viewpoint character for the time being, you simply skip two spaces and pick up one of the other principals.

  In any novel of this sort, it makes good sense to keep your number of principal characters down to a manageable figure. When you pass the half dozen mark, it becomes a little more difficult for the reader to remember what’s going on and who’s doing what and why. You can, however, have any number of additional minor viewpoint characters, from whose vantage point an occasional scene or two is portrayed. This can add a sense of richness to a novel without diluting the reader’s attention to the main characters.

  More important than learning a multitude of rules on the subject of viewpoint is that you be aware of the question of the point of view in your own reading. Your perceptions of the way other writers handle viewpoint changes, your sense of what works and what doesn’t, will teach you more about the subject than you can learn by reading about it.