Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

  The fact that you’ve created a strong character doesn’t mean you should write a second book about him. It seems as though some writers are geared to write series books and others are not. Sometimes success will tend to force a series upon a writer. That sort of thing has been happening ever since Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor because Queen Elizabeth wanted to see another play about Falstaff. At this stage of the game, however, it’s not too likely that you’ll have to launch a series as a command performance for royalty. With one unpublished novel to your credit, you still have the freedom to make your own decisions.

  The journeyman novelist occasionally has the opportunity to produce books of a sort we haven’t yet discussed—tie-ins, novelizations, and books in someone else’s series.

  I haven’t mentioned them previously because they’re the sort of thing a publisher is likely to hand out as an assignment, and it’s highly unlikely your first novel will be assigned to you. Later on, though, when publishers are familiar with you and your work, or when you have an agent who can recommend you for assignments, some of this work may come your way.

  Books of this sort aren’t much fun to write. You can’t display a hell of a lot of creativity, nor are you likely to earn substantial sums from them. Writing paperback novels about the Brady Bunch will not make you rich. Turning Grade “B” movie scripts into Grade “C” novels won’t make your name a household word. And there’s a limit to how much pride you can take in having been one of fifty people to write under the umbrella pen name of Nick Carter.

  All the same, any assignment that brings the novice novelist money for writing fiction is not all bad. And writing the books can sharpen your craft considerably, whatever the ultimate merits of what you write. There’s a point, certainly, when you should stop accepting these assignments and concentrate instead on your own work, but you can burn that bridge when you come to it.

  The tie-in is a book based on someone else’s characters. You generally furnish your own plot, although the publisher or someone from the network may have suggestions to throw into the hopper—which is probably the right place for them.

  I wrote my first detective novel this way. Belmont Books had a deal set for a tie-in novel based on Markham, a series starring Ray Milland. The book I wrote turned out rather well, and my agent agreed it was a shame to waste it as a tie-in so he showed it to Knox Burger, then at Gold Medal. Knox liked it, whereupon I had to redo the book, changing Roy Markham to Ed London and otherwise altering the character. That done, I had to go write yet another book about Markham, which Belmont did indeed publish.

  Novelizations are easier in that the whole plot is laid out for you, scene by scene. You’ve got a movie script in front of you and your job is to turn it into prose. It’s very rare that this is anything more than a purely mechanical task, which explains why knowledgeable readers shun those paperbacks that carry notices indicating they were based upon a screenplay. They’re almost invariably lifeless.

  The fact that the books sell so well all the same indicates too how few readers are all that knowledgeable, or all that sensitive to writing quality. Sad to say.

  Some writers are better at novelizations than others. A pro who can turn out solid acceptable novelizations regularly can count on a decent steady income. A handful have acquired reputations; Leonore Fleischer, for one, is able to demand high advances and preferential royalty rates because of her reputation for delivering a quality product.

  Writing books in somebody else’s series is just what it sounds like. I couldn’t say how many people have launched literary careers by being Nick Carter for a couple of books. Here again, the work is thankless and ill-paying, but it’s a way to learn your craft while you get paid for it, and that’s not the worst thing that ever happened to a writer.

  You wouldn’t want to spend a career writing this sort of swill, but one book does not a career make. As to whether this sort of hack work is lower than you care to stoop, that’s for you to decide.

  If you figure it’ll make you blind, you can always quit when you need glasses.

  A second novel, whatever sort you choose, is the best thing to do after you’ve done your first novel. You’ll learn from it, even as you have learned from the first. You’ll be able to see your own increased facility. You’ll be doing the best thing possible to cure the post-novel blahs. And, once you’ve finished it, you’ll have two manuscripts out to market. While this may bring rejections at double your usual rate, so too will it more than double your chances of eventual acceptance.

  Finally, there’s one more argument for writing a second novel. If you don’t, how can reviewers complain that it doesn’t fulfill the promise of your first novel?

  Has this helped any?

  I wonder, looking over what I’ve written, whether I’ve done what I set out to do. I’m often similarly uncertain when I write the last words of a novel, skip a few spaces, and type “The End” in the center of the page. Does the story hold up? Are the characters interesting? Is the book I’ve written the book I wanted to write in the first place? It never quite is, perhaps because one’s reach exceeds one’s grasp, but is it at least a good book?

  Maybe you’ll get something out of it. I don’t know. In the final analysis, you can no more learn the gentle art of novel writing from a book than you can learn how to ride a bicycle. The only way you really learn is by doing it yourself, and you may fall off a lot before you get the hang of it.

  I wish you luck.

  I won’t read your manuscript, or recommend an agent, or put you in touch with a publisher. I’ll answer letters—if I can make the time, and if you enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope. But that’s as much as I’ll do. You have to do the rest yourself. That, I’m afraid is how it works in this business.

  I hope you write your novel. I hope you write a lot of them, and that they’re very good books indeed. Not because I would presume to regard your work as a sort of literary grandchild of mine—let’s face it, you’d write it whether or not you read this book.

  But simply because, while there are far too many books in this world, there are far too few good ones.

  And I don’t ever want to run out of things to read.

  A New Afterword by the Author

  In the spring of 1976 I sold a piece to Writer’s Digest, the monthly magazine for writers. I was in Los Angeles at the time, in mute testimony to H. L. Mencken’s observation that a Divine Hand had taken hold of the United States by the State of Maine, and lifted, whereupon everything loose wound up in Southern California. The article I sold them was a reply to the perennial question, Where do you get your ideas?, and when they accepted it I got an idea on the spot.

  My idea was to sell them on the idea of hiring me as a columnist. They had a couple of columnists, but nobody was writing about fiction, and that was the chief interest of most of their audience, so the need seemed to be there. Rather than push this through the mail, I waited until I could do it in person; my daughters flew out in July to spend the summer with me, and we stayed that month in LA and spent the month of August on a leisurely drive back to New York, where they lived with their mother—and where I had lived, until that Divine Hand sent me spinning.

  I mapped out our route east so that I could work in a lunch in Cincinnati with John Brady, then the editor at Writer’s Digest. He’d bought my article, and over lunch he bought my idea for a fiction column, to run six times a year, alternating with their cartoon column. I got back to New York and sent in the first column, and by the time I’d written the third one they’d booted the cartoonist. My column would appear in the magazine every month for the next fourteen years.

  I’d been doing it for a little over a year when Brady got in touch. Their book division felt the need for a book telling how to write a novel. And they liked the way I wrote about writing, and wanted me to do the book for them.

  I was living in New York again, in an apartment on Greenwich Street. (It’s no more than a two-minute walk from where I
live now, thirty-three years later, but I’ve had a slew of addresses in the interim.) I wrote the book and sent it off, and the folks in Cincinnati liked it just fine, and proposed a title: Writing the Novel from Plot to Print.

  I didn’t like it at the time, felt it made the whole process sound more mechanical than I thought it to be. I’d made a particular point in my book of not telling the reader, “This is the way to do it.” There were, as I saw it, at least as many ways to do it as there were writers, and arguably as many ways as there were books. But they really liked the title, and I went along with it, and I have to say it seems OK to me now.

  The book has remained continually in print for more than thirty years. I guess the title hasn’t hurt it any.

  Fifteen years ago, Writer’s Digest Books wanted me to revise Writing the Novel. They felt it was dated. I talk about the Gothic novel, for example, and while books fitting that pattern may continue to be written and read, the category by that name has long since ceased to exist. If I could go through it and update it, then they could bring out a new edition with the words “updated new edition” on it, and increase sales accordingly.

  I thought about it, and ultimately decided against it. The book seemed to be one readers find useful, and the techniques and principles discussed struck me as essentially timeless, as pertinent in 1995 as they had been in 1978. And the whole idea of updating a book bothers me, anyway. I knew a writer once who’d updated a novel, or tried to; it was being reissued after fifteen or twenty years, and he’d gone through it page by page, updating the cost of a telephone call from a nickel to a dime (this was a few years ago), changing the stars of a movie his character watches from William Powell and Myrna Loy to William Holden and June Havoc (yes, this was a while ago), and otherwise altering the book’s temporal setting.

  Well, it didn’t work. One way or another, every word in that book was attached to the year it was written. It had a certain integrity, and you altered it at your peril.

  Writing the Novel is not a novel, and thus may not need to adhere to the same standard of artistic integrity, but it’s nonetheless a creature of the time of its writing, and my inclination is to leave it alone. I’m also predisposed to avoid work, and this looked to me to be work to no purpose.

  Now, fifteen years after I decided the book wasn’t broke and didn’t need to be fixed, it is in fact another decade and a half older, and that much further out of date. But it still ain’t broke, as I can tell by the enthusiastic word-of-blog I keep encountering on the Internet, and I’m still predisposed to avoid work. So I’m not fixing it. I hope it does for you all a book of this sort can possibly hope to do. I hope it helps you speak in your own voice, map out your own route, and find your very own way to your very own book.

  Bon voyage!

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

  Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

  In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

  A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

  A four-year-old Block in 1942.

  Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

  Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

  Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

  Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

  Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

  Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

  Block and his wife, Lynne.

  Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”

  Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1979 by Lawrence Block

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0913-4

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

 

 

 
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