Writing the Novel Read online

  Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print

  Lawrence Block

  For Miss May Jepson, my 11th Grade English teacher at Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York, who first encouraged me to become a writer;

  For my mother and father, whose support toward that end was unflagging;

  For John O’Hara, Evan Hunter, Fredric Brown, W. Somerset Maugham, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, and so many more writers from whom I’ve learned so much of what I know;

  For Nolan Miller, whose writing workshop at Antioch College was my nursery;

  For John Brady, who encouraged me to write about writing;

  For my daughters, Amy and Jill and Alison, who can be whatever they want in this world;

  For Bill and all his friends, who have shared their experience, strength and hope;

  And for Mary Pat, with all my love.

  Acknowledgments

  Before this present volume was in the planning stages, I circulated a questionnaire on writing methods with the intention of doing a magazine piece on the subject. A large number of writers of fiction and nonfiction alike were kind enough to reply at some length. While my article was not ultimately published, the replies to my questionnaire were of inestimable value to me when it came time to write this book on the novel. I’ve had occasion to quote from several of the replies I received; all of them in one way or another enlarged my understanding of how writers do whatever it is that we do.

  This book’s defects are mine alone. For its strengths, I should like to acknowledge the assistance of all those who replied to my questionnaire, to wit:

  Mary Amlaw, Poul Anderson, Mel Arrighi, Isaac Asimov, Michael Avallone, Jean L. Backus, Eugene Franklin Bandy, D.R. Benson, Robert Bloch, Murray Teigh Bloom, Barbara Bonham, Jon L. Breen, William Brittain, Barbara Callahan, William E. Chambers, Thomas Chastain, John Cheever, Mary Higgins Clark, Virginia Coffman, George Harmon Coxe, Linda Crawford, Clive Cussler, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Richard Deming, F.M. Esfandiary, Stanley Ellin, Harlan Ellison, Robert L. Fish, Patricia Fox-Sheinwold, Lucy Freeman, Anne Freemantle, Tonita S. Gardner, Brian Garfield, Herbert Gold, Arthur Goldstein, Joe Gores, Marilyn Gran-beck, Russell H. Girran, Irving A. Greenfield, Isidore Haiblum, Joseph Hansen, Joyce Harrington, Tony Hillerman, Edward D. Hoch, Peter Hochstein, James Holding, Hans Holzer, Dorothy B. Hughes, Beatrice Trum Hunter, Bel Kaufman, Richard Kostelanetz, Eda J. LeShan, Elizabeth Levy, Robert Ludlum, John Lutz, Arthur Lyons, Arthur Maling, Harold Q. Masur, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Gregory McDonald, Thomas M. McDade, Patricia McGerr, William P. McGivern, James McKimmey, Francis M. Nevins, Donald Newlove, Stephen R. Novak, Al Nussbaum, Dennis O’Neil, Robert B. Parker, Don Pendleton, Judson Philips, Richard S. Prather, Bill Pronzini, Tom Purdom, Robert J. Randisi, Malcolm Robinson, Willo Davis Roberts, Sam Ross, Sandra Scoppettone, Justin Scott, Henry Slesar, Martin Cruz Smith, Jerry Sohl, Jane Speed, Aaron Marc Stein, Richard Martin Stern, Ross Thomas, Lawrence Treat, Louis Trimble, Thomas Walsh, Stephen Wasylyk, Hillary Waugh, Sol Weinstein, Edward Wellen, Helen Wells, David Westheimer, Donald E. Westlake, Collin Wilcox and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Why Write a Novel? The advantages, commercial and artistic, of writing a novel as opposed to short fiction. The novel as a learning experience. As a vehicle for self-expression.

  Chapter 2 Deciding Which Novel to Write. What to do when you don’t have a specific novel in mind. How to pick your type of novel.

  Chapter 3 Read … Study … Analyze. How to read, as a writer. Taking books apart to see how they work. Applying these principles in structuring your own novel.

  Chapter 4 Developing Plot Ideas. How to encourage ideas to bubble up from the unconscious. How ideas come together to create plot. Ways to sharpen up a plot.

  Chapter 5 Developing Characters. Drawing characters from real life. Making up characters from the whole cloth. How to make your characters memorable.

  Chapter 6 Outlining. First, learn about outlines, by writing one of an existing book. How to write an outline of your own. How to expand it step by step into a book. Advantages of not using an outline. Avoiding outline-enslavement.

  Chapter 7 Using What You Know … and What You Don’t Know. How to put the background you have to work in your novel. Capitalizing on your own experience. Research—how and when to do it, how and when to do without it.

  Chapter 8 Getting Started. Beginnings. How to open the book up, when to begin at the beginning and when not to.

  Chapter 9 Getting It Written. How to harness self-discipline for the long haul of novel-writing: Take it a day at a time.

  Chapter 10 Snags, Dead Ends and False Trails. What to do when a wheel comes off.

  Chapter 11 Matters of Style. Grammar, diction, usage. Dialogue. First vs. third person. Single vs. multiple viewpoint. How to handle transitions, descriptive passages.

  Chapter 12 Length. How long is long enough? Length as a market consideration. Writing the right length for your particular book.

  Chapter 13 Rewriting. All at once or as you go along? Structural revision. Stylistic polishing. How rewriting sharpens prose.

  Chapter 14 Getting Published. Difficulties facing the first novelist. Queries. Finding an agent, if you think you need one. Dealing with editors. Subsidy publishers.

  Chapter 15 Doing It Again. Moving on to the next book. Special aspects of sequels and series books.

  A New Afterword by the Author

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Introduction

  This is a book designed to help you write a novel. It contains the distillation of my own experience of twenty years as a published novelist, plus a considerable amount that I’ve learned from other writers. My goal throughout has been to produce the sort of book I might have found useful when I set out to write my own first novel.

  But there are no guarantees. Just because you’ve bought this book, just because you’ve studied it diligently, does not mean for a moment that your success as a novelist is a foregone conclusion. You may never write so much as the first paragraph of a novel. You may begin work on a book and find yourself unable to complete it. Or you may labor long and hard on a book, working your way through outline and first draft and final polish, only to discover that you’ve turned a perfectly good ream of paper into something commercially unviable and artistically indefensible.

  These things happen. That they happen constantly to neophyte writers should hardly be surprising news. What may be more of a surprise is that they happen to seasoned professional novelists as well.

  They even happen to me. Over the years, I’ve published, at last count, twenty novels under my own name, plus perhaps five times that number under various pseudonyms. You would think that all that furious typing would have resulted in my having learned something, that while I might not know how to tie my shoes or cross the street I ought certainly to have the mechanics of writing a novel down cold by now.

  But in the past two or three years I’ve had perhaps half a dozen ideas for novels that got no further than the first chapter. I’ve written three novels that died after I’d written over a hundred pages; they repose in my file cabinet at this very moment, like out-of-gas cars on a highway, waiting for someone to start them up again. I very much doubt they’ll ever be completed.

  That’s not all. During that same stretch of time I’ve seen two novels through to completion and succeeded only in producing books that no one has wanted to publish—and, I’ve come to believe, for good and sufficient reason. Both were books I probably shouldn’t have tried writing in the first place. Both failures constituted learning experiences that will almost certainly prove beneficial in future work. While I could by no means afford the time sp
ent on these books, neither can I properly write that time off as altogether wasted.

  But how could an established professional write an un-publishable book? If he’s written a dozen or two dozen or five dozen publishable ones in a row, wouldn’t you think he’d have the formula down pat?

  The answer, of course, is that there’s no such thing as a formula. Except in the genuinely rare instances of writers who tend to write the same book over and over, every novel is a wholly new experience.

  In Some Thoughts I Have in Mind When I Teach, Wendell Berry makes the point that

  No good book was ever written according to a recipe. Every good book is to a considerable extent a unique discovery. And so one can say with plenty of justification that nobody knows “how to write.” Certainly nobody knows how other people ought to. For myself, though I think I know how to write the books I have already written—and though I guess, wrongly no doubt, that I could now write them better than I did—I am discomforted by the knowledge that I don’t know how to write the books that I have not yet written. But that discomfort has an excitement about it, and it is the necessary antecedent of one of the best kinds of happiness.

  Some of the books I write involve series characters. I’ve done three books, for example, about a burglar named Bernie Rhodenbarr; in each of them he becomes the prime suspect in a homicide investigation because of his activities as a burglar, and in order to get himself out of the jam he has to solve the murder himself. There is, clearly, a similarity to the structure of all three of these books which at a cursory glance might well look like a formula.

  But each plot is significantly different and each book, let me assure you, has presented its own specific problems. You might think the books would become easier to write. The third, just recently completed as I write these lines, was by a fair margin the most difficult of the three.

  As a noun, novel means a book-length prose narrative. As an adjective, it means “of a new kind or nature.” The dual definition is historic, of course, deriving from a time when the novel was a new fictional form. Still, I see it as a happy accident, for every novel is novel.

  I would suppose that a majority of this book’s readers have yet to write a book-length work of fiction. It is commonplace to hear that the first novel presents special problems to author and publisher alike. But in a larger sense every novel is a first novel, presenting no end of unique problems, carrying enormous risks, and offering immense excitement and other rewards.

  If you’re unprepared for the risks, perhaps you’d like to rethink this whole business of novel-writing. If you’re unwilling to live with the possibility of failure, perhaps you’d be more comfortable writing laundry lists and letters to the editor.

  If you really want to write a novel, stick around.

  One thing you won’t find in this book is an explanation of the way to write a novel.

  Because I don’t believe there is one. Just as every novel is unique, so too is every novelist. The study I’ve made of the writing methods of others has led me to the belief that everybody in this business spends a lifetime finding the method that suits him best, changing it over the years as he himself evolves, adapting it again and again to suit the special requirements of each particular book. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another; what works with one book won’t necessarily work with another.

  Some novelists outline briefly, some in great detail, and a few produce full-fledged treatments that run half the length of the final book itself. Others don’t outline at all. Some of us revise as we go along. Others do separate drafts. Some of us write sprawling first drafts and wind up cutting them to the bone. Others rarely cut three paragraphs overall.

  Some months before I wrote my own first novel—of which there will be more later—I read a book which purported to tell how to write a novel. The author taught writing at one of America’s leading universities and had written a couple of well-received historical novels, and he had set out to tell the great audience of would-be novelists how to go and do likewise.

  His method was a dilly. What you did if you wanted to write a novel, I was given to understand, was to trot down to the nearest stationery store and pick up several packs of three-by-five file cards. Then you sat at a desk with the cards and a trayful of sharp pencils and got down to business.

  First you went to work on your character cards. You wrote out one or more of those for each and every character to appear in the book, from the several leads to the most minor bit players. For the major characters, you might use several cards, devoting one to a physical description of the character, another to his background, another to his personal habits, and a fourth, say, to the astrological aspects at the moment of his birth.

  Then you prepared your scene cards. Having used some other cards to rough out the plot, you set about working up a file card for every scene which would take place in your novel. If one character was going to buy a newspaper somewhere around page 384, you’d write out a scene card explaining how the scene would play, and what the lead would say to the newsdealer, and what the weather was like.

  There was, as I recall, rather more to this method. By the time you were ready to write the book you had innumerable shoeboxes filled with three-by-five cards and all you had to do was turn them into a novel—which, now that I think of it, sounds rather more of a challenge than converting a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or base metal into gold.

  I read this book all the way through, finding myself drawing closer to despair with every passing chapter. Two things were crystal clear to me. First of all, this man knew how to write a novel, and his method was the right method. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly manage it.

  I finished the book, heaved a sigh, and gave myself up to feelings of inadequacy. I decided I’d have to stick to short stories for the time being, if not forever. Maybe someday I’d be sufficiently organized and disciplined and all to get those file cards and dig in. Maybe not.

  Couple of months later I got out of bed one morning and sat down and wrote a two-page outline of a novel. About a month after that I sat down to the typewriter with my two-page outline at hand and a ream of white bond paper at the ready. I felt a little guilty without a shoebox full of file cards, but like the bumblebee who goes on flying in happy ignorance of the immutable laws of physics, I persisted in my folly and wrote the book in a couple of weeks.

  Shows what a jerk that other writer was, doesn’t it? Wrong. It shows nothing of the sort. The extraordinarily elaborate method he described, while no more inviting in my eyes than disembowelment, was obviously one that worked like a charm—for him.

  Perhaps he said as much. Perhaps he qualified things by explaining that his method was not the way to write a novel but merely his way to write a novel. It’s been a long time since I read his book—and it’ll be donkey’s years until I read it again—so I can’t trust my memory on the point. But I do know that I was left with the distinct impression that his method was the right method, that all other methods were the wrong method, and that by finding my own way to write my own novel I was proceeding at my own peril. It’s unlikely that he put things so strongly, and my interpretation doubtless owes a good deal to the anxiety and insecurity with which I approached the whole prospect of writing a book-length work of fiction.

  Nevertheless, I would hate to leave anyone with the impression that the following pages will tell you everything to know about how to write a novel. All I’ll be doing—all I really can do—is share my own experience. If nothing else, that experience has been extensive enough to furnish me with the beginnings of a sense of my own ignorance. After twenty years and a hundred books, I at least realize that I don’t know how to write a novel, that nobody does, that there is no right way to do it. Whatever method works—for you, for me, for whoever’s sitting in the chair and poking away at the typewriter keys—is the right way to do it.

  Chapter 1

  Why Write a Novel?

  If you want to write fiction, the best t
hing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

  If it persists, you probably ought to write a novel. Interestingly, most embryonic fiction writers accept the notion that they ought to write a novel sooner or later. It’s not terribly difficult to see that the world of short fiction is a world of limited opportunity. Both commercially and artistically, the short-story writer is quite strictly circumscribed.

  This has not always been the case. Half a century ago, the magazine story was important in a way it has never been since. During the twenties, a prominent writer typically earned several thousand dollars for the sale of a short story to a top slick magazine. These stories were apt to be talked about at parties and social gatherings, and the reputation a writer might establish in this fashion helped gain attention for any novel he might ultimately publish.

  The change since those days has been remarkable. In virtually all areas, the short fiction market has shrunk in size and significance. Fewer magazines publish fiction, and every year they publish less of it. The handful of top markets pay less in today’s dollars than they did in the much harder currency of fifty or sixty years ago. Pulp magazines have virtually disappeared as a market; a handful of confession magazines and a scanter handful of mystery and science-fiction magazines are all that remain of a market once numbered in the hundreds. Whole categories of popular fiction have categorically vanished; the western, the sports story, the light romance—these were once published in considerable quantity, twelve or fifteen stories per magazine, and now they have simply gone the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon.