Writing the Novel by Lawrence Block
If we can stay in touch with that hunger, the pot will keep bubbling—and ideas that engage us will continue rising to the surface.
When an idea does come along, make quite sure you don’t forget it.
I would recommend carrying a notebook around as routinely as you carry your house key or wallet. Whenever an idea turns up, make a note of it. The simple act of writing down a few words will help to fix the idea in your mind so your subconscious can get hold of it.
Before you go to bed at night, make a point of glancing through the notebook. If you have the wrong attitude, this process can simply load you up with guilt over all the fiction ideas you’ve left undeveloped. Don’t let this happen. Those scribbles and scraps in your notebook aren’t things you have to do, and they’re certainly not projects which must be undertaken right away. The notebook’s a tool. It’s there to make sure you don’t lose sight of things that might turn out to be worth remembering; by referring to it frequently, you use it to give your memory a jog and stimulate the unconscious development of the idea over a period of time.
For some writers, a notebook comes close to being an end in itself. They approach the notebook as an art form, using it as a sort of creative journal and devoting an hour or so at the end of the day to ruminating therein. I’ve never been able to do this, perhaps because of a constitutional incapacity for sustained work at something without at least the possibility that what I’m doing will be publishable. Then too, it’s my own feeling that the writer who puts too much energy into notebook entries is like the athlete who overtrains, like the boxer who leaves his fight in the gym.
That’s just personal prejudice. Once again, writing is an utterly individual matter, and your notebook ought to be whatever you want it to be. Whatever works is what is right.
It’s generally better, if rumination is your thing, to confine it to a notebook rather than to discuss your plot notion with friends. Sometimes this sort of discussion is useful, especially if the friends are writers themselves. When people in the business bat plot material around, the brainstorming process often results in clarifying and strengthening the ideas. All too often, though, talking about an idea winds up serving as an alternative to writing about it, especially if the people you talk to are not writers. I can lose enthusiasm for ideas if I talk them out at length. Perhaps the ideas I’ve gone stale on in this fashion are ideas that would have withered on the vine regardless, but my experience in this area has made me superstitious and secretive on the subject. I tend now to sit on my better ideas like a broody hen, letting them hatch as they will in their own good time.
One thing that I’ve learned, occasionally to my chagrin, is that it’s not enough for an idea to be a good one. It has to be a good one for me.
It’s easy to fool oneself in this area. Just because I’ve thought of an idea for a novel, and just because it’s the sort of idea that could be developed into a viable book, is no reason in and of itself for me to write that particular book. It may not be my type of book at all. But sometimes, overawed by the commercial potential of the project, I lose sight of this fact.
I recently had a painful lesson in this regard, and it was a long time coming. Some years ago I was reading something about Case Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia that was the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Germany. I got an idea—specifically, that Hitler had been manipulated into attacking Russia by a British agent who had penetrated the Berlin government. I thought that was a neat premise to hang a novel on, and discussed it with my friend, novelist Brian Garfield, figuring it was the sort of book he could do a nice job with.
Brian was intrigued, but not quite captivated enough to do anything with the notion. Time passed, and the idea lingered in my subconscious, and two or three years later on a flight to Jamaica an idea struck me out of the blue, tying the original notion I’d dreamed up with Rudolf Hess’s inexplicable flight to Scotland. A whole bunch of quirky historical elements would not fit themselves into the context of my little fiction, and the book which might result might just have the stuff of which best sellers are made.
There was only one problem. It still wasn’t my kind of book. It wasn’t really the kind of book I’d be terribly likely to read, let alone write. I might have recognized this, had I not had my judgment clouded by pure and simple greed. (Then too, I didn’t have anything else to write, and there were no other ideas hanging fire that did much for me.)
I had a terrible time with the book, and the first draft of it, certainly, was at least as terrible as the time I had. The whole project may well turn out to be salvageable, and I may indeed wind up entering this particular book on the profit side of my ledger, but I hope I never lose sight of the fact that it was a mistake for me to write this book. If I’ve learned that, and if the lesson sticks, then I’ll really have profited from the experience regardless of how it turns out financially.
For the beginner, a certain amount of experimentation in this regard is both inevitable and desirable. It takes a lot of writing to know with any degree of assurance what you are and are not capable of doing. Furthermore, at the start of a writing career any writing experience is valuable in and of itself. But as you grow to develop a surer sense of your individual strengths and weaknesses, you’ll be better able to decide what ideas to develop, what ones to give away, and what ones to forget about altogether.
Some ideas come from other people. I’ve had both good and bad experiences writing books based on the ideas of others. Years ago Donald E. Westlake got an idea for a suspense novel—a bride is raped on her wedding night and the bridal couple take direct revenge on the bad guys. He wrote an opening chapter, found it didn’t seem to go anywhere, and he put it away and forgot about it.
A year or so after that I called him up and asked if he had any plans for the idea. When he said no, I requested permission to steal the notion—it had been percolating on a back burner of my mind ever since he first mentioned it to me. He graciously told me to go ahead, and Deadly Honeymoon became my first hardcover novel, a fair success in book form and ultimately the basis of a film, called Nightmare Honeymoon for reasons I wouldn’t presume to guess.
Agents and publishers have come up with other ideas and given them to me. Sometimes I’ve written the books their ideas sparked, and sometimes they’ve turned out well.
On the other hand, I’ve had several experiences where ideas originated by other persons led me to books that proved ultimately unwritable, or books which gave me a great deal of trouble, or books which simply failed for one reason or another.
It can be quite difficult, for example, working from a publisher’s idea. The temptation to do so can be considerable, since one is not working on speculation; the publisher, along with the idea, generally dangles a contract and an advance in front of one’s eyes, and the more attractive the contract and the larger the advance, why, the better the idea is going to look. Thus you find yourself bound to an idea you might have dismissed out of hand if you’d thought it up all by yourself.
Sometimes—and I’ve had this experience—the publisher has only a vague idea of what he wants. In order to produce a book you’ll be able to write effectively, you have to transform this idea and make it your own. If the publisher’s got an open mind, that’s no problem. Occasionally, however, he’ll be struck by the discrepancy between what you’ve produced and the sublime if hazy vision with which he started. If the book’s good enough in its own right you’ll sell it somewhere sooner or later, but it doesn’t make for the best feelings all around.
What it boils down to, then, is that you really have to be sure you like another person’s idea before you use it. Remember, your own ideas bubble up from your own mind; when you work on them, that bubbling process will continue and the idea will develop. When you’re working on another person’s idea, you’re adopting it. It has to be the sort you can love as if it were your own or you won’t be able to bring your subconscious fully to bear upon it. It won’t grow organically the way an idea mu
How well developed does an idea have to be before you can start writing the book? It depends.
The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep took a couple of years gestating until various plot components fitted themselves together. By the time I sat down to write the book, I had a very strong sense of the character of Tanner and a pretty good grasp of the book’s plot. I didn’t know everything else that was going to happen by any means, but I had the general outline of the book pretty clear in my mind.
With Deadly Honeymoon, I could fit the book’s premise into one sentence, and that was as much of a handle as I had on the book when I sat down and wrote the first chapter. I think now that I might have written a better book if I’d known more about the various characters and had given the plot more thought before I started, but I was impatient to get on with it, and it’s possible the book gained by the impatient enthusiasm that gripped its author.
One night Brian Garfield parked his car on the street in Manhattan and returned to it to find the convertible top slashed by some archfiend in human form who wanted to steal a coat from the back seat. Brian’s first reaction was murderous rage. He realized he couldn’t find the villain and kill him, but he could find some other villain and kill him, couldn’t he? Because Brian is a writer rather than a homicidal maniac—although admittedly the two classes are not mutually exclusive—he decided to write a book about someone so motivated rather than act out his anger directly.
He might have begun work immediately upon a book about a vigilante who goes around killing people after someone slashes his convertible top—and that’s not the worst premise for a book I’ve ever heard. But Brian gave the book plenty of time to take shape, let the character of accountant Paul Benjamin emerge from wherever our ideas grow, made the motivating experience the rape and beating of Benjamin’s wife and daughter by a trio of hoodlums, with the wife dying and the daughter shocked into madness, and let the story grow from there. The result, Death Wish, was an artistic success as a novel and an enormous commercial triumph as a film.
Don Westlake, on the other hand, once wrote a first chapter in which a surly fellow walks across the George Washington Bridge into New York, snarling at motorists who offer him rides. Don didn’t know where he was going with that one but found out as he went along. The result was the lengthy series of novels Don wrote under the pen name Richard Stark, all of them featuring Parker, a professional heist man and as unobliging a chap as he was the day he walked across the bridge.
As the years go by, which is something they do with increasing rapidity lately, I find myself giving ideas more rather than less time to take shape. I’m no longer so anxious to rush Chapter One through the typewriter if I have no idea what’ll happen in Chapter Two. One learns from experience, and I’ve had the experience of watching far too many first chapters wither on the vine to dismiss the possibility of its happening again. I’m less inclined to worry that an idea will evaporate if I don’t get it into production as quickly as possible. If I make a note of it so I won’t forget it, and if I read through my notebook from time to time and make it a point to think about what I find there, the good ideas will survive and grow. The bad ones will drop out along the way, and that’s fine; I don’t feel compelled to add to my stack of first-chapters-of-books-destined-never-to-have-a-second-chapter.
On the other hand, the next book I intend to write is one I’ve been thinking about for several months now, getting more and more of a sense of the lead character, considering and rejecting any number of geographical settings, changing my mind over and over again about the nature of the plot.
I got the idea, incidentally, by the serendipitous process that yields so many ideas. I was at the library, doing research on patron saints for the sake of a bit of conversational by-play in a light mystery novel, The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. This led me to a passage from Aquinas that amounted to a marvelous moral justification for larceny. Then, because I was tired of saints, patron or otherwise, I started browsing magazines, something I rarely do, and came across an interview with Dennis Hopper. I felt I really ought to go home and get to work, but I felt self-indulgent that day and read the Hopper interview, and there was the idea for my next novel, just waiting there for me to find it. (I won’t tell you what it is—I don’t want to leave my fight in the gym.)
Anyway, I expect I’ll start writing the book in a couple of months. I know the book will have benefited greatly from the time I’ve spent thinking about it off and on ever since I read that interview. But I’m quite certain that I won’t know very much about the direction the plot will take. I’ll have my first chapter pretty well worked out in my mind, and I’ll know a lot about the characters, and I’ll have a variety of possible directions for the book to go, but ….
But I won’t be able to sit down and paint the thing by numbers. That’s what makes it hard, no matter how much plotting time you give a book, but it’s also what keeps it exciting.
Chapter 5
Developing Characters
The chief reason for almost any reader to go on turning the pages of almost any novel is to find out what happens next. The reason the reader cares what happens next is because of the author’s skill at characterization. When the characters in a novel are sufficiently well drawn, and when they’ve been so constructed as to engage the reader’s capacities for sympathy and identification, he wants to see how their lives turn out and is deeply concerned that they turn out well.
The books that I don’t finish reading—and their numbers increase with the years—are generally abandoned along the way for one of two reasons. Sometimes the writer’s style puts me off; because I’m a writer myself I’ve become increasingly aware of literary technique, much as a professional musician will notice sour notes and technical flaws that would escape my attention. Unless theme or story line or characters have a great hold upon me, I’ll lose interest in an inexpertly written novel.
If the writing’s competent, my interest may flag nevertheless if I find that I just don’t give a damn whether the characters live or die, marry or burn, go to the Devil or come out the other side. This may happen because I just don’t believe in the characters the author has created. They don’t act like real people, they don’t sound like real people, and they don’t seem to have the emotions or thoughts of real people. Thus they’re unreal as far as I’m concerned, and I say they’re spinach and the hell with them.
Note, please, that my complaint is that these wooden characters don’t seem like real people, not that they aren’t ordinary people. Some of the most engaging characters in fiction, clutching my attention as the Wedding Guest hung on to the Ancient Mariner, have been the farthest thing from ordinary. Nothing about Sherlock Holmes is ordinary, yet the character’s appeal has been such as to keep the Conan Doyle stories in print to this day, and to have Holmes resuscitated and brought back to life in several novels by contemporary authors, novels which owe their success almost entirely to public enthusiasm for Conan Doyle’s eternally fascinating character.
Similarly, I’ve found Rex Stout’s books about Nero Wolfe endlessly rereadable. There’s nothing ordinary about Wolfe, and it’s not only his corpulence that makes him larger than life. I don’t reread the books because their plots are so compelling, certainly not the second or third time around. Nor am I dazzled by Stout’s sheer writing ability; while it was considerable, I never got interested in his non-Wolfe books, either the mysteries starring other detectives or the several straight novels he wrote before creating Wolfe. No, I read him as I suspect most people do, for the sheer pleasure of watching the interplay between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, of seeing these two men react to different situations and stimuli, and of participating vicariously in the life of that legendary brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street.
Ordinary? Scarcely that. But so real that I sometimes have to remind myself that Wolfe and Goodwin are the creations of a writer’s mind, that no matter how many doorbells I ring in
That’s characterization. It was the ability to create characters readers could care about, too, that made Charles Dickens a monumental popular success. While Oscar Wilde might have remarked that only a man with a heart of stone could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing, the truth of the matter is that readers did not laugh when they read that scene. They wept.
Some novels depend rather more on characterization than do others. In the novel of ideas, the characters often exist as mouthpieces for various philosophical positions; while the writer may have taken the trouble to describe them and give them diverse individual attributes, they often have little real life outside of their specific argumentative role in the novel.
Some whodunits rely on the clever intricacy of their plotting to hold the reader’s attention, stinting on characterization in the process. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries can be compulsively readable, but does Mason himself ever emerge as anything more than a forceful courtroom presence and a keen legal mind? Agatha Christie supplied her Hercule Poirot with a variety of attitudes and pet expressions, but I’ve never found that the little Belgian added up to anything more than the sum of these quirks and phrases. He serves admirably as a vehicle for the solution of brilliant mystery puzzles but does not interest me much as a character.
On reflection, it seems to me that even in these categories—the novel of ideas, the plot-heavy whodunit—my favorite novels are those in which the author has created characters to whom I am capable of responding strongly. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a brilliant novel of political and philosophical argument; I find it ever so much more effective because the lead character, Rubashov, is so absorbing a human being. And, while one of Ms. Christie’s Poirot mysteries will always do to fill an idle hour, I’m a passionate fan of her Jane Marple stories, not because their plots are appreciably different from the Poirots but because Marple herself is such a fascinating character, warm and human and alive.