Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

The remaining pulps are scarcely worth writing for. Consider the plight, for example, of the writer of detective fiction. Twenty years ago, the two leading magazines in the field paid five cents a word for material, and their rejects sold quite readily to any of a batch of lesser markets. Now, at a time when the erstwhile nickel candy bar has gone to twenty cents, those two magazines still pay the same nickel a word—and only a single cent-a-word publication exists to skim the cream of the stories they reject.

  The outlook is not much more promising for writers of “quality” fiction. Very few magazines publish stories of literary distinction and pay a decent price for the privilege. After a piece has made the rounds of The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, and a few others, its author is reduced to submitting it to the small literary magazines that pay off in contributor’s copies or, at best, token payment. It is not merely impossible to make a living in this fashion; it is very nearly impossible, over the course of a year, to cover one’s mailing expenses.

  On the other hand, one can make a living writing novels.

  I’m not going to make you drool by rattling on about the stratospheric sums certain writers have received of late for their novels. The earnings of best sellers, the fortunes paid for film and paperback rights, have relatively little to do with the average writer, be he neophyte or veteran. James Michener once remarked that America is a country in which a writer can make a fortune but not a living—i.e., a handful of successful writers get rich while the rest of us can’t even get by. There’s some truth in this—the gap between success and survival is, I submit, an unhealthily yawning one—but there’s some hyperbole in it as well. A writer can indeed make a living in America; if he’s a reasonably productive novelist, he can make a living verging on comfortability.

  Financial considerations aside, I have always felt there are satisfactions in the novel which are not to be found in shorter fiction. I began as a writer of short stories, and to have written and published a short story was an accomplishment in which I took an inordinate amount of pride. But genuine literary achievement, as far as I was concerned, lay in being able to hold in my own hands a book with my own name on the cover. (I was to hold a dozen of my own books before one of them was to bear my own name, as it turned out, but that’s by the way.)

  Short-story writing, as I saw it, was estimable. One required skill and cleverness to carry it off. But to have written a novel was to have achieved something of substance. You could swing a short story on a cute idea backed up by a modicum of verbal agility. You could, when the creative juices were flowing, knock it off start-to-finish on a slow afternoon.

  A novel, on the other hand, took real work. You had to spend months on the thing, fighting it out in the trenches, line by line and page by page and chapter by chapter. It had to have plot and characters of sufficient depth and complexity to support a structure of sixty or a hundred thousand words. It wasn’t an anecdote, or a finger exercise, or a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. It was a book.

  The short-story writer, as I saw it, was a sprinter; he deserved praise to the extent that his stories were meritorious. But the novelist was a long-distance runner, and you don’t have to come in first in a marathon in order to deserve the plaudits of the crowd. It is enough merely to have finished on one’s feet.

  These arguments presented above would all seem to urge the writer to turn eventually to the novel. But it’s my contention that the beginner at fiction ought to focus his attention on the novel not sooner or later but right away. The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.

  At first, this may well seem illogical. We’ve just seen the short story likened to a sprint, the novel to a marathon. Shouldn’t a marathon runner work up to that distance gradually? Shouldn’t a writer develop his abilities in the short story before attempting the more challenging work of the novel?

  Certainly a great many of us do begin that way. I did myself, as far as that goes. In my earliest efforts, it was extremely difficult for me to sustain a prose narrative for the fifteen hundred words necessary to constitute a proper short-short. Over a period of time I became increasingly at ease writing full-length short stories, and then I finally wrote my first novel. Other writers have followed a similar path, but perhaps as many have leaped directly into the novel without any serious effort at short stories. There doesn’t seem to be any traditional path to follow in becoming a writer. Whatever road leads to the destination turns out to have been the right road for that particular traveler.

  With the understanding, then, that all roads lead to Rome, here are some of the reasons why I believe a writer is best advised to begin with a novel.

  Skill is less at a premium. This may seem paradoxical—why should a novel require less skill than a short story? You’d think it would be the other way around.

  Don’t you have to be a better craftsman to manage a novel? I don’t think so. Often a novelist can get away with stylistic crudity that would cripple a shorter piece of fiction.

  Remember, what a novel affords you as a writer is room. You have space to move around in, space to let your characters develop and come to life, space for your story line to get itself in motion and carry the day. While a way with words never hurts, it’s of less overwhelming importance to the novelist than the sheer ability to grab ahold of the reader and make him care what happens next.

  The best seller list abounds with the work of writers whom no one would want to call polished stylists. While I wouldn’t care to name them, I can think offhand of half a dozen writers whose first chapters are very hard going for me. I’m perhaps overly conscious of style—writing does radically change one’s perceptions as a reader—and I find their dialogue mechanical, their transitions awkward, their scene construction clumsy, their descriptions imprecise. But if I can make myself hang on for the first twenty or thirty or forty pages, I’ll lose my excessive awareness of the trees and start to perceive the forest. The author’s pure storytelling ability grips me and I no longer notice the defects of his style.

  In shorter fiction, the storyline wouldn’t have this chance to take over. The story would have run its course before I ceased to notice the author’s style.

  Similarly, some novels triumph over the style in which they are written because of the grandeur of their themes or the fascination of their subject matter. The epic novel, presenting in fictional form the whole history of a nation, catches the reader up because of the sheer power of its scope. Leon Uris’s Exodus is a good example of this type of book. And Arthur Hailey’s books exemplify the novel that conveys an enormous amount of information to the reader, telling him almost more than he cares to know about a particular industry. This is not to say that these novels, or others of their ilk, are stylistically clumsy, but merely to point out that style becomes a considerably less vital consideration than it must be in short fiction.

  The idea is less important. I’ve known any number of writers who have postponed writing a novel because they felt they lacked a sufficiently strong or fresh or provocative idea for one. I can understand this, because similar feelings delayed my own first novel. Logic would seem to suggest that a novel, by virtue of its length, would require more in the way of an idea than a short story.

  If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, you may well be better off with a novel than with short stories. Because each short story absolutely demands either a new idea or a new slant on an old one. Often the short story amounts to very little more than an idea fleshed out and polished into a piece of fiction. This is particularly likely to be the case with the short-short, which is typically not much more than a fifteen-hundred-word preamble leading up to a surprise ending, an idea thinly cloaked in the fabric of fiction.

  Novels, on the other hand, are time and again written with no original central idea to be found. Every month sees the publication of new gothic novels, for example, and the overwhelming majority of them hew quite closely to a single plotline—a young woman is in peril in a forb
idding house, probably on the moors; she is drawn to two men, one of whom turns out to be a hero, the other a villain. Another category, the historical romance of the Love’s Tender Fury variety, has an initially innocent heroine getting ravished in various historical periods and with varying degrees of enjoyment.

  Westerns typically adhere to one of five or six standard plotlines. Similarly, there are a handful of basic book types in the mystery and science-fiction fields. And, in the world of mainstream fiction, consider how many novels each year deal with nothing more original than the loss of innocence.

  This is not to say that the novel does not demand ingenuity. It is this quality which enables the novelist to take a standard theme and hang upon it a book which will seem quite fresh and new to everyone who reads it. As he writes, characters come to life, scenes acquire dimension upon the page, and a wealth of original incident serves to make this particular book significantly different from all those other novels to which it is thematically identical.

  Sometimes these elements of characterization and incident which make a novel unique exist in the forefront of the author’s mind when he sits down to the typewriter. Sometimes they emerge from his creative unconscious as he goes along.

  I enjoy writing short stories myself. They offer me considerable satisfaction, for all that their production is economically unsound. I very much enjoy being able to sit down at the typewriter with an idea fully formed in my head and devote myself to a day’s work of transforming that idea into a finished piece of fiction.

  The enjoyment’s so keen that I’d do this sort of thing more often—except that each story requires a reasonably strong central idea, and the idea itself gets used up in the space of a couple of thousand words. I simply don’t get that many ideas that I find all that appealing.

  Ed Hoch makes a living writing nothing but short stories, and he manages this superhuman feat because he seems to be a never-ending fount of ideas. The development of short story ideas and their speedy metamorphosis into fiction is what gives him personal satisfaction as a writer. I sometimes find myself envying him, but I know I couldn’t possibly come up with half a dozen viable short story ideas every month the way he does. So I take the easy way out and write novels.

  You can learn more. Writing has this in common with most other skills: we develop it best by practicing it. Whatever writing we do helps us to become better writers.

  It has been my observation, however, that there is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel. I learned quite a bit by writing short stories. I learned much much more when I wrote my first novel, and I have continued to learn something or other with virtually every novel I have written since.

  Short story writing taught me quite a bit about effective use of the language. I learned, too, how to construct a scene and how to handle dialogue. Everything I learned in this fashion was valuable.

  When I wrote a novel, it was as if I were working out now with heavy weights; I felt growth in muscles I had not previously been called upon to use at all.

  Characterization was at once a very different matter. Before my characters had existed to perform specific functions and speak specific lines. Some were well drawn, some were not, but none had the sort of fictive life that transcended their role on the page. When I wrote a novel, the characters came to life for me. They had backgrounds, they had families, they had quirks and attitudes that added up to more than the broad lines of caricature. I had to know more about them in order to make them maintain vitality over a couple of hundred pages, and thus there was more substance to them. This not to say that my characterization in my earliest novels was particularly good. It was not. But I learned immeasurably from it.

  I learned, too, how to deal with time in fiction. My short stories had often consisted of a single scene, and rarely of more than three or four scenes. The novels I wrote seemed to cover a matter of days or weeks, and of course consisted of a great many scenes. I learned to deal with any number of technical matters—viewpoint shifts, flashbacks, internal monologues, etc.

  You can earn while you learn. It’s curious how many writers tend to expect instant gratification. We’ve barely rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter than we expect to see our efforts on the best seller list.

  It seems to me that other artists are rather less impatient of tangible success. What painter expects to sell the first canvas he covers? More often than not he plans to paint over it once it’s dried. What singer counts on being booked into Carnegie Hall the first day he hits a high note? Every other artistic career is assumed to have an extended and arduous period of study and apprenticeship, yet all too many writers think they ought to be able to write professionally on their first attempt, and mail off their first stories before the ink is dry.

  There must be reasons for this. I suppose the whole idea of communication is so intrinsic a part of what we do that a piece of writing which goes unread by others is like Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling where no human ear can hear it. If nobody reads it, it’s as if we hadn’t even written it.

  Then too, unpublished writing strikes us as unfinished writing. An artist can hang a canvas on his own wall. A singer can croon in the shower. A manuscript, though, is not complete until it is in print.

  At first glance this desire to receive money and recognition for early work would look like the height of egotistic arrogance. It seems to me, however, that what it best illustrates is the profound insecurity of the new writer. We yearn to be in print because without this recognition we have no way of establishing to our own satisfaction that our work is of any value.

  I would not for a moment advise a new writer to expect to get any recognition or financial gain out of a first novel. Unless you are fully prepared to spend months writing a book with no greater reward than the doing of it, you would very likely be better off getting rid of your typewriter and taking up some leisure pastime which places less of a premium on achievement.

  This notwithstanding, there is no gainsaying the fact that any number of first novels are published every year. Publishers typically bitch about the difficulty of breaking even on a first novel, conveniently ignoring the several first novels per season to achieve best seller status. True, most first novels are not published. True too, most that are sell very poorly. The wonder is that any are published at all.

  Thus it is possible to make certain gains, in money and in recognition, while acquiring those skills which can only be acquired through experience. And this sort of paid apprenticeship is far more readily accessible to the novelist than the short story writer.

  It wasn’t always this way. When the newsstands teemed with pulp magazines, the pulps were precisely where the new writer earned a living—albeit a precarious one—while developing his skills and refining his technique. A similar kind of magazine apprenticeship is standard procedure to this day in the field of nonfiction; article writers earn while they learn by writing for house organs and trade journals before they are ready to write either nonfiction books or articles for more prestigious magazines.

  Some of the surviving fiction magazines are certainly open to new writers—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, for example, makes a special point of publishing first stories, having printed over five hundred maiden efforts to date. But ever since the decline of the pulps in the 1950s, there has not been sufficient depth to the magazine fiction market for a writer to serve out his apprenticeship there.

  In contrast, the market for original paperback fiction continues to be quite strong, and quite receptive to the work of beginners. The relative viability of the various categories of category fiction—suspense, adventure, western, science fiction, gothic, light romance, historical romance—runs a cyclical course, but there are always several categories which constitute a healthy market.

  I served my own novelistic apprenticeship in the field of paperback sex novels. In the summer of ’58, I had just finished my first novel and was wondering what to do next. My agent was marketing the book; I had
no idea whether it would sell or fail completely.

  The agent got in touch with me to say that a new publisher was entering the field of sex novels. Did I know what these books were? Could I read a few and try one of my own?

  I bought and skimmed several representative examples in the field. (If I had all of this to do over again, I’d spend more time on this analysis, as detailed in Chapter Three.) I then sat down at the typewriter with the assurance of youth and batted out three chapters and an outline of what turned out to be the start of a career.

  I didn’t know how many sex novels I was to write in the years to follow. For quite a while I was doing a book a month for one publisher with occasional books for other houses as well, along with a certain amount of more ambitious writing. I suppose I must have turned out a hundred of them. Maybe not—I really don’t know, and my copies of most of the books were lost in the course of a move some years ago. Let’s just agree that I wrote a lot of them and let it go at that.

  I learned an immeasurable amount from doing this. Bear in mind that these books were written in more innocent times; while they were the most inflammatory reading matter then on the market, they can barely qualify as soft-core pornography by contemporary standards. Unprintable words were not to be found, and descriptive passages were airbrushed like an old-fashioned Playboy centerfold.

  The books had a sex scene per chapter, but the scene couldn’t take up the whole chapter. There was plenty of room left for incident and characterization, for dialogue and conflict and plot development, room in short for a story to be told with periodic interruptions for sexual titillation. Without the sex, surely, the books would have had no reason for existence; the stories in the main were not strong enough to carry the books unassisted. (Though I can think of one or two exceptions, books where a character took over and came to life, so that the sexual episodes seemed almost like annoying interruptions. But this was rare indeed.)

  This was a wonderful apprenticeship for me. I was by nature a fast writer, gifted with the ability to write smooth copy in a first draft; thus I could produce these books rapidly enough to make a satisfactory living. (They did not pay much, nor were there royalties to be had or subsidiary income to anticipate; it was indeed like working for the pulp magazines, with all sales outright.)