Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  “The question is,” said Alice, “Whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

  “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

  I don’t really know that that’s the question with words; it seems to me that words work best for me if I take care to employ them more or less in accordance with accepted English usage. With outlines, however, it’s important that the writer be the master of the situation.

  That, I think, is the chief danger of outlines—that one can feel bound by them. Remember, the book continues to grow and define itself after the outline has been written, and this process continues during the writing itself. It’s important that you feel free to give your imagination its head. If you can think of a more interesting development, a sounder resolution for Chapter Six, or even a wholly different course for the book to take somewhere along the way, you have to be able to chuck the outline and do whatever’s best for the book.

  Some writers avoid putting their plots down on paper because an outline confines them in this fashion. I lean in this direction myself, and rarely write an outline nowadays unless I’m using it to nail down a contract. Other writers do write out an outline but then put it in a drawer and avoid referring to it during the actual writing of the book.

  Robert Ludlum takes this approach. As he explained in an interview published in Writer’s Digest,

  While working as a producer I learned to break a play down so that I developed a sense of its dimensions, where it was going, what made it work dramatically. Outlining a novel is a way to break down a book in much the same way. It gives me an understanding of the theme, the material, the main characters. I’m able to see the story in terms of beginning and middle and ending. Then, once I have a handle on the story, I don’t need the outline any more. The book itself will differ in plot specifics from the outline, but it’ll be the same in thrust.

  So far we have been talking about an outline strictly as an author’s aid—something you write before you write the book itself, for the purpose of making the book stronger and the writing easier. Along the way, however, I’ve alluded a couple of times to an outline which has another purpose, that of persuading a publisher to offer a contract for a book which has not yet been written.

  Writers who have established themselves professionally rarely write a complete book without having made arrangements for its publication somewhere along the line. When one is of sufficient stature, it’s not even necessary to have a specific idea for a novel in order to get a publisher’s signature on a contract; when one has no track record whatsoever, most publishers would prefer to have a completed manuscript in hand before making any commitment.

  I would strongly advise a first novelist to finish at the very least the first draft of his book before making any attempt to sell it. Almost any publisher will look at a neophyte’s chapters and outline, but he’s unlikely to offer a contract on that basis. Why should he? He has no reason to assume the unproven writer has the capacity to finish the book, to sustain whatever strengths the chapters and outline display. If he is sufficiently attracted by what he sees, he may gamble to the extent of offering far less generous terms than he would for a completed manuscript.

  But that’s not the main reason why I would recommend writing the whole book first. More often than not, any interruption in the writing of a novel is a mistake. A loss of momentum can sometimes be fatal. If the book’s going well, for heaven’s sake stay with it. If it’s not going well, figure out what’s wrong and deal with it; bundling it off to a publisher isn’t going to solve your problems. A couple of times, when I had sent chapters and outline to a publisher, I kept right on with the writing of the book while awaiting word on the portion I’d submitted. In some instances that I can recall, I had the book completed before the publisher made up his mind.

  When you do reach a point in your career where it’s advantageous to submit an outline, the document you will want to produce is a rather different proposition from the sort you write solely for your own benefit. Your object in this submitted outline is to convince another person—the editor or publisher—that you have a sound grasp of the book and will be able to complete a novel which will fulfill the promise of its opening chapters. A successful outline of this sort gives whoever reads it the impression that the book’s already there in your mind, fully realized, just waiting for you to tap it out on the typewriter keys.

  When it comes to clinching a sale, long, detailed outlines are best. There are two reasons for this, one logical and the other human. The logical one is that the more substance and detail you include in an outline, the more the editor is able to know about what you intend to do in the material to come, and thus the better able he is to judge whether the book you will write will be a book he would want to publish.

  The other reason is rather less firmly rooted in logic. Editors are people, too—hard as I occasionally find it to admit this. If they are going to commit their firm to the purchase of a novel in progress, and if they are going to lay substantial cash on the table as an advance to bind the deal, they like to feel they are getting something tangible for their money. A fifty-page outline, comprehensive enough to be what the film industry delights in calling a “treatment,” has some heft to it. You don’t even have to read it to know there’s something there; just weighing it in your hand will get that message across. And, by George, you can tell that the author put in some time writing it. It’s infinitely different from a one-page synopsis that he could have batted out in eighteen-and-a-half minutes on a rainy afternoon. Never mind that the one-page synopsis might be as much as he’d need to have a firm grasp on the remainder of the novel—anyone would be more comfortable dealing on the basis of a fifty-page treatment.

  Just how long and detailed an “outline-for-submission” must be varies greatly with circumstances. Random House contracted for my third mystery novel about burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr on the basis of a one-page letter to my editor, Barbé Hammer. In the letter I told her the book’s basic premise and some of the general avenues I intended to explore. There was nothing in the letter to show that I knew how to resolve the plot complications I intended to develop, and there was considerable vagueness even in the opening premise—I said, for instance, that Bernie was going to be hired to steal a particular collector’s item, from one enthusiast for another’s benefit, but I didn’t say what the gimcrack would be because I admittedly hadn’t yet decided.

  I got by with this rather cavalier approach because of the particular circumstances that were operating. Barbé knew and liked my work. Random House had already published two books about Bernie and folks there were pleased with them aesthetically and commercially. All I really had to do to get a contract was indicate that I had a sound idea for a book, that it was sufficiently “the same only different” to continue the series, and that I at least was confident of my ability to tie everything up neatly by the end of the book.

  In contrast, my outline for my World War II novel ran a dozen or so pages and was as detailed as I could comfortably arrange. In this instance I was offering to write a book of a sort with which I had no real prior experience, and a more substantial outline was necessary not only to convince a publisher that I knew what I was setting out to do but to make me similarly confident. Before I began a 500-page monster of a novel, I wanted to assure myself that I wouldn’t wind up somewhere around page 374 having painted myself into some plotting corner. In retrospect, I wish I’d written this particular outline two or three or four times as long; had I done so, I might have had an easier time of writing the book.

  To sum up:

  An outline is a tool, the equivalent of a painter’s preliminary sketches. Use it to whatever extent it is helpful. Don’t be a slave to it; if the book begins to grow away from the outline, let the book chart its own course.

  A
bove all, remember there’s no one right way to do it. You can sit down with no outline whatsoever and write the whole book from first page to last. Or you can write a one-page synopsis, expand it into a chapter outline, expand that into a detailed chapter outline with each scene sketched in, and even expand that outline into a super-treatment with bits of dialogue included and point-of-view changes indicated. Some writers operate this way, blowing up the balloon of their novel one breath at a time, until the writing of the novel’s actual first draft is just a matter of doubling the length of the final outline. If that’s what works for them, then that’s the right way to do it—for them.

  Finally, for anyone interested in the best illustration I can recall of what an outline is and how it all works, I would recommend Donald E. Westlake’s hilarious novel, Adios, Scheherazade. The narrator is a hapless hack who has written a sex novel a month for the past twenty-eight months and who confronts a massive writer’s block when he attempts to write Opus Twenty-Nine. At one point he produces an outline for the book, an outline that’s very instructive to any apprentice novelist while it finds its way to one of the funniest punchlines I ever read. I can’t reproduce it here, but I earnestly commend the book to your attention.

  Chapter 7

  Using What You Know… and What You Don’t Know

  Write about what you know.

  That’s the conventional wisdom, and it seems as sensible now as it did when I first heard it back around the time when the idea of becoming a writer first occurred to me. Several writers whom I greatly admire—Thomas Wolfe for one, James T. Farrell for another—had written whole series of novels which I recognized as frankly autobiographical. Others wrote books that clearly derived from their own life experience. One dust jacket blurb after another would recount the author’s background, and each of those writers seemed to have the sort of job résumé that would strike terror into the heart of a personnel manager. A writer, I quickly learned, was someone who grew up on an Indian reservation before running off with a circus. Then over a period of years he worked as an itinerant fruit picker, a gandy dancer on the railroads, a fry cook in a lumber camp, and a teacher in ghetto schools. He saw combat in an infantry division and spent a few years as a merchant seaman. He wrestled a grizzly bear and made love to an Eskimo woman—or was it the other way around?

  Never mind. In any event, it was evident to me that I had two choices. I could ramble around the world gathering up subject matter for stories and novels or I could probe the depths of my life to date, telling an eager world just what it was like to grow up in Buffalo, New York, in one of those happy families that Tolstoy has assured us are all alike.

  I recognized at a very early date that I was not temperamentally equipped to write the conventional autobiographical novel. While I would not argue that my family and childhood contain nothing of the stuff of which novels are wrought, I was neither sufficiently perceptive nor of the right emotional bent to turn that background into fiction, though many writers have done that successfully.

  Nor did I seem inclined to stride adventurously into the world, ready to take on whatever grizzly bears and grizzlier women presented themselves. I was in a hell of a hurry—not to amass experience but to get busy with the actual business of writing. As I’ve recounted, I wound up writing for a living at rather a tender age; I couldn’t write out of my own experience because I hadn’t had any, for heaven’s sake.

  One way or another, this is the case with a great many of us. While a few of us actually have the adventures first and then learn how to type, that’s not usually the way it goes. In actual practice most real-life adventurers never get around to writing; there’s always another grizzly bear in their future, and they’re too much inclined to pursue fresh experience to bother with emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth characterized the origin of poetry. Even when we start out with a background of extensive life experience, adventurous or otherwise, we generally tend to use up our past in our fiction and find ourselves stranded like an overzealous general who has outrun his supply lines. It doesn’t take too many books for most of us to exhaust the experiences we’ve piled up before we started writing. And how are we to gather fresh experience after that point? We’ve just been sitting in rooms, staring into space and banging away at typewriter keys, and how are we to fashion that experience into a novel?

  The difficulty of writing out of one’s experience can be vividly demonstrated in the field of genre fiction. In my own bailiwick of crime fiction, for example, I’m at a loss from the standpoint of experience. I have never been a private detective like Joe Gores, a cop like Joseph Wambaugh, or a district attorney like George V. Higgins. Neither have I worked the other side of the street and spent time in the clink like Malcolm Braly and Al Nussbaum—not yet, anyway.

  All the same, I find myself using my own background and experience every time I go to work. Just as often, I find myself using what I don’t know—putting to work a combination of research and fakery to furnish what my own background and experience cannot supply.

  Let’s take them in turn. How can you put your own presumably ordinary background and experience to work for you? Here are a few ways to make use of what you already know.

  Shape your story line to fit your personal knowledge and experience. Let’s hearken back for a moment to the gothic novel we examined in outline form in an earlier chapter. Remember the premise? “A young widow is hired to catalogue the antique furniture in a house on the moors in Devon….” Perhaps you might have come up with just that plot after having done some studying of the gothic category. There’s only one trouble. You don’t know Louis Quinze from Weird Louie the Plumber, you don’t know moors from marshmallows, and the closest you’ve been to Devon is St. Joe, Mo.

  It might seem as though the obvious answer is to write about a weird Missouri plumber with a passion for marshmallows, but the resultant manuscript might be tricky to place with an editor of gothics. A less radical solution calls for examining your plot line and seeing how you can adapt it to fit what you’ve got going for you.

  You say you don’t know zip about antique furniture? Well, that’s okay, but what do you know about? Rare books? Maybe your heroine has been hired to catalogue the ancestral library. Have you got some background in fine art? Maybe she was hired to clean and restore paintings, or to evaluate them or something. Is there some sort of collectible with which you have a fair degree of familiarity? Rare stamps or coins? Old porcelain? Nineteenth-century patent medicine bottles? Roman glass? Oceanic art? A good many plots are almost infinitely adaptable in this fashion, and it doesn’t take too much in the way of ingenuity to discover a means of channeling such a story to fit whatever expertise you can furnish.

  Use familiar settings for your material. Let’s say you haven’t wandered far afield from St. Joe, Mo. Or Butte or Buffalo or Bensonhurst. How are you going to write this story about the young widow on the Devonshire moors and make it authentic?

  First thing you can do is decide whether or not your story really has to take place in Devon. Maybe there’s a lonely house on the outskirts of St. Joseph that could serve as the setting for your story as well as any creaking windswept old manse in the West of England. Maybe there’s no such place in reality, but you can build one in your imagination readily enough. Maybe you can readily figure out how people living in such a house, and warped by the strains and stresses built into your basic plot, would relate to and interact with the local people in St. Joseph, much as those moor dwellers in your original outline would relate to the townspeople in Devon. In short, maybe you can transplant all the significant elements of your plot into your own native soil.

  If you can manage this, you won’t be cheating; on the contrary, you’ll simply be making the story that much more your own, one that derives from your own experience and reflects your own perceptions. Perhaps any of a hundred writers could turn out an acceptable book about an imagined Devon moor, but how many could write your story of an old farmhouse on the outski
rts of your own town, occupied now by the descendants of the original inhabitants, the farm acreage sold off piece by piece over the years, the house itself surrounded by suburban tract houses, but still awesome and forbidding, and….

  See?

  On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason why your book has to take place in Devon, because of some particular plot component which you regard as intrinsic to the story you want to write. Just as a writer of westerns is locked into setting his books in the old west, you must set this book in Devon.

  Fine. As we’ll see shortly, there’s a great deal you can do by way of research to make your setting authentic. But there’s also a way in which you can exploit your own background in order to construct a setting halfway around the world.

  You may not know moors from marshmallows, but if you’ve crossed the Central Plains you may recall the sense of infinite space, the loneliness, the uninterrupted flatness. You may have had a similar feeling in the desert. Or you may have experienced a comparable sense of isolation in terrain that has no similarity whatsoever to the moors—the North Woods, say, or smack in the middle of a milling Times Square crowd, or sealed into your own car on a high-speed freeway. The location itself doesn’t matter much. Search into your own bag of past experience, using your past like a Method actor, selecting something that will supply you not with circumstances identical to what you’re writing about but with equivalent feelings.

  Similarly, you can pick a house you know and plunk it down on the moors. Your research may have told you that you need a beamed Tudor dwelling, and indeed you may so describe the house in your narrative. Once you get past the beams, however, you can fill in with details of that house down the road that all the kids were scared of when you were in grade school.

  Explore your background and experience as a source for story ideas. Earlier, when we talked about reading and analysis, we saw how familiarity with a genre trains the mind to come up with plot ideas suitable for that genre. Similarly, the study you do and the perception you have of yourself as a writer should result in your sifting your background for elements that will prove useful in your writing.