Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

  My own writing methods have changed constantly over the past twenty years, forever shaping themselves to fit my state of mind, time of life, and various special circumstances. In the early years, the Simenon approach had a tremendous appeal for me. I can still see something to be said for the idea of completing a book in as short a total span of time as possible; that way one remains very much in the book during the term of its production, and one’s involvement can be very intense indeed.

  I have on occasion written books in as little as three days; I’ve written a couple that took only seven or eight days that are probably as good as anything I’ve done. I can’t argue that I made a mistake writing those books as rapidly as I did. Nor am I at all inclined to attempt to do that sort of thing now.

  Nowadays I try to write not twenty or thirty pages in a day’s time but five or six or seven. Age may very well be a factor, but I rather doubt that it’s the only one, or even the major one. It’s at least as significant, I think, that I’ve become a more careful writer and a more flexible one. When I was a brash and cocky young scribbler I was blessed with a very useful sort of tunnel vision; i.e., I could just see one way to do something in a book, and so I lowered my head and charged right in and did it. Now my vision has widened. I’m apt to be more aware of possibilities, of the multiplicity of options available to me as a writer. I’m able to see any number of ways to structure a scene. A slower pace helps me choose among them, selecting the one I’m most comfortable with.

  Years ago I was apt to work late at night, and that’s something else I don’t do any more. I’m sure part of the appeal of the midnight oil lay in the image that went with it—the lonely toiler, fortifying himself with endless cups of coffee, smoking endless cigarettes, and fighting the good fight while the rest of the world slept. There was also a practical element involved; with the rest of my family (like the rest of the world) asleep, I could work without interruption, a consummation devoutly to be wished if ever there was one.

  Then too, at that stage in my life I appeared to be more of a night person. I felt the wise thing to do with mornings was to sleep through them, and that a sunrise was a marvelous thing to look at immediately before going to bed.

  Ah, well, the only constant is change, and now I almost always make work the thing I do at the beginning of the day, not the end. My work is done most frequently in the morning, immediately after breakfast. When I try to work considerably later in the day, I find my mind’s not up to it. I’m fresher first thing in the morning, when I’ve had six or eight hours of sleep to clear the garbage out of my head.

  A majority of professional writers seem to have found this to be true. Quite a few report that they used to work in the evening, or late at night, but that they gradually found themselves becoming morning writers. Others work at night still, and find it’s the only time they can work. Others work any old time, whenever they can get it together.

  There’s no magic answer, and there are certainly more exceptions than there are rules, so I would not dream of advocating that anyone abandon a system that seems to be working just fine. However, for someone trying to decide at what point of the day to schedule writing time, I would very strongly recommend working first thing in the morning, especially for those writers with nonwriting jobs. It’s easier to write, and to write well, after a night’s sleep than after a hard day’s work. It’s also a sounder policy to write after morning coffee than after the post-ratrace martini.

  More important than what hours you spend at the typewriter are how often you choose to spend them. If there’s one thing I’m convinced of, on the basis of my own experience and the experience of others, it is the desirability of steady production. There are exceptions—there are always exceptions—but as a rule the people who make a success of novel writing work regularly and consistently. They may take time off between books, or between drafts of a book, but when they’re working they damn well work—five or six or even seven days a week until it’s done.

  There are two reasons why this is important. Obviously, the more steadily you work the sooner you’ll be done with this monumental task. If you write two pages a day, a two hundred-page book is going to take you one hundred days. If you write every day, you’ll complete that book in a little over three months. If you only average three writing days a week, the same book will take the better part of a year.

  More important, I believe, is that steady day-in-day-out work on a book keeps you in the book from start to finish, and keeps the book very much in your mind during those hours you’re at the typewriter and during those hours you’re doing something else—playing, reading, sleeping. You and the book become part of one another for the duration. Your unconscious mind can bring its resources to bear upon plot problems as they present themselves. You don’t have to stop at the beginning of the day’s work to read over what you’ve already written and try to remember what you had in mind when you left off last week.

  “A novelist,” Herbert Gold says, “has to think/dream his story every day. Poets and story writers can go for the inspired midnight with quill dipped in ink-filled skull.” And Joseph Hansen adds, “I have made a number of young novelists angry by saying that writing is something you do when you get up in the morning, like eating breakfast or brushing your teeth. And it is. Or it had better be.”

  After you’ve determined when to write and how often to write, there’s something else you have to work out. That’s how much you’ll write each day, or how many hours you’ll spend doing it.

  Some writers put in a certain number of hours each working day. I’ve never worked that way, and research leads me to believe that most pros pace themselves more by the amount they produce than the time it takes to produce it.

  I’m certainly more comfortable making a contract with myself to produce five pages of copy, than to spend three hours at the typewriter. For one thing, the amount of time I spend working doesn’t seem particularly relevant. Nobody’s paying me by the hour, and nobody’s checking to see if I punched the old time clock at the appointed hour. The idea of spending a set number of hours working may help to allay one’s conscience, but I don’t think it has much to do with the business of writing.

  Some days the writing flows and I can do my five pages in one glorious hour. When that happens, I’m free to do as I wish with the rest of the day. I’ve learned to stop writing then and there, because my mind’s tired after five pages, whether it took me one hour or three hours to get them written.

  Other days, the writing pours like January molasses. Maybe I’ll take five hours to do as many usable pages. Those days aren’t much fun, but I’ve learned to keep at it for as long as it takes, because for all the agony of their composition, those pages are apt to read just as smoothly as the ones that came with no effort. If I threw in the sponge after three hours, those pages wouldn’t get written.

  I had much the same system at the beginning of my career, when I wrote soft-core sex novels in two weeks’ time, five days on, a weekend off, then five days to finish the book. Then I wrote twenty pages a day where now I write five, but the basic principle was the same.

  The number of pages you shoot for is for you to decide. My pace changes depending on the book I’m writing. Some novels seem to demand a more intense level of concentration, and a smaller number of pages will tire me. Others, for whatever reason, move at a faster natural pace.

  You may find that one page a day is as much as you can easily manage. That’s fine. Work six days a week and you’ll produce a book in a year. You may find that it’s no strain for you to turn out ten or twenty or thirty pages at a stretch. That’s fine, too—enjoy yourself. My questionnaire responses suggest that a preponderance of pros do four or five pages a day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be less than professional by shooting for a higher or lower number. They settled on that figure because they found out it seemed to be right for them, just as you’ll find out what’s the right pace for your own novel.

  One thing you might try to
avoid, in this connection, is attempting to extend your productivity. This sort of overload principle works fine in weightlifting, where one’s ability to manage more weight increases as one lifts more weight, but it doesn’t work that way in writing. It’s tempting to try to do a little more each day than we did the day before, and I still find myself intermittently struggling to resist this particular temptation, even after lo these many years. If I can do five pages today, why can’t I do six tomorrow? And seven the day after? For that matter, if I really catch fire and do seven today, that proves I can definitely do a minimum of seven tomorrow. Doesn’t it?

  No, it doesn’t.

  What does happen, in point of fact, is that this sort of overload generally leads to exhaustion. Then I can rationalize taking a couple days off—after all, I’m ahead of schedule, aren’t I?—and the next thing I know I’m not producing consistently at all. I’m writing in fits and starts, stealing days off and then trying to make up for them by doubling up on my work. The book suffers, the manuscript takes longer than it would have taken otherwise, and once again the tortoise nips the hare at the finish line.

  The motto is “Easy does it.” Find your right pace, make sure it’s one that’s not going to be a strain, and then stick with it. If you do have a day when you write an extra page or two, don’t waste time thinking about it. Regard it as a freak occurrence, nothing to be deplored but nothing you should make an effort to repeat. When the next day dawns, resume your regular pace and go on writing the book one day at a time.

  For years I proofread my manuscripts after they were finished. I hated doing this. When I wrote “The End” in the middle of the last page I felt like a marathon runner crossing the finish line. I wanted to lie down, not jog back over the route and see if I’d dropped my keys somewhere along the way.

  As a result, I tended to give my scripts a rather slipshod proofing. That wasn’t disastrous—I tend to turn out a reasonably clean script anyway—but after a number of years I found a way to avoid being confronted with that unpleasant postwriting chore, and it paid unanticipated dividends. So I’ll share it with you.

  I proofread the book as I go along. Not a page at a time, certainly, but either a chapter at a time or a day’s work at a time. I perform this little chore either at the end of the day’s work or before beginning work the following day.

  The effect of this ongoing proofreading is threefold. First, it keeps me very much in the book, especially if I do the job immediately before beginning the next day’s work. In the course of proofreading, I’m picking up where I left off and getting my mind set for resuming the narrative.

  Second, I do a much more thorough job of proofing when I have a molehill to deal with instead of a mountain. I’m able to take the time to notice changes I want to make. I can spot stylistic irregularities and change them then and there.

  Third, I’m more comfortable with what I’ve done because those pages stacked to the left of my typewriter are in more finished form. True, I may wind up rewriting the whole damned thing—but that’s immaterial at this stage. As far as I’m concerned while I’m writing, those neatly stacked pages are what the linotype operator is going to set type from.

  Another stray word about proofreading, while we’re on the subject. While I’m writing, I tend to xxxxxx out mistyped words and failed phrases. I obliterate these xxxxxx’d out passages with a thick marking pen when I proofread. To expedite matters, I go through the pages once just dealing with the xxxxxx’d out portions; then I can concentrate more deliberately on the actual text when I go through it a second time with a fine-tipped pen.

  Seems to me you’re making a pretty broad assumption. You seem to take it for granted that all I have to do is put my body in front of my typewriter and everything will follow. What about the days when my mind’s a blank?

  There are a couple of ways to answer that question. For openers, I’d have to say that the most important step I can take to assure that I’ll get work done today is to plant my behind in my desk chair and face the typewriter. While it may not be absolutely true that if you bring the body the mind will follow, the reverse is indisputable; if I don’t show up for work I’m not going to get work done. Period.

  When in spite of this my mind doesn’t seem to be doing its job, it usually means one of two things. Either I’m paralyzed by an inability to figure out What Happens Next, or my mental attitude is keeping my fingers off the keys, making me dissatisfied with my sentences even as I try to form them in my mind.

  The first problem, being unable to decide What Happens Next, is one that turns out to be projection a good nine-tenths of the time. Most frequently I know what’s going to happen in the five pages I intend to write today; I’m paralyzed because I’m worrying about what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the day after, or sometime in early April.

  That way lies madness. The better I’m able to focus only on what I’m going to write today, the better equipped I find myself to do a good job with today’s writing.

  And tomorrow generally takes care of itself. Understand, I’m not denigrating the value of true and proper planning. That’s why outlining can be so useful, whether your outline is formal or unwritten. And planning continues to be useful on a day by day basis. I often find myself looking up from a magazine of an evening and letting my mind ruminate upon some plot problem a few days in the book’s future.

  But when I’m writing, I do best if I concern myself only with that day’s writing. Because that’s all I’m in a position to deal with at the time. I can no more write tomorrow’s pages today than I can breathe tomorrow’s air today. The fact that I don’t know what I’m going to write tomorrow doesn’t matter much today. I don’t have to know until tomorrow. And, when tomorrow comes, I’ll probably have the answer when I need it. It’ll grow out of what I manage to write today and whatever processes my unconscious mind sets in motion between now and then.

  Sometimes, however, I know what’s going to happen next, both today and tomorrow. What stops me in my tracks is that the words just don’t seem to come out right. Nothing seems to work and I begin to have dark suspicions of organic brain damage.

  That brings us to our second problem: There are days when all you can do is go to the movies. But there aren’t really very many days like that. What I’ve learned to do on those headful-of-cotton-candy mornings is to sit down and write my daily quota of pages anyway.

  I make a bargain with myself. I give myself full permission to decide after the fact that the five pages read as though they were typed by an orangutan. If I hate them the following morning, I can throw them out with a clear conscience. But in the meantime I’m going to sit down and get them written, for better or for worse.

  You’d be surprised how often I wind up with five pages of perfectly acceptable copy this way. I may yank a lot of sheets out of the typewriter en route, crumpling them up, hurling them at the wastebasket, and shattering the air with colorful imprecations. But I generally get five pages written that prove to be, if not divinely inspired, nevertheless as good as my prose is apt to get. And, on those genuinely rare occasions when I throw out the five pages on the morning after, I’ve nonetheless gained from the ordeal; the struggle will have jarred something loose, and I can approach with a clear vision the task that had been so impossibly muddled the day before.

  Here’s where it’s so important that your daily quota is not too great a burden. For my part, I can always manage to squeeze five pages out of my typewriter. It’s a manageable burden. If I set my goals higher, I might have no trouble fulfilling them on good days, but on bad ones I’d be awed by having to produce ten or twelve pages. So I’d do none at all, and instead of making progress I’d sacrifice momentum.

  Now and then a book grinds to a halt not because of projection or muddleheadedness but because something has Gone Wrong. We’ll deal with that in the next chapter.

  Chapter 10

  Snags, Dead Ends and False Trails

  Sometimes a book just plain runs into a w
all. It moves merrily along, lulling you into a false sense of security—is there any other kind?—and then a wheel comes off and there you are, knowing only that it’s your fault and that there ought to be something you can do about it.

  If I had a magic answer, I would not be writing this book. Not because I’d be unwilling to share such divinely-inspired insight with you. Nothing would give me more pleasure. But I’d be too busy finishing up the dozen or more books of mine that ran into walls over the years, and that have languished unfinished in drawers and cardboard boxes ever since.

  I’m not talking about those false starts where I knocked out one or two chapters of a book, then gave it up as a bad job. Those were just ideas I ran up the flagpole; when nobody saluted I hauled ’em down without a second thought. No, I’m talking about books that I stayed with for fifty or a hundred or a hundred fifty pages before something went curiously wrong, with them or with their author, and nothing more ever happened with them.

  In some instances, this has happened to me because of my propensity for writing books without having a terribly clear idea where I’m going. I’m sure that if I always worked from a reasonably detailed outline I would run into dead ends far less frequently. On the other hand, my willingness to take a well-realized opening sequence and follow it to see where it leads has enabled me to write several of my most successful novels. If a trunkful of false starts is part of the price I’ve had to pay along the way, I can’t argue that it hasn’t been worth it.

  All the same, it’s never fun investing substantial time and effort, not to mention mental and emotional involvement, in a never-to-be-finished book. Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” is part of every symphony orchestra’s repertoire, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood has remained in print since Dickens left it unfinished at his death, but this doesn’t mean any of my stillborn literary offspring will ever get anywhere. While regretting them is a waste of time, I’d certainly like to have as few of those abortive efforts as possible in my future.