Writing the Novel

by Lawrence Block

  One thing I’ve come to recognize is that I tend to run into a wall at a certain point in almost all of my books. I’ve been given to understand that marathon runners experience this sort of exhaustion somewhere around the twenty-mile mark when their glycogen stores run out. They keep going anyway and generally finish the race on their feet.

  Most of my suspense novels run a shade over two hundred pages in manuscript, which probably comes to something like sixty thousand words. More often than not, these books hit the wall somewhere around page 120. It’s around that point that I find myself losing confidence in the book—or, more precisely, in my ability to make it work. The plot seems to be either too simple and straightforward to hold the reader’s interest or too complicated to be neatly resolved. I find myself worrying that there’s not enough action, that the lead’s situation is not sufficiently desperate, that the book has been struck boring while my attention was directed elsewhere.

  I have come to realize that this conviction is largely illusory. I don’t know what causes this misperception of mine, but I would suspect it reflects attitudes of my own that have nothing much to do with the book. In any event, I know from experience that there’s very likely nothing wrong with the book, and that if I push on and get over the hump I’ll probably have a relatively easy time with the final third of the manuscript, and that the book itself will be fine.

  If I put it aside, however, and wait for something wonderful to happen, I’ll very likely never get back to it.

  It may not work this way for everyone, but I’ve learned to my cost that it works this way for me. The temptation to take a break from a novel when it runs out of gas is overwhelming. It seems so logical that such a break will have a favorable effect; phrases like “recharging one’s batteries” come readily to mind. The wish, I’m afraid, is father to the thought; struggling with a difficult book is unpleasant, and one very naturally wishes to be doing something else—anything else!—instead. But such a move is generally undertaken at the cost of completing the book.

  I hardly ever go back to the books I abandon. Maybe that’s as well, maybe they’re better off rusting out on the side of the road, but I don’t think so. It seems to me that some of the ones I let go of had just run into that wall around page 120; if I’d stayed with them they’d have worked out fine. By taking a break from them I sacrificed all the momentum I’d built up. In addition, I let my grasp of the characters and settings loosen up. The book drew away from my consciousness and from my unconscious as well.

  Understand, please, that I’m not referring to an occasional break of a day or two. That may be useful for me when I’ve been working too hard for too long and I need to relax. But when I put a book aside for a week or a month, when I deliberately elect to shelve it while I work on something else, I’m really laying it aside forever.

  This said, the fact remains that many books do hit snags, run into dead ends, or wander off down false trails. Having established that the thing to do is press on with them, the question arises as to how best to manage this.

  Frequently the trouble is plot. If you outline as I generally do, with a more comprehensive picture of the early portion of the book and blind faith that the latter chapters will take care of themselves, the problem is often one of planning what will occur next. In mysteries, where the unfolding of action occurs simultaneously with the gradual discovery of what’s really been happening, this business of figuring out what’s going on is doubly problematic.

  But people who outline carefully can have the same sort of plot trouble. For them—or for me, with those books in which I use a detailed outline—the problem comes when the book grows apart from its outline. Perhaps a certain character has taken shape in such a way as to make what’s scheduled to happen no longer viable. We spoke earlier of the need for flexibility, stressing that you have to be willing to adapt your outline to allow for the organic growth of your novel. When this happens, you’re in the same place as the person writing without an outline to start with. You have to figure out what happens next.

  The image that comes to mind when I think of this sort of snag is that of a log jam. I’ve generally got enough ideas in my mind but they’re snarled up like floating timber in a river, pinning each other down, getting in each other’s way. If I could just shake things loose the book would flow downstream with no trouble at all.

  The best way I’ve found to jar thoughts loose is to talk to myself at the typewriter, babbling away at myself without regard to style or sense, producing something that’s a combination of stream-of-consciousness, letter to self, and outline of the remainder of the book. I usually throw these things away when they’ve ceased to be useful—I’ve never seen the point in saving remnants for posterity, figuring it’s unlikely enough that posterity will be interested in my books, let alone my literary fingernail clippings. With my most recent book, however, I ran headlong into what looked at the time to be a serious plotting problem. I resolved it by chattering to myself at the typewriter, and I haven’t yet discarded the gibberish I produced, having realized at the time that it might come in handy to illustrate a point in this present volume. Here, then, is how I talked to myself during a difficult stage of The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling:

  All right, where’s the book going? Bernie stole the book from Arkwright on Whelkin’s orders. Then went to meet Whelkin at Porlock’s apartment. She drugged him, and when he woke he was framed for her murder. Meanwhile, a Sikh tried to get the book from Bernie and went off with the wrong book.

  Okay. Say the Sikh worked for the Maharajah of Jaipur. Madeleine Porlock was being kept by somebody, stole the book and sold it to Arkwright. Suppose Porlock was sleeping with Arkwright, kept by him. Bernie could know this from fur labels in her closet. She and Whelkin knew each other—that’s why she wore the wig to the bookstore—and she managed to learn that Whelkin was going to try to steal the book via Bernie.

  Suppose Arkwright wanted the book to swing an import-export deal with a Saudi Arabian big shot who collects anti-Semitic material. The book would be a sweetener. Arkwright’s enough of a collector to have gotten into a book discussion with the Saudi.

  Suppose there were a couple of dozens of these books. Whelkin got hold of the cache in England and faked the Haggard inscription on all of them, selling them one at a time to rich book collectors with the proviso that they keep it a secret. He’s sold a copy to Arkwright. Then he finds out Arkwright is going to show his copy to the Saudi. He has to get the Arkwright copy back or the Saudi will know there’s been fraud committed.

  Who killed Porlock?

  Could be Whelkin. Say Whelkin worked through Porlock to get Arkwright to buy the book. Porlock was trying to recover the book herself to sell it elsewhere. Whelkin entered the apartment after she drugged Bernie and killed her, framing Bernie for it.

  Or suppose it was Arkwright? When he found the book missing he suspected Porlock engineered the theft. He figured she played him for a sucker and shot her and left the gun in Bernie’s hand to get rid of the disloyal mistress and the actual burglar in one swoop. Bernie could half-recognize the gun from having seen it in Arkwright’s den.

  What about the Sikh? He works for somebody, the Saudi or the Maharajah, who cares?, and he learned that Bernie had stolen the book....

  This process of talking out loud goes on for another couple of hundred words, with more possibilities brought up and discussed and set out for inspection. Then I wrote an outline of the next three chapters to be written, and then, unblocked and a little bit clearer, I sat down and wrote them.

  That wasn’t the end of my problems with The Burglar Who Liked To Quote Kipling. The plot was a complicated affair and it continued to work itself out as it went along, and twice more I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and did some thinking on the keys. Both times I managed in this fashion to shake something loose and I was able to continue plotting and writing the book, carrying it through to completion. I not only finished a book that at one point looked
unworkable, but I wound up producing a novel I’m pleased with.

  If instead I had put it on the shelf to sort itself out, I’m certain it would still be there, gathering dust and serving as the source of monumental guilt. Snags and dead ends don’t sort themselves out, I’ve come to believe. They get sorted out, and it takes work, and you have to do it yourself.

  You don’t have to do this sort of thing on paper. Some writers find it useful to talk this sort of a problem into a tape recorder. Later they play back the tape and find out what they’ve got in mind. Others work things out by discussing things with a friend. Not every friend will do for this process, and you have to experiment to determine which of your acquaintances serves you best as a sounding board. Some people—well-meaning, certainly, and often creative themselves—serve only to stifle your imagination. Others prove enormously helpful, perhaps because they’re capable of listening so attentively. The person you select may be an agent or an editor. It may as easily be someone unconnected with the business, someone who doesn’t even read much. You can try different people to see who does you some good, bearing in mind the distinct possibility that this is a process you can only handle on your own.

  Sometimes my difficulty in writing Chapter Eleven is directly attributable to the way I wrote Chapter Ten. If I take a wrong turn in a book, that can fence me in further down the line.

  The answer’s clear enough. You drop back fifteen yards and punt. In other words, I go back to where things took that wrong turn and start rewriting at that point.

  The problem lies in knowing when that’s what’s hanging you up. Happily enough, the solution sometimes works even when this isn’t the real problem. Maybe you’re blocked because of atmospheric conditions, or phases of the moon, or what you had for dinner last night. Even so, redoing a chapter you’ve already written may start the juices flowing and unblock you all the same.

  When John D. MacDonald goes stale, he props open somebody else’s book and starts copy typing. After a few paragraphs or pages, he finds himself changing a word here and a phrase there, improving what he’s copying. Pretty soon he’s ready to get back to work on something of his own.

  Perhaps you’ll find this approach useful should you go stale in the course of writing your novel. There are a few other suggestions that may or may not prove helpful.

  Read what you’ve written. Suppose you’ve had to spend a week or two away from the manuscript, not because you’ve been avoiding it but because something else came up. The danger here is not just loss of momentum but that the book slips out of mind. Take your time and read it over before plunging back into it. You may even want to read it more than once. Remember that, important as it is for us to stay in the now while we write a book, a portion of our mind deals with the past and the future—i.e., what we’ve already written and what we’ll be writing next. Reading the manuscript recharges those batteries.

  Retype the last few pages. This is a good way to get back into the rhythm of your writing, whether you’ve been away from it for a short or long period of time. I’ve heard of writers who make it a practice to begin each day’s work by retyping the last page they wrote the day before. The habit may have started when they left off in the middle of the page and wanted to start in on a clean page; it endured when they found it helped them recapture the flow of the previous day’s writing.

  Break in the middle of a sentence. I’ve read this advice in various forms over the years. Some people advocate stopping at the bottom of the fifth page of the day, say, even if it’s smack in the middle of a hyphenated word. Others are less compulsive about where you stop but merely suggest that it be at a point where you know precisely what sentence you’re going to write next.

  The theory here is that you’ll have an easier time picking the book up the next day because you already know what your first sentence or two will be. I offer this suggestion because it evidently works for some people, but I’m not going to tout it too strongly because I’ve really made some grim mornings for myself this way.

  Imagine, for instance, sitting down to the typewriter and seeing this looking back at you. “She looked up at me, bright-eyed, and her smile was like….”

  Like what, for the love of God? I obviously had a simile in mind when I wrote what I wrote, and I’ll never come up with a new simile and believe it to be as good as the lost one, and in the meantime I may spend half an hour scratching my head and trying to recall what I was thinking of. If I’ve got a good sentence in mind, the best thing I can do with it is commit it to paper before I lose it. So my own advice would be more along the lines of this:

  Find a logical place to break off. At the end of a chapter, or the end of a scene, or the end of a paragraph, or at the very least at the end of a sentence. Not only does this avoid the sort of minor aggravation described above, but I believe it helps focus the attention of the subconscious mind upon the new chapter or scene or whatever to be tackled next.

  You’ve abandoned books—quite a few of them, from the sound of it. And you’ve already said there’s a strong possibility that my first novel won’t prove publishable, that its main function may be as a learning experience. Suppose I reach a point where I’m sure it’s not going to succeed. Wouldn’t I be justified in abandoning it?

  No.

  Oh, you can abandon the book. For that matter, you don’t have to start writing it in the first place.

  But if you do undertake to write a first novel, I strongly urge you to finish it. Whether or not you lose faith in it along the way. Whether or not you’re convinced it stinks. No matter what, stay with it a day at a time and see it through to completion. If its chief function is to be educational, rest assured that you’ll learn infinitely more by finishing a first novel than by casting it aside.

  I’d suggest further that you complete a first draft from beginning to end before getting involved with substantial revision. There’s one exception—if you want to go back and start over after you’ve done forty or fifty pages, feel free to do so. But after you’ve passed the fifty-page mark, I would recommend that you push onward to the end before giving any thought to rewriting.

  I have a reason for this stance. I’ve observed that most of the people who start first novels never finish them, and I’ve come to believe that actually seeing a book through to the finish line is the most important thing you can do in your first essay at the novel. This to my mind is what separates the sheep from the goats and the ribbon from the clerks: the determination to stay with a book until it’s done, for better or for worse.

  If you abandon a first novel, the chances of your ever writing and completing a second novel are rather slim. If you pause in the course of a first novel for substantial revision, the chances of your finishing the book are lessened. Finishing a novel isn’t a cinch, even if you’ve done it a dozen times already. When you’re making your initial attempt, I would suggest that other considerations be kept in the background. In this case, the first thing is to get it written. Later on you can worry more about getting it right.

  Chapter 11

  Matters of Style

  In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  I’ve often wondered, when contemplating the passage quoted above, whether or not the author wasn’t being a trifle disingenuous. We certainly regard Hemingway as a highly stylized writer. Passages from his works, taken out of context, are unmistakably his, and the Hemingway style is as inviting a target for the parodist as is the Bogart lisp for an impressionist. It’s hard to believe a man could develop a style at once so individualized and so influential without having the slightest suspicion of what he was doing.

  Be that as it may, I have no quarrel with the implied message—i.e., that the best way to develop a style is to make every effort to write as naturally and honestly as possi
ble. It is not intentionally mannered writing that adds up to style, or richly poetic paragraphs, or the frenetic pursuit of novel prose rhythms. The writer’s own style emerges when he makes no deliberate attempt to have any style at all. Through his efforts to create characters, describe settings, and tell a story, elements of his literary personality will fashion his style, imposing an individual stamp on his material.

  There are a handful of writers we read as much for style as for content. John Updike is one example who comes quickly to mind. The manner in which he expresses himself is often interesting in and of itself. It is occasionally said of a particularly effective actor that one would gladly pay money to hear him read the telephone directory. Similarly, there are readers who would gladly read the phone book—if someone like Updike had written it.

  The flip side of this sort of style is that it sometimes gets in the way of content in the sense that it blunts the impact of the narrative. Remember, fiction works upon us largely because we are able to choose to believe in its reality. Hence we care about the characters and how their problems are resolved. Just as a poor style gets in our way, making us constantly aware that we are reading a work of the imagination, so does an overly elaborate and refined style set up roadblocks to the voluntary suspension of our disbelief. From this standpoint, one may argue that the very best style is that which looks for all the world like no style at all.

  Style, along with the various technical matters that come under that heading, is difficult for me to write about, very possibly because my own approach has always been instinctive rather than methodical. From my earliest beginnings as a writer, it was always a relatively easy matter for me to write smoothly. My prose rhythms and dialogue were good. Just as there are natural athletes, so was I—from the standpoint of technique, at least—a natural writer.