Lawrence Block - Step by Step

It was the summer of 1987. We had been living in Florida for almost two years. I’d been writing regularly during that time — a book version of Write For Your Life, a film novelization that never got published because the publisher hadn’t cleared the rights sufficiently, a collaborative nonfiction venture that didn’t quite work out. I managed a couple of short stories, and I’d written the opening chapters of a couple of novels that were fated never to have second chapters, and it was past time for me to sit down and get a new novel written, and I couldn’t think what to write.

On an impulse, I’d contrived to book myself into a writers’ colony for the month of July. I’d never stayed at a colony before, but I’d read about them, and understood they provided room and board and a sort of communal solitude presumably conducive to creative effort. For years I’d been in the habit of going off somewhere when I was having trouble getting something written, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts struck me as a happier choice than a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Abilene, so I applied and was accepted. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, but I figured it couldn’t be less than I was doing at home in Florida.

Maybe I’d write a book about Bernie Rhodenbarr. I’d written five lighthearted books about the light-fingered fellow, and I really wanted to write a sixth, but the couple of attempts I’d made in that direction had gone nowhere. I liked the notion of a story about baseball cards — somebody could collect them, and Bernie could steal them — and I’d bought a couple of books and read up on the subject, but that didn’t mean I was ready to write the book, or even that there was a book to be written.

All that might come together, I decided, by the time I was settled in at VCCA. I’d be there for four weeks, and that ought to be time to get something started, if not finished. And that was all I needed, really — a good start on a book. If I managed that much, I could get the rest done back home in Florida.

Then, perhaps two weeks before I was to get started in Virginia, I got this vision of a guy walking across the country.

Over the next few days more and more of the story came to me. The fellow who started the whole thing was a bartender in Oregon, I decided — or realized, or whatever it was. And another character was a woman who was losing her eyesight. And she had a young son. And—

Bits and pieces. And, along with these folks, I sensed that there was another story line running alongside, involving a serial killer who was roaming the Midwest and murdering women. I couldn’t imagine what he had to do with this other story, or how the two plotlines might intersect, or if they even belonged on the same library shelf, let alone in the same book. But I sensed that what was happening to me was a rather extraordinary case of literary ferment, unlike anything in my prior experience, and the last thing I wanted to do was get in its way.

It was also very much evident that the book I was going to write was to be a very complicated affair, a large multiple-viewpoint novel, with a few dozen characters and a great body of incident. It would need considerable advance plotting, probably an elaborate outline, and it would be a long time before I’d be ready to write it. More than two weeks, certainly — which meant I’d better think of something else to work on at VCCA.

By the time I got in my car for the drive north, I realized I didn’t have any choice. There was only one book in my mind, and it wasn’t going to go away. I didn’t think I could actually start writing it, but maybe I could do some of the preliminary work on it, cobble up some sort of an outline that would serve me when I got back to Florida. Toward that end I took along a Rand McNally road atlas; it would help me with the geographical research, and might also keep me from getting irretrievably lost en route to Virginia.

I took two days to drive there, with a stop in Knoxville to attend a custom-made knife show. (I bought a nice little folding knife. I wonder whatever happened to it. Maybe it’s in the pocket of my Jersey Shore Marathon jacket.) On arrival at VCCA, I found my way to my dormitory room, and from there to my studio in the barn complex a quarter-mile away. I set up my typewriter, placed the road atlas to one side of it and a stack of blank paper to the other, and went to the dining room for dinner.

Come morning, I went to my studio, sat down at the typewriter, and wrote twenty pages. And I did the same thing every morning for twenty-three days, by which time I had completed a 460-page manuscript. I spent a day editing it, and another day getting it photocopied at Sweet Briar College, and then I got in the car and went home.

Writers sometimes say that a particular piece of work wrote itself, although in my experience nothing ever does. From a distance, though, Random Walk would seem to come close. An idea had come to me, apparently from out of nowhere, and two weeks later I’d sat down and begun writing, and three weeks and two days after that I was done. If the damn thing hadn’t written itself, then who, pray tell, was responsible for it?

Well, I guess that would be me. I was the one tapping the typewriter keys, and I was the one getting to my studio early each morning and emerging ten or twelve or fifteen hours later.

Nor was it a simple matter of taking down celestial dictation. I’ve read about people who’ve “channeled” books, and for whom the writing process consisted of little more than transcribing the sentences that unreeled in their brains. (If Mozart is to be believed — and God knows he’s always been reliable in the past — composition was rather like this for him. “There’s nothing to it,” he’s supposed to have said. “All I do is write down the music I hear in my head.”)

I’m not sure what channeling amounts to, for Mozart or for the woman who produced A Course in Miracles; I don’t know whether the actual source at such times is within or outside oneself. I’ll allow that my own experience had something in common with channeling, in that the initial idea came from no apparent source, and that ideas continued to come to me throughout the writing process, so that I was never at a loss for what turn in the narrative ought to happen next.

And that was no small gift. E. L. Doctorow has likened the process of writing a novel to driving at night — you can see only so far as the headlights reach, but you can get clear across the country that way. My characters, led by that bartender from Roseburg, Oregon, were walking by day, not driving by night, but each morning I went to my studio knowing just enough about their journey to carry them along for one more day.

I didn’t have an outline, of course, because I could never really see more than a day’s work into the book’s future. What I did have was my road atlas, and there wasn’t a day that I didn’t spend a substantial amount of time poring over it, working out the walkers’ route, determining what turns they would take and where they would stop. My serial killer, meanwhile, was driving all around the Midwest doing his evil deeds, and I was tracing his route in the atlas as well. Much of the book’s action was unfolding in places I had never been, but that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was writing, but I knew it wasn’t a travel book.

If one were to attribute such things as will to inanimate objects, one could say that Random Walk had shown an overwhelming desire to be written. It had virtually insisted on it.

Alas, it proved a good deal less eager to be read.

My regular publisher, William Morrow, was willing to bring out the book, but only if I cut it severely and reshaped it beyond recognition. I didn’t even consider complying, and my agent sent the book to two other publishers, both of whom wanted to do it. We went with Tor, and I made one small change to make the editor happy, adding a crystal that gets handed around among the walkers. (I’m not convinced it was a good idea, but I can’t see that it hurt anything.)