Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

I wrote three novels and two novelettes about Scudder and took enormous satisfaction in them: I like the books as well as anything I’ve written. They worked, and Scudder worked, because I was able to take a generally sound character idea and transform it into a character who came to life as a projection of the author. I identified strongly with Scudder. For all the apparent difference of our lives and our selves, he and I had any number of underlying aspects in common.

All characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The earth is flat.

The above disclaimer notice, which appeared in the front of Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, brought me an invitation — eagerly accepted, I might add — to join the Flat Earth Society of Canada. My purpose in including the notice was not to proselytize against the globularist heresy, as we Flat Earthers are wont to call it, but to make a point about the disclaimer notices that appear so routinely in so many novels. The statements are generally palpable nonsense; resemblance to persons living or dead is often quite intentional.

Many of the characters with whom we people our fiction are drawn from life, and how could it be otherwise? One way or another, all our writing comes from experience, and it is our experience of our fellow human beings that enables us to create characters that look and act and sound like human beings.

The average reader often seems to think that writers go about snatching people off the streets and bundling them into books with the rapacious fervor of an old-fashioned white slaver. It is as if the characters were stolen from the real world and transplanted bodily into a novel.

Once in a while it very nearly amounts to that. In the genuine roman à clef, where the author presumes to render real events in the guise of fiction, the characters are portrayed as much like their real life prototypes as the author can manage. Thomas Wolfe wrote in this fashion, telling his own story in Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, casting himself as Eugene Gant and his own family as the Gant family. Even so, the Gants inevitably became fictional characters; Wolfe had to invent, to devise. Even a character like Eliza Gant, modeled so faithfully upon his own mother, emerges finally as Wolfe’s interpretation of the woman, as the person he would have been had he been her.

Furthermore, the novelist’s imagination and the novelist’s sense of order work changes upon characters drawn from life. In his autobiographical work, Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood tells of various persons with whom he was acquainted over the years, some of whom appeared previously as characters in his largely autobiographical novels. Here’s how he discusses a friend and the way the man appeared in a novel:

In Down There on a Visit, Francis appears as a character called Ambrose and is described as follows:

“His figure was slim and erect and there was a boyishness in his quick movements. But his dark-skinned face was quite shockingly lined, as if Life had mauled him with its claws. His hair fell picturesquely about his face in wavy black locks which were already streaked with grey. There was a gentle surprise in the expression of his dark brown eyes. He could become frantically nervous at an instant’s notice — I saw that; with his sensitive nostrils and fine-drawn cheekbones, he had the look of a horse which may bolt without warning. And yet there was a kind of inner contemplative response in the midst of him. It made him touchingly beautiful. He could have posed for the portrait of a saint.”

This is true to life, more or less, except for the last three sentences, which relate only to the fictitious part of Ambrose. Photographs of Francis at that time show that he was beautiful, certainly, but that he had the face of a self-indulgent aristocrat, not a contemplative ascetic. I can’t detect the inner response....

Isherwood goes on to recount several other aspects of Francis’s character which he did not incorporate in the fictional Ambrose. However unmistakably the one may have been modeled upon the other, the writing process has clearly made them different personalities.

Another popular sort of novel specializes in holding up a fun-house mirror to life. This is the generally tacky type of book in which the story line is largely a matter of sheer invention, occasionally incorporating bits of rumor and scandal, and with several of the characters so obviously based on prominent persons as to make the reader regard the book almost as an unauthorized biography. Someone remarked not long ago that Frank Sinatra, for one, has been pressed into service in so many novels over the years, whether as the lead or in a cameo role, that he really deserves to collect a royalty. And any number of novels have similarly “starred” Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Onassis, and more other celebrities than I would care to name or number.

More often, the characters we create are drawn in part from people we have known or observed, without our in any sense attempting to recreate the person on the page. I may borrow a bit of physical description, for example, or a mannerism, or an oddity of speech. I may take an incident in the life of someone I know and use it as an item of background data in the life of one of my characters. Little touches of this sort from my own life experience get threaded into my characters much as bits of ribbon and cloth are woven into a songbird’s nest — for color, to tighten things up, and because they caught my eye and seemed to belong there.

The first time I consciously transferred an aspect of a real person into a novel was when I wrote a book called After the First Death, a murder mystery set in the half-world of Times Square streetwalkers. I had at the time a nodding acquaintance with one such woman — and on one occasion she told me about a relationship she’d had of some duration with a married man from Scarsdale. She’d evidently been off drugs at the time, and seeing him exclusively, but after he’d cancelled a planned European trip with her and took his wife to the Caribbean instead, she ended the relationship and returned to prostitution and heroin addiction.

I don’t know that the character of Jackie in my novel had much in common with the woman who told me this story. Jackie was certainly a romanticized character; if she didn’t have a heart of gold, she had at the very least a soft spot in her heart of brass. Nor did I know the real-life hooker well enough to haul her off the streets and plunk her down on the printed page. But certainly the portrayal of Jackie owed a lot to my impression of her, and the story about her Scarsdale Galahad found its way almost word for word into print.

Some years later I wrote a pseudonymous novel in the manner of Peyton Place — sensational doings in a small town, that sort of thing. I very deliberately set the book in a particular town with which I was personally familiar, and several of the characters owed something to real people who lived in the town. For one character, I borrowed the physical description of a local actor, not intending to ape him too closely; only to find that the character I’d created had a will of his own and insisted upon speaking and behaving precisely as his real-life prototype spoke and behaved. I couldn’t write the character’s dialogue without hearing my friend’s voice booming in my ears. Now I suppose it’s possible to fight that sort of thing, but what writer in his right mind would presume to do so? The best possible thing had happened. A character had come to life. I might be inviting a lawsuit or a public thrashing by allowing him to play out his part, but I’d have been false to my art to do otherwise.