Lawrence Block: Writing the Novel

As a noun, novel means a book-length prose narrative. As an adjective, it means “of a new kind or nature.” The dual definition is historic, of course, deriving from a time when the novel was a new fictional form. Still, I see it as a happy accident, for every novel is novel.

I would suppose that a majority of this book’s readers have yet to write a book-length work of fiction. It is commonplace to hear that the first novel presents special problems to author and publisher alike. But in a larger sense every novel is a first novel, presenting no end of unique problems, carrying enormous risks, and offering immense excitement and other rewards.

If you’re unprepared for the risks, perhaps you’d like to rethink this whole business of novel-writing. If you’re unwilling to live with the possibility of failure, perhaps you’d be more comfortable writing laundry lists and letters to the editor.

If you really want to write a novel, stick around.

One thing you won’t find in this book is an explanation of the way to write a novel.

Because I don’t believe there is one. Just as every novel is unique, so too is every novelist. The study I’ve made of the writing methods of others has led me to the belief that everybody in this business spends a lifetime finding the method that suits him best, changing it over the years as he himself evolves, adapting it again and again to suit the special requirements of each particular book. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another; what works with one book won’t necessarily work with another.

Some novelists outline briefly, some in great detail, and a few produce full-fledged treatments that run half the length of the final book itself. Others don’t outline at all. Some of us revise as we go along. Others do separate drafts. Some of us write sprawling first drafts and wind up cutting them to the bone. Others rarely cut three paragraphs overall.

Some months before I wrote my own first novel — of which there will be more later — I read a book which purported to tell how to write a novel. The author taught writing at one of America’s leading universities and had written a couple of well-received historical novels, and he had set out to tell the great audience of would-be novelists how to go and do likewise.

His method was a dilly. What you did if you wanted to write a novel, I was given to understand, was to trot down to the nearest stationery store and pick up several packs of three-by-five file cards. Then you sat at a desk with the cards and a trayful of sharp pencils and got down to business.

First you went to work on your character cards. You wrote out one or more of those for each and every character to appear in the book, from the several leads to the most minor bit players. For the major characters, you might use several cards, devoting one to a physical description of the character, another to his background, another to his personal habits, and a fourth, say, to the astrological aspects at the moment of his birth.

Then you prepared your scene cards. Having used some other cards to rough out the plot, you set about working up a file card for every scene which would take place in your novel. If one character was going to buy a newspaper somewhere around page 384, you’d write out a scene card explaining how the scene would play, and what the lead would say to the newsdealer, and what the weather was like.

There was, as I recall, rather more to this method. By the time you were ready to write the book you had innumerable shoeboxes filled with three-by-five cards and all you had to do was turn them into a novel — which, now that I think of it, sounds rather more of a challenge than converting a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or base metal into gold.

I read this book all the way through, finding myself drawing closer to despair with every passing chapter. Two things were crystal clear to me. First of all, this man knew how to write a novel, and his method was the right method. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly manage it.

I finished the book, heaved a sigh, and gave myself up to feelings of inadequacy. I decided I’d have to stick to short stories for the time being, if not forever. Maybe someday I’d be sufficiently organized and disciplined and all to get those file cards and dig in. Maybe not.

Couple of months later I got out of bed one morning and sat down and wrote a two-page outline of a novel. About a month after that I sat down to the typewriter with my two-page outline at hand and a ream of white bond paper at the ready. I felt a little guilty without a shoebox full of file cards, but like the bumblebee who goes on flying in happy ignorance of the immutable laws of physics, I persisted in my folly and wrote the book in a couple of weeks.

Shows what a jerk that other writer was, doesn’t it? Wrong. It shows nothing of the sort. The extraordinarily elaborate method he described, while no more inviting in my eyes than disembowelment, was obviously one that worked like a charm — for him.

Perhaps he said as much. Perhaps he qualified things by explaining that his method was not the way to write a novel but merely his way to write a novel. It’s been a long time since I read his book — and it’ll be donkey’s years until I read it again — so I can’t trust my memory on the point. But I do know that I was left with the distinct impression that his method was the right method, that all other methods were the wrong method, and that by finding my own way to write my own novel I was proceeding at my own peril. It’s unlikely that he put things so strongly, and my interpretation doubtless owes a good deal to the anxiety and insecurity with which I approached the whole prospect of writing a book-length work of fiction.

Nevertheless, I would hate to leave anyone with the impression that the following pages will tell you everything to know about how to write a novel. All I’ll be doing — all I really can do — is share my own experience. If nothing else, that experience has been extensive enough to furnish me with the beginnings of a sense of my own ignorance. After twenty years and a hundred books, I at least realize that I don’t know how to write a novel, that nobody does, that there is no right way to do it. Whatever method works — for you, for me, for whoever’s sitting in the chair and poking away at the typewriter keys — is the right way to do it.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

If it persists, you probably ought to write a novel. Interestingly, most embryonic fiction writers accept the notion that they ought to write a novel sooner or later. It’s not terribly difficult to see that the world of short fiction is a world of limited opportunity. Both commercially and artistically, the short-story writer is quite strictly circumscribed.

This has not always been the case. Half a century ago, the magazine story was important in a way it has never been since. During the twenties, a prominent writer typically earned several thousand dollars for the sale of a short story to a top slick magazine. These stories were apt to be talked about at parties and social gatherings, and the reputation a writer might establish in this fashion helped gain attention for any novel he might ultimately publish.

The change since those days has been remarkable. In virtually all areas, the short fiction market has shrunk in size and significance. Fewer magazines publish fiction, and every year they publish less of it. The handful of top markets pay less in today’s dollars than they did in the much harder currency of fifty or sixty years ago. Pulp magazines have virtually disappeared as a market; a handful of confession magazines and a scanter handful of mystery and science-fiction magazines are all that remain of a market once numbered in the hundreds. Whole categories of popular fiction have categorically vanished; the western, the sports story, the light romance — these were once published in considerable quantity, twelve or fifteen stories per magazine, and now they have simply gone the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon.