Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

Which comes first, the plot or the character?

There’s no answer for that one. A book may start with either the plot or the characters more fully grasped, but both aspects generally take shape side by side as the book itself is formed. Even in books where I think I know pretty much what’s going to happen before I start writing, unplanned incidents crop up in the plotting and invariably call for the creation of new minor characters on the spot. My lead, say, goes looking for someone at a hotel. His quarry’s out, but a conversation ensues with the hotel clerk, either to develop certain information or just because such a conversation would be part of the natural order of things. I can make that clerk as much or as little an individual as I want. He can be tall or short, young or old, fat or thin. He can have something or nothing much to say.

Is he doing something when my lead approaches him? Looking at a girlie magazine? Filling in a crossword puzzle in ink? Dozing? Sucking on a bottle of bourbon?

These are all decisions you make as a writer. You may make them quickly and spontaneously and intuitively. You may elect to tell a lot or a little about this sort of bit player. The success of your novel will not stand or fall upon the way you handle him, as it well may hinge on your treatment of major characters, but all characterization plays an important part in the overall impact of your fiction.

An outline is a tool which a writer uses to simplify the task of writing a novel and to improve the ultimate quality of that novel by giving himself more of a grasp on its overall structure.

And that’s about as specifically as one can define an outline, beyond adding that it’s almost invariably shorter than the book will turn out to be. What length it will run, what form it will take, how detailed it will be, and what sort of novel components it will or will not include, is and ought to be a wholly individual matter. Because the outline is prepared solely for the benefit of the writer himself, it quite properly varies from one author to another and from one novel to another. Some writers never use an outline. Others would be uncomfortable writing anything more ambitious than a shopping list without outlining it first. Some outlines, deemed very useful by their authors, run a scant page. Others, considered equally indispensable by their authors, run a hundred pages or more and include a detailed description of every scene that is going to take place in every chapter of the book. Neither of these extremes, nor any of the infinite gradations between the two poles, represents the right way to prepare an outline. There is no right way to do this — or, more correctly, there is no wrong way. Whatever works best for the particular writer on the particular book is demonstrably the right way.

I’ve written quite a few novels without employing any outline whatsoever. The advantage of eschewing outlines is quite simple. With no predetermined course, the novel is free to evolve as it goes along, with the plot growing naturally out of what has been written rather than being bound artificially to the skeletal structure of an outline like a rosebush espaliered to a trellis.

The writer who does not use an outline says that to do so would gut the book of its spontaneity and would make the writing process itself a matter of filling in the blanks of a printed form. At the root of this school of thought is the argument first propounded, I believe, by science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon. If the writer doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, he argued, the reader can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next.

There’s logic in that argument, certainly, but I’m not sure it holds up. Just because a writer worked things out as he went along is no guarantee that the book he’s produced won’t be obvious and predictable. Conversely, the use of an extremely detailed outline does not preclude the possibility that the book will read as though it had been written effortlessly and spontaneously by a wholly freewheeling author.

Some time ago I queried a hundred or so authors on their writing methods. A considerable number explained that they didn’t outline at all, or prepared minimal outlines at most. Here’s Willo Davis Roberts echoing Sturgeon’s Principle:

I seldom outline, except insofar as I have to come up with enough to interest an editor if I want a contract before I do the book. Often I do not know how a suspense novel will turn out until I get to the last chapter, which is more fun than having the end all planned beforehand.

Tony Hillerman takes the same position, not because it’s more fun necessarily but because it’s what comes naturally for him:

I have never been able to outline a book. I work from a basic general idea, a couple of clearly understood characters, a couple of thematic and plot ideas, and a rough conception of where I’m going with it all. I also work with a clear idea of place. I tend to write in scenes — getting one vividly in mind, then putting it quickly on paper.

In marked contrast, consider this from Richard S. Prather, author of forty suspense novels, most of them lighthearted frothy chronicles of the doings of private eye Shell Scott:

I spend considerable time on plot development, typing roughly 100,000 or more words of scene fragments, gimmicks, “what if?” possibilities, alternative actions or solutions, until the overall story line satisfies me. I boil all of this down to a couple of pages, then from these prepare a detailed chapter-by-chapter synopsis, using a separate page (or more) for each of, say, twenty chapters, and expanding in those pages upon characters, motivations, scenes, action, whenever such expansion seems a natural development. When the synopsis is done, I start the first draft of the book and bang away as speedily as possible until the end.

If I ever tried the method Prather describes, I’m sure what I produced would have all the freshness and appeal of week-old mashed potatoes; it would certainly not possess the sparkle of his Shell Scott books — which only serves to underscore the highly individual nature of outlines in particular and writing methods in general. If writing with an outline is for some people like filling in a printed form, writing without an outline is for others like playing tennis without a net — as Robert Frost said of free verse. In some instances, it’s even more like walking a tightrope without a net.

It’s all up to you. If you feel comfortable beginning your book without an outline — or even without all that firm an idea where it’s going — by all means go ahead. If you’ll feel more confident of your ability to finish the book with an outline in front of you, by all means construct and employ one. As you go along, you’ll learn what works best for the particular writer you turn out to be.

And that’s all that matters. No one ever bought a book because it was written with an outline, or because it wasn’t.

I want to use an outline. Now what?

The first step is to find out what an outline is. And the easiest way to do that is to write one. Not of your book but of somebody else’s.

In an earlier chapter, we discussed this method of preparing an outline of someone else’s book as a means of understanding how novels work. The process is similarly valuable as an aid to learning what an outline is.

Some years back I decided in a weak moment that I wanted to write movies. I was bright enough to recognize that film is an infinitely different medium from prose, and reasoned that I had to familiarize myself with it before I could expect to produce anything that would fly. First thing I did was start going to movies day after day.