Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

First thing you can do is decide whether or not your story really has to take place in Devon. Maybe there’s a lonely house on the outskirts of St. Joseph that could serve as the setting for your story as well as any creaking windswept old manse in the West of England. Maybe there’s no such place in reality, but you can build one in your imagination readily enough. Maybe you can readily figure out how people living in such a house, and warped by the strains and stresses built into your basic plot, would relate to and interact with the local people in St. Joseph, much as those moor dwellers in your original outline would relate to the townspeople in Devon. In short, maybe you can transplant all the significant elements of your plot into your own native soil.

If you can manage this, you won’t be cheating; on the contrary, you’ll simply be making the story that much more your own, one that derives from your own experience and reflects your own perceptions. Perhaps any of a hundred writers could turn out an acceptable book about an imagined Devon moor, but how many could write your story of an old farmhouse on the outskirts of your own town, occupied now by the descendants of the original inhabitants, the farm acreage sold off piece by piece over the years, the house itself surrounded by suburban tract houses, but still awesome and forbidding, and....

See?

On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason why your book has to take place in Devon, because of some particular plot component which you regard as intrinsic to the story you want to write. Just as a writer of westerns is locked into setting his books in the old west, you must set this book in Devon.

Fine. As we’ll see shortly, there’s a great deal you can do by way of research to make your setting authentic. But there’s also a way in which you can exploit your own background in order to construct a setting halfway around the world.

You may not know moors from marshmallows, but if you’ve crossed the Central Plains you may recall the sense of infinite space, the loneliness, the uninterrupted flatness. You may have had a similar feeling in the desert. Or you may have experienced a comparable sense of isolation in terrain that has no similarity whatsoever to the moors — the North Woods, say, or smack in the middle of a milling Times Square crowd, or sealed into your own car on a high-speed freeway. The location itself doesn’t matter much. Search into your own bag of past experience, using your past like a Method actor, selecting something that will supply you not with circumstances identical to what you’re writing about but with equivalent feelings.

Similarly, you can pick a house you know and plunk it down on the moors. Your research may have told you that you need a beamed Tudor dwelling, and indeed you may so describe the house in your narrative. Once you get past the beams, however, you can fill in with details of that house down the road that all the kids were scared of when you were in grade school.

Explore your background and experience as a source for story ideas.Earlier, when we talked about reading and analysis, we saw how familiarity with a genre trains the mind to come up with plot ideas suitable for that genre. Similarly, the study you do and the perception you have of yourself as a writer should result in your sifting your background for elements that will prove useful in your writing.

Once when I was in high school I came home one afternoon to find that my mother had left the place locked. I went around and crawled in through the milk chute, an accomplishment which looked to be as likely as slipping a camel through the eye of a needle, given the tiny dimensions of the milk chute and the unpleasantly plump dimensions of the embryonic author. I was to repeat this procedure on numerous occasions when the door was unlocked, for the entertainment of friends and relatives, and I can still recall squirming through that hole in the wall and landing upside down in a confusion of mops and brooms and scrub buckets; the milk chute, unused since the war, opened into a cluttered broom closet.

Nowadays I write books about a burglar. (Perhaps the seed was planted all those many years ago, when I first discovered the thrill of illicit entry.) I’ve written three novels to date about Bernie Rhodenbarr without making use of that milk-chute entrance, but I recalled it a week or so ago, and this time I saw it from the stance of one who writes about burglary. I immediately saw any number of ways such a bit of business could fit into a novel about a burglar, and I let my mind play with the possibilities, and I filed them all away in the cluttered broom closet I call a mind; someday I’ll quite probably get some use out of it.

In the same fashion, ongoing experience becomes grist for the mill. I can’t seem to enter a building without pondering how Bernie would enter it illegally. When I visit a museum I see not merely objects of artistic and historical significance, but things for him to steal. On a recent trip to London, a visit to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields turned up a display of the photograph of a pistol which Soane purchased in the belief that it had belonged to Napoleon. It was actually an utter fake and the whole story about its provenance a pawnbroker’s fabrication; however, only the photo was on display because the actual pistol, fake or no, had been stolen from the museum in 1969.

I think I’d like that story even if I wrote nothing but stories about kittens and bunny rabbits for preschoolers. Given the kind of writing I do, I immediately thought of six different ways to work that item into fiction. I may never use it at all, but my writer’s eye and my writer’s imagination have taken a museum exhibit and turned it into the raw material out of which fiction may someday be fashioned.

Cultivating this habit becomes increasingly important the more time you spend in this business. Consider the paradox of the full-time professional writer: He writes out of his experience, using up his past, and the greater his success the less likely he is to store up useful new experiences. I don’t get a hell of a lot of fresh input sitting at a desk with a typewriter for company. And, while I derive enormous essential stimulation from the company of other writers, I don’t often get source material from them.

Happily, my inclinations are such that I spend a great deal of time away from my desk. My circle of friends includes people of all sorts, and their conversation puts me in worlds I’d never explore otherwise. Just the other day a policeman friend of mine told three or four stories that will very likely turn up in my work sooner or later; more important, his company sharpens and deepens my sense of what a cop’s life is like.

Some years ago a friend told me of an evening his father, then the manager of a Miami Beach hotel, had spent in the company of John D. MacDonald. As a long-time fan of MacDonald, I was very interested in knowing what he was like and what he’d had to say.

“Well, he didn’t have much to say at all,” my friend reported. “He got my father talking, and evidently he’s the world’s best listener. By the time the evening was done, my father didn’t know too much about John D. MacDonald, but MacDonald sure learned a lot about hotel management and the life history of Seymour Dresner.”

And that’s how it works. A lot of us enjoy holding court, sitting back and talking expansively about our work. It’s hearty fare for the ego, to be sure. But if instead we make a real effort to draw out other people’s stories, we’ll be using the time to good advantage, providing ourselves in due course with stories of our own.

The use of conversation just described is another example of the manner in which the writer is always working, even if he doesn’t know for certain what he’s working on or what he’ll ultimately wind up doing with it. Every conversation, every book read, every new place visited, is a part of the endless and all-encompassing business of nonspecific research.