Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

Such Men Are Dangerous — written under the pen name of Paul Kavanagh — concerns a burnt-out ex-Green Beret on the verge of a breakdown who hies himself off to an island in the Florida Keys and lives a hermit’s existence. Then a CIA type drops in and involves him in a caper. This would have been a natural for the First-Things-Second approach, but I was more interested in establishing the lead’s character at the beginning since I saw that as the most important single element in the book. Moreover, I wanted to show the character going through the process of personality disintegration before he found his way to the Keys, then show the contrast achieved through some months of solitude and self-sufficiency.

The Sins of the Fathers, the first of three books about Matthew Scudder, begins with his being hired by the father of a murder victim. The action which follows is gradual and I felt the book would build more effectively if events were dealt with in chronological order. The two succeeding Scudder books, however, open First-Things-Second.

There are two schools of thought about the opening of a novel. One holds that the important thing is to get it written, the other that the important thing is to get it right. Both of them are quite valid, of course; the distinction is one of emphasis, and it will vary with the writer and with the particular novel.

In my own case, a book is never entirely real for me until I begin putting words on paper. The words of an outline or treatment somehow don’t count. I have to be doing the actual writing, pulling finished pages of prose and dialogue from my typewriter. The pages may not be finished in any true sense; I may throw them out, or rewrite them any number of times, before the book is in final form. But they have the look of finished pages, and when they begin to accumulate to the left of my machine, I know I’m really engaged in the curious process of writing a book.

Because of this, I probably start some books prematurely, before they’re as well thought out as they might be. My first drafts of my first several chapters are frequently a part of this thinking-out process. It’s in the course of writing them that I find out a lot of essential information about my characters and the plot in which they’re caught up.

This happened in The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling.

Having already written two books about Bernie Rhodenbarr, I probably didn’t have to type out fifty pages of first draft in order to make his acquaintance. Nor was I running blind as far as plot was concerned; I already had a pretty clear view of the plot for at least the first hundred pages when I sat down to write page one.

Even so, fifty pages in I decided I didn’t like what I’d done. The pace felt wrong to me. There were some characters I wanted to drop, some scenes I wanted to compress. There was a relationship between Bernie and his sidekick Carolyn Kaiser which I knew more about for having written the fifty pages; as a result I wanted to do them over so I could redefine it in the early pages. There were some things I knew about the plot that I hadn’t known when I started, and I wanted to lay the groundwork for them in my opening.

On the other hand, I wrote a book called After The First Death knowing a great deal about the opening and not too much about what would happen later on. The premise is simple enough: a man has spent time in prison for killing a prostitute during an alcoholic blackout. He wins his release via one of those landmark decisions of the early sixties — Miranda, Escobedo, Gideon, one of those cases. The book opens First-Things-Second style, with Alex waking slowly, coming out of blackout in a Times Square hotel room, seeing a dead woman on the floor in a pool of blood and rocked with the thought that he’d done it again. In the second chapter he decides not to turn himself in, as he did the first time, but becomes a fugitive from justice. Then we’re at last told who he is and what it is that he seems to have done again, and then, the flashback completed, he searches his memory and gets a tiny flash of the moment just before he went into blackout, enough of a flash to convince him that he didn’t kill the hooker after all and that he has to find out who did. The rest of the book concerns his attempts to do so.

I didn’t know who the killer was when I started the book. I didn’t even have a clue who the various suspects would be. All I really knew was how I wanted the book to open. That scene was vivid in my mind, and during the writing of it I got enough of an idea who the lead was to write the second chapter. After that point I largely plotted the book as I went along. For all of that, I never did have to rewrite the first two chapters. They were sufficiently well realized to hold up fine despite the fact that I wrote them without knowing what would follow them.

By and large, though, first chapters are more apt to need rewriting than subsequent chapters, at least in my own novels. When this proves to be the case, I have the choice of rewriting my opening immediately or pushing on with the book and redoing the opening after I’ve completed the first draft.

Again, the decision is individual and arbitrary. Do you get it written first or do you first get it right? I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m more comfortable with a book if I rewrite this sort of thing as I go along; otherwise my concentration on Chapter Fifteen, say, is diffused by the nagging awareness that Chapters One through Three have to make another trip through the typewriter. We’ll discuss this general dilemma again in a chapter on revision, but it seems worth a brief mention here because beginning sections are so often apt to be out of synch with the rest of the book.

Knowing that an opening may very well need to be rewritten can make you sloppy. For this reason, I always proceed on the premise that what I’m writing is what will one day be set in type, word for imperishable word.

But that’s just my approach. For another writer, that sort of sloppiness might be worth encouraging; he might be infinitely less inhibited typing an unabashedly rudimentary first draft on yellow second sheets than if he felt his words were being carved on stone tablets.

The important thing, as I’ve said before, is neither to get it written nor to get it right. The important thing is to do what works.

Writing a novel is hard work.

Now writing anything well is work, whether it’s an epic trilogy or the last line of a limerick for a deodorant contest. But when it comes to the novel you have to work long and hard even to produce a bad one. This may help explain why there are so many more bad amateur poets around than there are bad amateur novelists. Writing a good poem may be as difficult as writing a good novel. It may even be harder. But any clown with a sharp pencil can write out a dozen lines of verse and call them a poem. Not just any clown can fill 200 pages with prose and call it a novel. Only the more determined clowns can get the job done.

“I could never be a writer,” countless acquaintances have told me, “because I just don’t have the necessary self-discipline. I’d keep finding other things to do. I’d never get around to working on the book. I wouldn’t get anything accomplished.”

Let’s not kid ourselves. It does take self-discipline. On the dullest day imaginable, I can always find something to do besides writing. I have innumerable choices. I can read, I can watch television, I can pick up the phone and call somebody, I can hit the refrigerator — or I can decide instead to sit at a typewriter, pick words out of the air, put them in order, and spread them on the page.