Lawrence Block: Writing the Novel

The remaining pulps are scarcely worth writing for. Consider the plight, for example, of the writer of detective fiction. Twenty years ago, the two leading magazines in the field paid five cents a word for material, and their rejects sold quite readily to any of a batch of lesser markets. Now, at a time when the erstwhile nickel candy bar has gone to twenty cents, those two magazines still pay the same nickel a word — and only a single cent-a-word publication exists to skim the cream of the stories they reject.

The outlook is not much more promising for writers of “quality” fiction. Very few magazines publish stories of literary distinction and pay a decent price for the privilege. After a piece has made the rounds of The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, and a few others, its author is reduced to submitting it to the small literary magazines that pay off in contributor’s copies or, at best, token payment. It is not merely impossible to make a living in this fashion; it is very nearly impossible, over the course of a year, to cover one’s mailing expenses.

On the other hand, one can make a living writing novels.

I’m not going to make you drool by rattling on about the stratospheric sums certain writers have received of late for their novels. The earnings of best sellers, the fortunes paid for film and paperback rights, have relatively little to do with the average writer, be he neophyte or veteran. James Michener once remarked that America is a country in which a writer can make a fortune but not a living — i.e., a handful of successful writers get rich while the rest of us can’t even get by. There’s some truth in this — the gap between success and survival is, I submit, an unhealthily yawning one — but there’s some hyperbole in it as well. A writer can indeed make a living in America; if he’s a reasonably productive novelist, he can make a living verging on comfortability.

Financial considerations aside, I have always felt there are satisfactions in the novel which are not to be found in shorter fiction. I began as a writer of short stories, and to have written and published a short story was an accomplishment in which I took an inordinate amount of pride. But genuine literary achievement, as far as I was concerned, lay in being able to hold in my own hands a book with my own name on the cover. (I was to hold a dozen of my own books before one of them was to bear my own name, as it turned out, but that’s by the way.)

Short-story writing, as I saw it, was estimable. One required skill and cleverness to carry it off. But to have written a novel was to have achieved something of substance. You could swing a short story on a cute idea backed up by a modicum of verbal agility. You could, when the creative juices were flowing, knock it off start-to-finish on a slow afternoon.

A novel, on the other hand, took real work. You had to spend months on the thing, fighting it out in the trenches, line by line and page by page and chapter by chapter. It had to have plot and characters of sufficient depth and complexity to support a structure of sixty or a hundred thousand words. It wasn’t an anecdote, or a finger exercise, or a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. It was a book.

The short-story writer, as I saw it, was a sprinter; he deserved praise to the extent that his stories were meritorious. But the novelist was a long-distance runner, and you don’t have to come in first in a marathon in order to deserve the plaudits of the crowd. It is enough merely to have finished on one’s feet.

These arguments presented above would all seem to urge the writer to turn eventually to the novel. But it’s my contention that the beginner at fiction ought to focus his attention on the novel not sooner or later but right away. The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.

At first, this may well seem illogical. We’ve just seen the short story likened to a sprint, the novel to a marathon. Shouldn’t a marathon runner work up to that distance gradually? Shouldn’t a writer develop his abilities in the short story before attempting the more challenging work of the novel?

Certainly a great many of us do begin that way. I did myself, as far as that goes. In my earliest efforts, it was extremely difficult for me to sustain a prose narrative for the fifteen hundred words necessary to constitute a proper short-short. Over a period of time I became increasingly at ease writing full-length short stories, and then I finally wrote my first novel. Other writers have followed a similar path, but perhaps as many have leaped directly into the novel without any serious effort at short stories. There doesn’t seem to be any traditional path to follow in becoming a writer. Whatever road leads to the destination turns out to have been the right road for that particular traveler.

With the understanding, then, that all roads lead to Rome, here are some of the reasons why I believe a writer is best advised to begin with a novel.

Skill is less at a premium.This may seem paradoxical — why should a novel require less skill than a short story? You’d think it would be the other way around.

Don’t you have to be a better craftsman to manage a novel? I don’t think so. Often a novelist can get away with stylistic crudity that would cripple a shorter piece of fiction.

Remember, what a novel affords you as a writer is room. You have space to move around in, space to let your characters develop and come to life, space for your story line to get itself in motion and carry the day. While a way with words never hurts, it’s of less overwhelming importance to the novelist than the sheer ability to grab ahold of the reader and make him care what happens next.

The best seller list abounds with the work of writers whom no one would want to call polished stylists. While I wouldn’t care to name them, I can think offhand of half a dozen writers whose first chapters are very hard going for me. I’m perhaps overly conscious of style — writing does radically change one’s perceptions as a reader — and I find their dialogue mechanical, their transitions awkward, their scene construction clumsy, their descriptions imprecise. But if I can make myself hang on for the first twenty or thirty or forty pages, I’ll lose my excessive awareness of the trees and start to perceive the forest. The author’s pure storytelling ability grips me and I no longer notice the defects of his style.

In shorter fiction, the storyline wouldn’t have this chance to take over. The story would have run its course before I ceased to notice the author’s style.

Similarly, some novels triumph over the style in which they are written because of the grandeur of their themes or the fascination of their subject matter. The epic novel, presenting in fictional form the whole history of a nation, catches the reader up because of the sheer power of its scope. Leon Uris’s Exodus is a good example of this type of book. And Arthur Hailey’s books exemplify the novel that conveys an enormous amount of information to the reader, telling him almost more than he cares to know about a particular industry. This is not to say that these novels, or others of their ilk, are stylistically clumsy, but merely to point out that style becomes a considerably less vital consideration than it must be in short fiction.

The idea is less important.I’ve known any number of writers who have postponed writing a novel because they felt they lacked a sufficiently strong or fresh or provocative idea for one. I can understand this, because similar feelings delayed my own first novel. Logic would seem to suggest that a novel, by virtue of its length, would require more in the way of an idea than a short story.

If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, you may well be better off with a novel than with short stories. Because each short story absolutely demands either a new idea or a new slant on an old one. Often the short story amounts to very little more than an idea fleshed out and polished into a piece of fiction. This is particularly likely to be the case with the short-short, which is typically not much more than a fifteen-hundred-word preamble leading up to a surprise ending, an idea thinly cloaked in the fabric of fiction.