Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

Retype the last few pages.This is a good way to get back into the rhythm of your writing, whether you’ve been away from it for a short or long period of time. I’ve heard of writers who make it a practice to begin each day’s work by retyping the last page they wrote the day before. The habit may have started when they left off in the middle of the page and wanted to start in on a clean page; it endured when they found it helped them recapture the flow of the previous day’s writing.

Break in the middle of a sentence.I’ve read this advice in various forms over the years. Some people advocate stopping at the bottom of the fifth page of the day, say, even if it’s smack in the middle of a hyphenated word. Others are less compulsive about where you stop but merely suggest that it be at a point where you know precisely what sentence you’re going to write next.

The theory here is that you’ll have an easier time picking the book up the next day because you already know what your first sentence or two will be. I offer this suggestion because it evidently works for some people, but I’m not going to tout it too strongly because I’ve really made some grim mornings for myself this way.

Imagine, for instance, sitting down to the typewriter and seeing this looking back at you. “She looked up at me, bright-eyed, and her smile was like....”

Like what, for the love of God? I obviously had a simile in mind when I wrote what I wrote, and I’ll never come up with a new simile and believe it to be as good as the lost one, and in the meantime I may spend half an hour scratching my head and trying to recall what I was thinking of. If I’ve got a good sentence in mind, the best thing I can do with it is commit it to paper before I lose it. So my own advice would be more along the lines of this:

Find a logical place to break off.At the end of a chapter, or the end of a scene, or the end of a paragraph, or at the very least at the end of a sentence. Not only does this avoid the sort of minor aggravation described above, but I believe it helps focus the attention of the subconscious mind upon the new chapter or scene or whatever to be tackled next.

You’ve abandoned books — quite a few of them, from the sound of it. And you’ve already said there’s a strong possibility that my first novel won’t prove publishable, that its main function may be as a learning experience. Suppose I reach a point where I’m sure it’s not going to succeed. Wouldn’t I be justified in abandoning it?

No.

Oh, you can abandon the book. For that matter, you don’t have to start writing it in the first place.

But if you do undertake to write a first novel, I strongly urge you to finish it. Whether or not you lose faith in it along the way. Whether or not you’re convinced it stinks. No matter what, stay with it a day at a time and see it through to completion. If its chief function is to be educational, rest assured that you’ll learn infinitely more by finishing a first novel than by casting it aside.

I’d suggest further that you complete a first draft from beginning to end before getting involved with substantial revision. There’s one exception — if you want to go back and start over after you’ve done forty or fifty pages, feel free to do so. But after you’ve passed the fifty-page mark, I would recommend that you push onward to the end before giving any thought to rewriting.

I have a reason for this stance. I’ve observed that most of the people who start first novels never finish them, and I’ve come to believe that actually seeing a book through to the finish line is the most important thing you can do in your first essay at the novel. This to my mind is what separates the sheep from the goats and the ribbon from the clerks: the determination to stay with a book until it’s done, for better or for worse.

If you abandon a first novel, the chances of your ever writing and completing a second novel are rather slim. If you pause in the course of a first novel for substantial revision, the chances of your finishing the book are lessened. Finishing a novel isn’t a cinch, even if you’ve done it a dozen times already. When you’re making your initial attempt, I would suggest that other considerations be kept in the background. In this case, the first thing is to get it written. Later on you can worry more about getting it right.

I’ve often wondered, when contemplating the passage quoted above, whether or not the author wasn’t being a trifle disingenuous. We certainly regard Hemingway as a highly stylized writer. Passages from his works, taken out of context, are unmistakably his, and the Hemingway style is as inviting a target for the parodist as is the Bogart lisp for an impressionist. It’s hard to believe a man could develop a style at once so individualized and so influential without having the slightest suspicion of what he was doing.

Be that as it may, I have no quarrel with the implied message — i.e., that the best way to develop a style is to make every effort to write as naturally and honestly as possible. It is not intentionally mannered writing that adds up to style, or richly poetic paragraphs, or the frenetic pursuit of novel prose rhythms. The writer’s own style emerges when he makes no deliberate attempt to have any style at all. Through his efforts to create characters, describe settings, and tell a story, elements of his literary personality will fashion his style, imposing an individual stamp on his material.

There are a handful of writers we read as much for style as for content. John Updike is one example who comes quickly to mind. The manner in which he expresses himself is often interesting in and of itself. It is occasionally said of a particularly effective actor that one would gladly pay money to hear him read the telephone directory. Similarly, there are readers who would gladly read the phone book — if someone like Updike had written it.

The flip side of this sort of style is that it sometimes gets in the way of content in the sense that it blunts the impact of the narrative. Remember, fiction works upon us largely because we are able to choose to believe in its reality. Hence we care about the characters and how their problems are resolved. Just as a poor style gets in our way, making us constantly aware that we are reading a work of the imagination, so does an overly elaborate and refined style set up roadblocks to the voluntary suspension of our disbelief. From this standpoint, one may argue that the very best style is that which looks for all the world like no style at all.

Style, along with the various technical matters that come under that heading, is difficult for me to write about, very possibly because my own approach has always been instinctive rather than methodical. From my earliest beginnings as a writer, it was always a relatively easy matter for me to write smoothly. My prose rhythms and dialogue were good. Just as there are natural athletes, so was I — from the standpoint of technique, at least — a natural writer.

This gave me a considerable advantage in breaking into print. I can see now that a lot of my early pulp stories had rather little to recommend them in terms of plot and characterization, but the fact that they were relatively well-written in comparison to the efforts of other tyros got me sales I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But a smooth style in and of itself is no guarantee of true success. For years I was accustomed to a particular message in letters of rejection. “The author writes well,” my agent would be advised. “This book didn’t work for us, but we’d be very interested in seeing something else he’s written.” That sort of response is encouraging the first few times you receive it. When it becomes a common refrain, all it sparks is frustration.