Lawrence Block: Writing the Novel

I myself have always been the sort of writer who loathes revision. Looking back over the years, I can see a couple of factors which tend to explain this attitude. I was always more concerned with the accomplishment than the act; I was interested less in writing, you might say, than in having written. Once I finished writing a short story or a novel I wanted to consider myself done with it for all time. Indeed, the minute I typed “The End” I wanted to be able to take a deep breath, walk around the corner, and see my work in print at the newsstand. The last thing I desired at such a moment was to sit down, take an even deeper breath, and commence feeding the whole thing through the typewriter a second time.

Because I was a naturally smooth stylist, as I mentioned a couple of chapters back, I could get away with submitting first drafts. They didn’t look rough. And, because I had a sort of fictive tunnel vision, I was unlikely to see more than one way that a book could be written.

When I was writing the soft-core sex novels, economic considerations largely ruled out rewriting. Who could afford it? Who had time for it? When you’re turning out somewhere between twelve and twenty books a year, you may cheerfully agree with Greenan’s point and still never rewrite a line. So what if every last one of your pages could be improved by making another trip through your typewriter? There’s no time to polish each page to perfection, and no incentive, either. The readers won’t notice the difference. The publisher probably won’t notice either, and wouldn’t care if he did.

There’s even an argument against revision, and it may have applied to those early sex novels. Jack Kerouac advanced it when he spoke of his writing as “spontaneous bop prosody,” equating his manner of composition to a jazz musician’s creative improvisation. More cynically, the lead character in Barry N. Malzberg’s Herovit’s World, a hack science-fiction writer enormously contemptuous of his own work, argues that rewriting would rob his crap of the only thing it has going for it, its freshness. Once you start rewriting, Herovit holds, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. All you wind up doing is what William Goldman, discussing the agony of rewriting an inadequate play prior to its opening, called “washing garbage.”

I never washed my garbage in those days. Thinking back, I’m astonished at the sangfroid with which I presumed to forego revision altogether. I scarcely ever retyped a page.

There was one time I well remember when, checking the pages at the end of the day’s work, I discovered that I’d written pages 31 through 45 but had somehow jumped in my page numbering from 38 to 40. Rather than renumber the pages, I simply sat down and wrote page 39 to fit. Since page 38 ended in the middle of a sentence, a sentence which then resumed on page 40, it took a little fancy footwork to slide page 39 in there, but the brash self-assurance of youth was evidently up to that sort of challenge.

Jacqueline Susann used to tell talk show audiences how she rewrote every book four or five times, using yellow paper for one draft, green for a second, pink for a third, blue for a fourth, and finally producing finished copy on white bond. I don’t seem to recall the point of this rainbow approach to revision, nor am I sure I believe Susann actually did this; anyone as accomplished as she at self-promotion might well have been capable of embroidery.

But that hardly matters. What’s relevant, I think, is that Susann knew her audience. The public evidently likes the idea of reading books over which writers have labored endlessly. Perhaps readers find it galling to shell out upwards of $8.95 for a book that flowed from its author’s typewriter like water from a cleft rock. The stuff’s supposed to read as though it came naturally and effortlessly, but one wants to be assured that a soul-satisfying amount of hard work went into it.

That’s nice to know when Dick Cavett holds your book up and asks you how you did it, but in the meantime you’re naturally more concerned with producing the best possible novel than with figuring out how best to push it on the tube. Is revision necessary? And what’s the proper approach to it?

For me, the best approach involves a sort of doublethink. If I take it for granted while writing a book that I’m going to have to sit down and do it over, I’m encouraging myself to be sloppy. I don’t have to find the right word or phrase. I don’t have to think a scene through and decide which way I want to tackle it. I can just slap any old thing on the page, telling myself that the important thing is to get words on paper, that I can always clean up my act in the rewrite.

Now this may be precisely what you require in order to conquer your inhibitions at the typewriter. Earlier I mentioned a couple of writers who produce lengthy first drafts, throwing in everything that occurs to them, then pruning ruthlessly in their second drafts.

I find, though, that unless I regard what I’m writing as final copy, I don’t take it seriously enough to give it my best shot. For this reason I proofread as I go along, do my first drafts on damnably expensive high-rag-content white bond, and get each page right before I go on to the next one. I don’t necessarily rewrite as I go along, but neither do I leave anything standing if it bothers me. Sometimes I’ll have twenty or thirty crumpled pages in or around my wastebasket by the time I’ve produced my daily five pages of finished copy. Other times I won’t have to throw out a single page, but even then I’ll be doing what you might call rewriting-in-advance in that I’ll try sentences and paragraphs a few different ways in my mind before committing them to the page.

In the chapter on starting your novel, I mentioned that I frequently rewrite the opening chapters of a book. Aside from that, I usually push on all the way through to the end without any substantial rewriting other than the polish-as-you-go business just described. Now and then, however, upon proofreading yesterday’s work prior to beginning today’s production, I’ll find something bothersome in the last couple of pages. This may happen because the unconscious mind, laboring during the night with what’s to be written next, will have come up with something that calls for changes in the section immediately preceding it. It may happen, too, because I was tired when I reached the end of yesterday’s work, and the results of fatigue are evident in the light of dawn. When this occurs, I’ll naturally redo the offending pages; this serves the dual purpose of getting me into the swing of my narrative even as I’m improving yesterday’s work.

Some writers elaborate on this method, rewriting their whole manuscript as they go along. They begin each day by rewriting in toto the first draft they produced the day before, then go on to churn out fresh first-draft copy which they will in turn revise the following morning, and so on a day at a time until the book is finished. There’s a lot to be said for this method. If your first drafts are stylistically choppy enough to require revision as a matter of course, and if the idea of being faced with a top-to-bottom rewrite all in one chunk is unattractive, this sort of pay-as-you-go revision policy has much to recommend it. Among other things, you don’t encourage yourself to be slipshod in your first draft, since your day of reckoning isn’t that far in the future.

This won’t work, incidentally, if you produce the sort of first drafts that require substantial structural revision, with lots of cutting and splicing.

A couple of pages back I described my present approach to writing and rewriting as a sort of doublethink. By this I mean that, although I work with the intention of producing final copy the first time around, I keep myself open to the possibility that a full second draft will be required. If I determine that this is the case, the fact that my first draft is neatly typed on crisp white bond paper doesn’t alter the fact that I have to redo it from top to bottom.