Lawrence Block: Writing the Novel

When I wrote Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, I stopped one chapter from the end and rewrote the whole thing. I suppose I could have written the final chapter of the first draft before starting the rewrite, but I didn’t see the point; I knew that my final chapter would be affected by the revisions I’d make in earlier chapters, so that I’d only wind up redoing it entirely later on.

Burglars Can’t Be Choosers got a complete rewrite for a couple of reasons. One stemmed from the fact that I didn’t know the identity of the murderer until I was almost three-quarters of the way through the book. The solution I hit on necessitated a certain amount of changes along the way. I wanted to push on to the end — or almost to the end, as it turned out — before making them, but they did have to be made in order for the book to hold up.

In addition, I was dissatisfied with the pace of the novel. While most of the scenes worked well enough, I felt there was too much wasted time in the story line. A rereading convinced me that I could eliminate a day from the plot, tightening things up a good deal in the process.

I could have tried making these changes by cutting and pasting, redoing selected pages here and there. I considered this but couldn’t avoid the conclusion that the book would profit considerably from a complete rewrite. While it seemed to me that some portions of the book didn’t require any changes beyond an occasional sentence here and there, I decided to retype everything.

By doing this, I made an incalculable number of changes. It’s virtually impossible for me to retype a page of my own work without changing something. Sometimes it was clear to me that these changes constituted a substantial improvement, although this improvement might not have been apparent to most of the book’s audience. In other cases it’s moot whether the changes I made were for better or worse; I occasionally had the feeling I was changing phrasing solely as a respite from the boredom of pure copy typing.

I would never have rewritten Burglars Can’t Be Choosers for stylistic reasons alone. The book was written smoothly enough the first time around, and if I hadn’t had to make structural changes I would have submitted my first draft as it stood. In retrospect, I’m glad I was forced to rewrite it; it’s a better book for the extra work it received.

It’s possible you’ll produce a first draft which looks to be submittable without a major rewrite. You may find, however, that the manuscript needs to be retyped before you send it off.

If so, I have a suggestion. Unless you absolutely can’t stand the idea, do the final typescript yourself.

You can probably guess the reason from my discussion of the revision of Burglars Can’t Be Choosers. No matter how much editing you do in pen or pencil, no matter how thoroughly you rework your material before having it typed, you’ll find more little changes to make when you actually hammer away at the keys yourself.

A friend of mind used to do this. Then she started to get higher advances and her books began earning more subsidiary income, and she decided she could afford the luxury of hiring somebody to type her final drafts for her. She works very hard over them, making innumerable pencil corrections before bundling them off to the typist, but her style’s not as polished in her latest books because she’s not doing her own typing. She’s omitting what was always a set stage in her personal process of revision, and while her books are still well written, I think they used to be smoother.

Earlier, in the chapter on snags and dead ends, I advised against setting a book aside when you run into trouble with it. Although it may seem like a good idea, it rarely lets you develop a fresh slant on your novel. The books I abandon in midstream invariably float off out of my life and are never seen again.

When you finish a first draft, however, I think you should give yourself breathing space before plunging into a rewrite. There’s a reason for this beyond the very real fact that you’re likely to be tired and deserving of a break.

The writer who has just completed a book cannot usually be sufficiently objective about it to appraise it properly with an eye toward revision. In my own case, it’s hard enough to be objective about my work ten years after it’s been published, let alone when the pages are still warm and the ink still wet. At that stage I’m not only too close to the book, I’m still inside it. A break of a couple of weeks lets me unwind, and when I sit down and read the thing from start to finish I just might have a certain amount of perspective on it.

During this cooling-off period, you might want to have someone else read the book — but only if you’ve got someone around whose judgment you trust. If a negative reaction might paralyze you, don’t take any chances. Wait until you’ve done your rewriting before you show the book to anybody.

Now’s the time to have the book read by a knowledgeable acquaintance if you’re concerned about your lack of expertise in a certain area. Suppose the book has a background in coin collecting, for instance. You’ve done a ton of research on the subject but you’re no numismatist and you can’t be certain you’ve got the lingo right. Maybe you’ve committed the sort of glaring error that’ll get you snotty letters from your readers.

Show the book to someone with the right background, explaining your uncertainty to him and asking him to read it with that consideration in mind. Make it clear to him that you want him to spot errors, that you’re not showing him the book in the hope that he’ll praise it. (It’s necessary to state this out front, because most people assume that most authors want not criticism but praise. And most of the time, incidentally, they’re absolutely right.) When he tells you what’s wrong and how to fix it, you can incorporate the information you get from him in your rewrite. If he tells you everything’s fine and your book is numismatically accurate, you can stop worrying about that aspect of it while you rewrite.

And, if he offers a lot of nonnumismatic criticisms of your story and characters and writing style, you can thank him politely and pay him no more attention in this respect than you see fit. Remember, you showed him the book because of his knowledge about rare coins, not because you figured him as the most perceptive editor since Maxwell Perkins.

Which leads us, neatly enough, into another area of the question of rewriting. So far we’ve dealt with the matter of the revision work that you do or don’t perform before submitting the manuscript. Of another sort altogether are those changes you make at the suggestion of an agent or publisher.

Most new writers will change almost anything to get a book published, and that’s probably as it should be. Just as the first law of nature is quite properly self-preservation, so is the first commandment of the first novelist to get published if it is at all possible. If you can accomplish this simply by revising your manuscript as an editor suggests, you would probably be foolish to do otherwise.

Hopeful writers have a fairly common fantasy in this area. It usually involves a hard-boiled editor trying to seduce them into making crass commercial changes to the book’s artistic detriment. The author either makes the changes only to discover the hollowness of great financial success at the cost of his soul, or he stands up for what he believes, tells the editor to go climb a tree, and (a) finds a more understanding publisher through whose efforts his book brings him wealth and glory beyond his wildest imaginings or (b) drinks himself to death in righteous indignation.

It all makes alluring fantasy, but it’s not too well grounded in reality. An agent or editor suggests changes because he thinks the changes will improve the book, not because he’s anxious to louse it up. His point of view may be in part the result of his commercial orientation, and if that’s not somewhat true he’s probably limited in his effectiveness in the business. But I’ve never known an editor to ask for a change that he didn’t believe would result in a stronger book.