Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

Beliefs, however, are not facts. Agents and editors are wrong often enough. And in the world of fiction, rightness and wrongness are often subjective matters.

To get to the point, what do you do when an editor wants changes with which you disagree? Do you bite the bullet and make the changes? Do you stand up for what you believe in? Come to think of it, how do you know what you believe in?

How much significance can you attach to your own feelings? After all, you only wrote the thing.

It’s a tricky question, and you can spend years in this business and still have occasional trouble answering it. One thing that’s certain is that the decision is yours to make. It’s your book, it’s going to have your name on it, and only you can decide how strongly you feel about what’s between the covers. If you refuse to make certain changes, you may be saying “no” to publication, and another opportunity for publication may not ever come along. You can’t assume no one else will ever take the book, but you may have to acknowledge the possibility, especially with a first novel.

Generally speaking, writers gain confidence with increased experience. I made some changes at an editor’s suggestion in my own first book, the lesbian novel I discussed earlier. One of those changes was a bad idea and I disliked making it, but it didn’t really occur to me to demur. I was twenty years old, delirious at the thought of having a book published, and awestruck at the two-thousand-dollar advance they were handing me. I know now that I could have talked my way clear of the one change I really hated making, but I didn’t even try.

That was minor. A friend of mine cut a long novel drastically some years ago at the suggestion of a respected editor. He felt at the time that the book would be weaker, both commercially and artistically, as a result of the cuts; however, he also felt the editor’s opinion was worth more than his. Perhaps it might have been in most cases but in this one it manifestly was not. He now regrets making those cuts. With the experience he now has under his belt, and with the track record he has since amassed as a successful commercial novelist, he would be far more likely to resist making similar changes.

Experience, the very factor that supplies confidence and self-assurance, can also deepen one’s humility and enable one to recognize and admit flaws in one’s work. In my own case, I know I’ve become more open to suggestions regarding revision than I was a number of years ago, although I’m apt to be unyielding when I’m convinced my position is right.

I’m sure I was inclined to take a stand against revision on some prior occasions because of simple laziness. I didn’t want to do the work, so my mind obligingly supplied reasons why the indicated changes were not a good idea. I still have a tendency to think this way, but I’m more inclined to see it now for what it is, and thus have trouble mistaking it for artistic integrity.

Your own decision, then, is your own decision. You’ll have to make it yourself when the time comes. It may help you to know that almost all novels require some work after they’ve caught an editor’s eye, and a great many of them require considerable rewriting. While John O‘Hara might snarl that the only way to improve a story after you’ve written it is by telling an editor to go to hell, you probably won’t want to be quite that quick to suggest travel plans to the editor who asks you to make changes. And a look at O‘Hara’s correspondence shows that he wasn’t either — not until he was so well established that he could afford to.

But this is all cart-before-horse stuff, isn’t it? First you have to find a publisher who’s interested enough to want changes in the first place.

Which, conveniently enough, brings us to our next chapter.

Once you’ve written your novel, you’re probably going to want to get it published.

It’s a curious fact about this whole business of writing that the preceding sentence almost goes without saying. The great majority of us write with the absolute intention of publishing what we have written.

This isn’t generally true with other artistic pursuits. The man who paints as a hobby doesn’t necessarily aspire to gallery showings. The woman who plays the cello once a week in an amateur string quartet doesn’t call herself a failure because she’s not on her way to Carnegie Hall.

The writer’s different. For him, publication is seen as part of the process that begins with an idea. His manuscript, unlike an artist’s finished canvas, is not in final form; his novel will only be in that condition when it has been set in type, printed, and bound.

This is unfortunate. While writing is unquestionably a profession, it is also a hobby, and functions very nicely in that capacity. Of those who write, I suspect it will always be the case that a relatively small percentage will be able to produce salable, publishable work, while the greater majority will be writing essentially for their own amusement. There’s nothing wrong with this; about the same ratio obtains in all artistic occupations. What’s tragic is that the amateur writer is so likely to consider himself a failure because of his inability to publish.

I elaborated on these thoughts a while ago in a Writer’s Digest column on Sunday writers, suggesting that we needn’t publish in order to consider ourselves successful writers. A heartening number of readers wrote to say they’d drawn encouragement from my observations. Suffice it to say now that I feel anyone who manages to complete the task of writing a novel ought to consider himself a success whatever its merits or publishability. If you’ve written a novel, you’re already a winner. Whether you try to publish it, whether you succeed or fail in your efforts, you’ve run a marathon and finished on your feet.

Congratulations.

That said, let’s suppose you’ve decided to make a few tries for the brass ring before stuffing your manuscript in a trunk. What are your chances of success? And what can you do to improve them?

Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not going to be ice cream and cake all the way. Like a dime-novel hero, you’re going to need luck and pluck — and plenty of both.

I might be tempted to offer the bromidic message that every novel will get published sooner or later if it’s good enough and if you work hard enough at the business of offering it to publishers. It’s the conventional wisdom, and it’s the sort of thing one likes to hear and would prefer to say.

I’m beginning to doubt that it’s true.

A case in point: In 1977 a fellow named Chuck Ross set out to establish the difficulties faced by new novelists. He submitted a novel to fourteen publishers and thirteen literary agents.

And the novel he submitted wasn’t one of his own but a freshly-typed copy of Jersy Kosinski’s Steps, the National Book Award winner for 1969.

No one recognized the manuscript, although one editor compared the author’s style to Kosinski. Neither did any publisher want to issue the book or any agent offer to represent it. Admittedly, Kosinski’s novel is an experimental work, and not the sort of item that has best seller written all over it when it comes in the guise of an unknown writer’s work. The experiment doesn’t prove that agents and publishers are all idiots, or that the emperor has no clothes, or anything of the sort.

But it should give you an idea of what you’re up against.

And just what am I up against? The wall? Is it safe to say that the new writer is facing impossible odds, that I’d be better off putting my book in a dresser drawer, or not writing it in the first place? Should I take up Sunday painting instead? Start taking cello lessons?