Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

In contrast, the market for original paperback fiction continues to be quite strong, and quite receptive to the work of beginners. The relative viability of the various categories of category fiction — suspense, adventure, western, science fiction, gothic, light romance, historical romance — runs a cyclical course, but there are always several categories which constitute a healthy market.

I served my own novelistic apprenticeship in the field of paperback sex novels. In the summer of ’58, I had just finished my first novel and was wondering what to do next. My agent was marketing the book; I had no idea whether it would sell or fail completely.

The agent got in touch with me to say that a new publisher was entering the field of sex novels. Did I know what these books were? Could I read a few and try one of my own?

I bought and skimmed several representative examples in the field. (If I had all of this to do over again, I’d spend more time on this analysis, as detailed in Chapter Three.) I then sat down at the typewriter with the assurance of youth and batted out three chapters and an outline of what turned out to be the start of a career.

I didn’t know how many sex novels I was to write in the years to follow. For quite a while I was doing a book a month for one publisher with occasional books for other houses as well, along with a certain amount of more ambitious writing. I suppose I must have turned out a hundred of them. Maybe not — I really don’t know, and my copies of most of the books were lost in the course of a move some years ago. Let’s just agree that I wrote a lot of them and let it go at that.

I learned an immeasurable amount from doing this. Bear in mind that these books were written in more innocent times; while they were the most inflammatory reading matter then on the market, they can barely qualify as soft-core pornography by contemporary standards. Unprintable words were not to be found, and descriptive passages were airbrushed like an old-fashioned Playboy centerfold.

The books had a sex scene per chapter, but the scene couldn’t take up the whole chapter. There was plenty of room left for incident and characterization, for dialogue and conflict and plot development, room in short for a story to be told with periodic interruptions for sexual titillation. Without the sex, surely, the books would have had no reason for existence; the stories in the main were not strong enough to carry the books unassisted. (Though I can think of one or two exceptions, books where a character took over and came to life, so that the sexual episodes seemed almost like annoying interruptions. But this was rare indeed.)

This was a wonderful apprenticeship for me. I was by nature a fast writer, gifted with the ability to write smooth copy in a first draft; thus I could produce these books rapidly enough to make a satisfactory living. (They did not pay much, nor were there royalties to be had or subsidiary income to anticipate; it was indeed like working for the pulp magazines, with all sales outright.)

I learned a tremendous amount about how to write fiction, learning by the irreproachable method of trial and error. I could fool around with multiple viewpoint, with various sorts of plot structure, could in fact try whatever I wanted as long as I continued to write the books in English and keep the action coming. I got any number of auctorial bad habits out of my system. And, as I’ve said, I earned while I learned.

I’m acquainted with quite a few writers who started out by cultivating this particular secret garden. There were a number who never went on to anything else; they earned some easy money at sex novels until the novelty wore off but lacked the particular combination of talent and drive which it evidently takes to establish a writing career. The rest of us moved on, sooner or later, to other things. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t regard the experience as valuable.

In my own case, I suspect I found the sex-novel groove too comfortable and stayed with it too long, past the point where it was able to teach me much. I probably should have tried stretching my literary muscles a little sooner. On the other hand, I was painfully young then in virtually every possible way. The sex books put bread on the table and gave me the satisfaction of regular production and regular publication at a stage when I was incapable of writing anything much more ambitious. I can hardly regret the time I devoted to them.

Is the sex novel field a good starting place for a beginner today? I’m afraid not. Their equivalent in today’s market is the mechanical, plotless, hard-core porn novel, written with neither imagination nor craft and composed of one overblown sex scene after another. The books I wrote were quite devoid of merit — let there be no mistake about that — but by some sort of Gresham’s Law of Obscenity they’ve been driven off the market by a product that is indisputably worse. Any dolt with a typewriter and a properly dirty mind could write them; accordingly, the payment is too low to make the task worth performing. Finally, the books are published by the sort of men who own massage parlors and peep shows. You meet a better class of people on the subway.

There’s no need, though, to be nostalgic for the old days, be they the old days of pulp magazines or the old days of soft-core sex novels. There always seems to be an area in which to serve out a writer’s apprenticeship. We’ll see how to choose your own particular area in the next chapter; meanwhile, let it be said that for the foreseeable future it’s almost certain to be a novel of some sort.

The suggestion that a beginner ought to begin as a novelist is a radical one. The natural response is to offer some immediate objections. Let’s consider some of the most obvious ones.

Isn’t it harder to write a novel than a short story?

No. Novels aren’t harder. What they are is longer.

That may be a very obvious answer, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It’s the sheer length of a novel that the beginning writer is apt to find intimidating.

As a matter of fact, you don’t have to be a beginner to be intimidated in this fashion. My suspense novels generally stop at two hundred pages or thereabouts. On the several occasions when I’ve begun books I knew would run two or three times that length, I had a lot of trouble getting started. The very vastness of the projects put me off.

What’s required, I think, is a change in attitude. To write a novel you have to resign yourself to the fact that you simply can’t prime yourself and knock it all out in a single extended session at the typewriter. The process of writing the book is going to occupy you for weeks or months — perhaps for years.

But each day’s stint at the typewriter is simply that — one day’s work. And that’s every bit as true whether you’re writing short stories or an epic trilogy. If you’re writing three or six or ten pages a day, you’ll get a certain amount of work accomplished in a certain span of time — whatever it is you’re working on.

I remember the first really long book I wrote. When I sat down to begin it I knew I was starting something that had to run at least five hundred pages in manuscript. I got a good day’s work down and wound up knocking out fourteen pages. I got up from the typewriter and said, “Well, just 486 pages to go” — and went directly into nervous prostration at the thought.

The thing to remember is that a novel’s not going to take forever. All the old clichés actually apply — a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and slow and steady honestly does win the race.

Consider this: If you write one page a day, you will produce a substantial novel in a year’s time. The writer who turns out one book a year, year in and year out, is generally acknowledged to be quite prolific. And don’t you figure you could produce one measly little page, even on a bad day? Even on a rotten day?