Lawrence Block: Writing the Novel

But as far as intrinsic merit is concerned, length is hardly a factor. You’ve probably heard of the writer who apologized for having written a long letter, explaining that he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. And you may be familiar with Faulkner’s comment that every short-story writer is a failed poet, and every novelist a failed short-story writer.

I’m not sure the desire to be significant is a particularly useful motive for writing anything. But length is no guarantee of significance and brevity no hallmark of the trivial. Sonnet, short story, thousand-page novel — write whatever it is you want to write, and that’s the long and short of it.

All right. Significant or otherwise, what I want to write is a novel. But what novel should I write? All I’ve got is a desk and a typewriter and a ream of paper and an empty head. What do I do now, coach?

Well, for openers, why don’t you turn the page?

You may not need this chapter. A certain proportion of novelists start off knowing pretty much what book they want to write, and you may very well be one of them. Although the precise shape of the plot and the structure of the book may be vague in your mind, it’s possible that you know certain things about the book. You know that it is a novel, for example, and you know what it’s about.

Perhaps the book you have decided to write is based upon your own life experience. Maybe you’ve endured something that strikes you as the raw material for a novel — a hitch in the military, a stretch in the slammer, or four years in a coed dormitory, say. Colorful or bland, anyone’s life can be turned into arresting fiction if it is incisively perceived and dramatically portrayed.

Similarly, you may be caught up in the notion of a novel that has nothing whatever to do with your visible life experience. Something from your reading or fantasy may have stimulated your creative imagination in such a way that you have a book to write firmly in mind. Perhaps your lead is a member of the Children’s Crusade, or an intergalactic explorer, or a contemporary private detective with a taste for Armagnac and a collector’s passion for oriental snuffboxes. Or your central character might as easily be a realistic contemporary figure with whom you identify on some inner plane — an abused child, an ex-athlete recovering from a failed marriage, a nun breathless with adoration. The possibilities are quite literally infinite; the only requisite is that there’s a character or conflict or fundamental situation somewhere along the line that makes you want to write a novel about it.

If this is the case, you have a slight advantage; you at least know what you want to write about, and the knowledge puts you one important step closer to the act. Skip ahead to the next chapter, if you’re so inclined.

During the first of my several vexingly undistinguished years as a college student, a cartoon hung for months on the English Department bulletin board. I returned to that campus twenty years after my precipitous departure from it, a prodigal son come home to teach a writing seminar, and as I walked across the greensward that cartoon came vividly back to me.

It showed a sullen eight-year-old boy staring down an earnest school principal. “It’s not enough to be a genius, Arnold,” the man was saying. “You have to be a genius at something.”

I recall identifying very strongly with Arnold. I had known several years before college that I wanted to be a writer. But it seemed it wasn’t enough merely to be a writer.

You had to be a writer of something.

Some people get the whole package as a gift. Not only are they endowed with writing talent but they seem to have been born knowing what to write about. Equipped at the onset with stories to tell, they have only to get on to the business of telling them.

Some people, in short, have it easy.

But some of us don’t. We know that we want to write without knowing what we want to write.

It’s encouraging to note that we’re in the majority, that most writers have been obsessed with the idea of becoming writers before the nature of what they might write about revealed itself to them. It’s easy to accept this premise about the nuts-and-bolts commercial writer, but the same initial uncertainty is every bit as likely to characterize the early years of writers with impeccable critical reputations. The identification of self as writer comes for most of us before we know what sort of writer we’ll be or what we’ll write about, and that seems to be just as true whether our ultimate literary product is Moby Dick or Trailer Trollop.

(This might be a good place to suggest, incidentally, that fiction writers of every stripe have a great deal more in common that the disparity of our work might suggest. The fact that we write unites us far more than the nature of what we write separates us.)

Let’s suppose, then, that all you know at this point is that you want to write a novel. Why you have this curious urge is not terribly important. It’s enough that you have it in good measure. Whether you’ll prove to have other elements essential to novelistic success — talent, perseverance, resourcefulness — is not something you have to know at this stage. Indeed, it’s not something you’re in a position to know. You’ll find out in due course.

How do you decide what novel to write?

It seems to me that this question can best be answered by asking a few others. First of all, what kind of novel do you like to read? I would not go so far as to say that we can only produce the sort of fiction that we most enjoy reading ourselves.

I’ve known of too many instances where this is simply untrue. When I was knocking out soft-core sex novels, for instance, I did not commonly spend my free hours reading other people’s soft-core sex novels. And I’ve observed that a substantial number of people who write westerns are very much averse to reading in the genre. Contrariwise, most mystery and science-fiction writers seem to enjoy reading in their respective fields.

When I was starting out, confession magazines constituted the most receptive market for new writers. They paid fairly well, too. Their numbers have shrunk since then and their rates of payment have actually declined, illustrating once more how the short story writer’s lot has gotten worse over the years, but back then they were an excellent place for a neophyte to get started.

I think, because I read a lot of them, I understood what a confession story was, the basic structure of its plot, and what made one story good and another unacceptable. During the year I spent working for a literary agent, the two confessions I yanked out of the slush pile both sold on their initial submissions, and the author of one of them came to be a leader in the field, ultimately going on to make a name for herself in the field of romantic fiction.

Well, I was game. Confessions back then paid several times what I was earning for suspense short stories, so on several occasions I went out and bought or borrowed confession magazines and set about reading my way through them. I never quite made it. I could not read one of the damned things all the way through without skimming. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. And I couldn’t shake the conviction that the entire magazine, from front to back and including the bust-developer ads, was nothing but mind-rotting swill.

Nor, consequently, could I produce a confession story. The ideas my mind came up with were either mind-numbingly trite or at odds with the market’s requirements. I never did turn one of these ideas into a story that I stayed with beyond a couple of tentative pages, never completed a confession until one bizarre weekend when I wrote three of them to order for a publisher with a couple holes to fill and a deadline fast approaching. I wrote them somehow because I’d accepted the assignment, and he printed them because he had to, and that was not the easiest money I ever made in my life, let me tell you.