Lawrence Block: Writing the Novel

How much do you have to like a type of novel in order to have a chance of success at it yourself? Well, let’s suppose you sit down one weekend with a stack of gothics or male adventure novels or light romances or whatever. If you have to flail yourself with a whip or whip yourself with a flail in order to get them read, fighting a constant urge to hurl the books across the room, and if your ultimate response is something along the lines of “This stuff is garbage and I hate it,” I think you might want to look a little further.

On the other hand, if you find the stories reasonably riveting even though you never lose sight of the fact that you’re not reading War and Peace, and if your final reaction is more in the vein of “This stuff’s garbage, all right, but it’s not bad garbage, and while I might not want word to get around I’ve got to admit that I sort of like it,” then perhaps you’ve found a place to start.

There are other questions to ask yourself. Here’s one — how important is it for you to be rewarded for your work? And what sort of reward’s most important? Money? Recognition? Or simply seeing your work in print? While the three are by no means mutually exclusive, and while the great majority of us want all three — in large portions, thank you — each of us is likely to find one of the three of maximum importance.

When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, and secure in the knowledge that I’d been placed on this planet to be a writer, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder what sort of thing I would write. I was at the time furiously busy reading my way through the great novels of the century, the works of Steinbeck and Hemingway and Wolfe and Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and all their friends and relations, and it was ever so clear to me that I would in due course produce a Great Novel of my own.

I’d go to college first, naturally, where I might get a somewhat clearer notion of just what constituted a Great Novel. Then I’d emerge into the real world where I would Live. (I wasn’t quite certain what all this capital-L Living entailed, but I figured there would be a touch of squalor in there somewhere, along with generous dollops of booze and sex.) All of this Living would ultimately distill itself into the Meaningful Experiences out of which I would eventually produce any number of Worthwhile Books.

Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this approach. Any number of important novels are produced in this approximate fashion, and the method has the added advantage that, should you wind up writing nothing at all, you’ll at least have treated yourself to plenty of booze and sex en route.

In my own case, though, I learned quickly that my self-image as a writer was stronger than my self-image as a potential great novelist. I didn’t really care all that deeply about artistic achievement, nor did I aspire to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. I wanted to write something and see it in print. I don’t know that that’s the noblest of motives for doing anything, but it was at the very core of my being.

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that you regard yourself as similarly motivated. While you’d certainly like to write something in which you can take great personal pride, something that might win you a measure of critical recognition, something that might lead stockbrokers and accountants to vie for your custom, your primary purpose as a writer is to get something published.

If that’s the case, you would probably be best advised to find a place for yourself in the field of category fiction, a term which covers the broad group of novels — generally paperback originals — which lend themselves readily to categorization as mysteries, adventure, romance, gothic, science fiction, historical saga, western, or whatever. These categories change slightly over the years; too, they go hot and cold, with one year’s hot ticket next year’s drug on the market. Every once in a while a novel achieves overwhelming success, to the point where its imitators quickly come to constitute a brand-new category. Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo went through printing after printing before other writers began to work the same vein; in due course the slave novel defined itself as a staple category of paperback fiction. Similarly, but far more rapidly, the first two steamy historical romances — Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower and Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love — rolled up impressive instant sales and sparked a new category overnight.

Some writers move with no apparent effort from one category to another over the years, furnishing a steady supply of whatever the market demands. When gothics are hot they write gothics; when a publisher calls with a demand for war stories or romantic intrigue, they shift gears and maintain full production. Typically, these jacks-of-all-trades meet minimal standards in every genre they take up without really distinguishing themselves in any one area. They are always competent but never inspired.

Which, come to think of it, is not terribly surprising. Professional competence is too rare a jewel to be dismissed summarily as hack work. Nevertheless, the writer who can do every type of novel with equal facility is a writer who has not managed to zero in on a type of novel that is uniquely his own. While you may prove to be this variety of writer, and while you may be happiest covering a wide range of fictional categories, I think you would do well first to determine if there’s a particular kind of novel that appeals to you more than the others.

We’ve established that the novel you set out to write ought to be of a type you would not find yourself unable to read had someone else written it. The converse of this argument is not necessarily true. Just because you can enjoy reading a particular sort of novel doesn’t mean you’d be well advised to try writing it.

Take me, for example; there was a time when I read a great deal of science fiction. I liked most S-F stories, and I liked the good ones a lot. Furthermore, I used to hang out with several established science fiction writers. I found them a congenial bunch, fellows of infinite jest and an engagingly quirky turn of mind. I liked the way they grabbed hold of ideas and turned them into stories.

But I couldn’t write science fiction. No matter how much of the stuff I read, no matter how much I enjoyed what I read, my mind simply did not yield up workable S-F ideas. I might read those stories with a fan’s intense enjoyment, but what I couldn’t do was get the sort of handle on what I read that left me saying to myself, “ I could have written that. I could have come up with that idea, and I could have developed it along those lines. I might even have improved it by doing thus and so. By gum, I could have been the writer of that story.”

I’ve enjoyed a good many historical novels over the years, and I’ve been deeply interested in history for as long as I can remember. There was a period of several years during which a fair percentage of my leisure-time reading consisted of works of English and Irish history. One might think I’d do well to combine business and pleasure and turn my sights on the historical novel, trying my hand at a novel the theme and background of which might suggest itself from my reading.

I wouldn’t dream of it. One of the innumerable unpleasant facts I have to face about myself is that I’m a sluggard when it comes to research. I don’t enjoy it and I don’t do a very good job of it. I force myself when I have to, and I’ve become better about this in recent years, less given to slipshod fakery, but the idea of deliberately setting out to write a book which requires a vast amount of academic research is anathema to me.

Beyond that, I’m not comfortable with the idea of writing something set in a time other than my own. I wasn’t around then, so how could I presume to know how people talked? How could I expect to get their dialogue right, or to have the faintest idea what it felt like to be around in eighteenth-century Ireland, say, or Renaissance Italy? The fact that no one else knows how people talked or felt back then does nothing to put my mind at rest. I have to be able to believe in the fictive reality of what I’m doing in order to make it work.