Writing the Novel (17 page)

I’m certainly more comfortable making a contract with myself to produce five pages of copy, than to spend three hours at the typewriter. For one thing, the amount of time I spend working doesn’t seem particularly relevant. Nobody’s paying me by the hour, and nobody’s checking to see if I punched the old time clock at the appointed hour. The idea of spending a set number of hours working may help to allay one’s conscience, but I don’t think it has much to do with the business of writing.

Some days the writing flows and I can do my five pages in one glorious hour. When that happens, I’m free to do as I wish with the rest of the day. I’ve learned to stop writing then and there, because my mind’s tired after five pages, whether it took me one hour or three hours to get them written.

Other days, the writing pours like January molasses. Maybe I’ll take five hours to do as many usable pages. Those days aren’t much fun, but I’ve learned to keep at it for as long as it takes, because for all the agony of their composition, those pages are apt to read just as smoothly as the ones that came with no effort. If I threw in the sponge after three hours, those pages wouldn’t get written.

I had much the same system at the beginning of my career, when I wrote soft-core sex novels in two weeks’ time, five days on, a weekend off, then five days to finish the book. Then I wrote twenty pages a day where now I write five, but the basic principle was the same.

The number of pages you shoot for is for you to decide. My pace changes depending on the book I’m writing. Some novels seem to demand a more intense level of concentration, and a smaller number of pages will tire me. Others, for whatever reason, move at a faster natural pace.

You may find that one page a day is as much as you can easily manage. That’s fine. Work six days a week and you’ll produce a book in a year. You may find that it’s no strain for you to turn out ten or twenty or thirty pages at a stretch. That’s fine, too—enjoy yourself. My questionnaire responses suggest that a preponderance of pros do four or five pages a day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be less than professional by shooting for a higher or lower number. They settled on that figure because they found out it seemed to be right for them, just as you’ll find out what’s the right pace for your own novel.

One thing you might try to avoid, in this connection, is attempting to extend your productivity. This sort of overload principle works fine in weightlifting, where one’s ability to manage more weight increases as one lifts more weight, but it doesn’t work that way in writing. It’s tempting to try to do a little more each day than we did the day before, and I still find myself intermittently struggling to resist this particular temptation, even after lo these many years. If I can do five pages today, why can’t I do six tomorrow? And seven the day after? For that matter, if I really catch fire and do seven today, that proves I can definitely do a minimum of seven tomorrow. Doesn’t it?

No, it doesn’t.

What does happen, in point of fact, is that this sort of overload generally leads to exhaustion. Then I can rationalize taking a couple days off—after all, I’m ahead of schedule, aren’t I?—and the next thing I know I’m not producing consistently at all. I’m writing in fits and starts, stealing days off and then trying to make up for them by doubling up on my work. The book suffers, the manuscript takes longer than it would have taken otherwise, and once again the tortoise nips the hare at the finish line.

The motto is “Easy does it.” Find your right pace, make sure it’s one that’s not going to be a strain, and then stick with it. If you do have a day when you write an extra page or two, don’t waste time thinking about it. Regard it as a freak occurrence, nothing to be deplored but nothing you should make an effort to repeat. When the next day dawns, resume your regular pace and go on writing the book one day at a time.

For years I proofread my manuscripts after they were finished. I hated doing this. When I wrote “The End” in the middle of the last page I felt like a marathon runner crossing the finish line. I wanted to lie down, not jog back over the route and see if I’d dropped my keys somewhere along the way.

As a result, I tended to give my scripts a rather slipshod proofing. That wasn’t disastrous—I tend to turn out a reasonably clean script anyway—but after a number of years I found a way to avoid being confronted with that unpleasant postwriting chore, and it paid unanticipated dividends. So I’ll share it with you.

I proofread the book as I go along. Not a page at a time, certainly, but either a chapter at a time or a day’s work at a time. I perform this little chore either at the end of the day’s work or before beginning work the following day.

The effect of this ongoing proofreading is threefold. First, it keeps me very much in the book, especially if I do the job immediately before beginning the next day’s work. In the course of proofreading, I’m picking up where I left off and getting my mind set for resuming the narrative.

Second, I do a much more thorough job of proofing when I have a molehill to deal with instead of a mountain. I’m able to take the time to notice changes I want to make. I can spot stylistic irregularities and change them then and there.

Third, I’m more comfortable with what I’ve done because those pages stacked to the left of my typewriter are in more finished form. True, I may wind up rewriting the whole damned thing—but that’s immaterial at this stage. As far as I’m concerned while I’m writing, those neatly stacked pages are what the linotype operator is going to set type from.

Another stray word about proofreading, while we’re on the subject. While I’m writing, I tend to xxxxxx out mistyped words and failed phrases. I obliterate these xxxxxx’d out passages with a thick marking pen when I proofread. To expedite matters, I go through the pages once just dealing with the xxxxxx’d out portions; then I can concentrate more deliberately on the actual text when I go through it a second time with a fine-tipped pen.

Seems to me you’re making a pretty broad assumption. You seem to take it for granted that all I have to do is put my body in front of my typewriter and everything will follow. What about the days when my mind’s a blank?

There are a couple of ways to answer that question. For openers, I’d have to say that the most important step I can take to assure that I’ll get work done today is to plant my behind in my desk chair and face the typewriter. While it may not be absolutely true that if you bring the body the mind will follow, the reverse is indisputable; if I don’t show up for work I’m not going to get work done. Period.

When in spite of this my mind doesn’t seem to be doing its job, it usually means one of two things. Either I’m paralyzed by an inability to figure out What Happens Next, or my mental attitude is keeping my fingers off the keys, making me dissatisfied with my sentences even as I try to form them in my mind.

The first problem, being unable to decide What Happens Next, is one that turns out to be projection a good nine-tenths of the time. Most frequently I know what’s going to happen in the five pages I intend to write today; I’m paralyzed because I’m worrying about what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the day after, or sometime in early April.

That way lies madness. The better I’m able to focus only on what I’m going to write today, the better equipped I find myself to do a good job with today’s writing.

And tomorrow generally takes care of itself. Understand, I’m not denigrating the value of true and proper planning. That’s why outlining can be so useful, whether your outline is formal or unwritten. And planning continues to be useful on a day by day basis. I often find myself looking up from a magazine of an evening and letting my mind ruminate upon some plot problem a few days in the book’s future.

But when I’m writing, I do best if I concern myself only with that day’s writing. Because that’s all I’m in a position to deal with at the time. I can no more write tomorrow’s pages today than I can breathe tomorrow’s air today. The fact that I don’t know what I’m going to write tomorrow doesn’t matter much today. I don’t have to know until tomorrow. And, when tomorrow comes, I’ll probably have the answer when I need it. It’ll grow out of what I manage to write today and whatever processes my unconscious mind sets in motion between now and then.

Sometimes, however, I know what’s going to happen next, both today and tomorrow. What stops me in my tracks is that the words just don’t seem to come out right. Nothing seems to work and I begin to have dark suspicions of organic brain damage.

That brings us to our second problem: There are days when all you can do is go to the movies. But there aren’t really very many days like that. What I’ve learned to do on those headful-of-cotton-candy mornings is to sit down and write my daily quota of pages anyway.

I make a bargain with myself. I give myself full permission to decide after the fact that the five pages read as though they were typed by an orangutan. If I hate them the following morning, I can throw them out with a clear conscience. But in the meantime I’m going to sit down and get them written, for better or for worse.

You’d be surprised how often I wind up with five pages of perfectly acceptable copy this way. I may yank a lot of sheets out of the typewriter en route, crumpling them up, hurling them at the wastebasket, and shattering the air with colorful imprecations. But I generally get five pages written that prove to be, if not divinely inspired, nevertheless as good as my prose is apt to get. And, on those genuinely rare occasions when I throw out the five pages on the morning after, I’ve nonetheless gained from the ordeal; the struggle will have jarred something loose, and I can approach with a clear vision the task that had been so impossibly muddled the day before.

Here’s where it’s so important that your daily quota is not too great a burden. For my part, I can always manage to squeeze five pages out of my typewriter. It’s a manageable burden. If I set my goals higher, I might have no trouble fulfilling them on good days, but on bad ones I’d be awed by having to produce ten or twelve pages. So I’d do none at all, and instead of making progress I’d sacrifice momentum.

Now and then a book grinds to a halt not because of projection or muddleheadedness but because something has Gone Wrong. We’ll deal with that in the next chapter.

Chapter 10

Snags, Dead Ends and False Trails

Sometimes a book just plain runs into a wall. It moves merrily along, lulling you into a false sense of security—is there any other kind?—and then a wheel comes off and there you are, knowing only that it’s your fault and that there ought to be something you can do about it.

If I had a magic answer, I would not be writing this book. Not because I’d be unwilling to share such divinely-inspired insight with you. Nothing would give me more pleasure. But I’d be too busy finishing up the dozen or more books of mine that ran into walls over the years, and that have languished unfinished in drawers and cardboard boxes ever since.

I’m not talking about those false starts where I knocked out one or two chapters of a book, then gave it up as a bad job. Those were just ideas I ran up the flagpole; when nobody saluted I hauled ’em down without a second thought. No, I’m talking about books that I stayed with for fifty or a hundred or a hundred fifty pages before something went curiously wrong, with them or with their author, and nothing more ever happened with them.

In some instances, this has happened to me because of my propensity for writing books without having a terribly clear idea where I’m going. I’m sure that if I always worked from a reasonably detailed outline I would run into dead ends far less frequently. On the other hand, my willingness to take a well-realized opening sequence and follow it to see where it leads has enabled me to write several of my most successful novels. If a trunkful of false starts is part of the price I’ve had to pay along the way, I can’t argue that it hasn’t been worth it.

All the same, it’s never fun investing substantial time and effort, not to mention mental and emotional involvement, in a never-to-be-finished book. Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” is part of every symphony orchestra’s repertoire, and
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
has remained in print since Dickens left it unfinished at his death, but this doesn’t mean any of my stillborn literary offspring will ever get anywhere. While regretting them is a waste of time, I’d certainly like to have as few of those abortive efforts as possible in my future.

One thing I’ve come to recognize is that I tend to run into a wall at a certain point in almost all of my books. I’ve been given to understand that marathon runners experience this sort of exhaustion somewhere around the twenty-mile mark when their glycogen stores run out. They keep going anyway and generally finish the race on their feet.

Most of my suspense novels run a shade over two hundred pages in manuscript, which probably comes to something like sixty thousand words. More often than not, these books hit the wall somewhere around page 120. It’s around that point that I find myself losing confidence in the book—or, more precisely, in my ability to make it work. The plot seems to be either too simple and straightforward to hold the reader’s interest or too complicated to be neatly resolved. I find myself worrying that there’s not enough action, that the lead’s situation is not sufficiently desperate, that the book has been struck boring while my attention was directed elsewhere.

I have come to realize that this conviction is largely illusory. I don’t know what causes this misperception of mine, but I would suspect it reflects attitudes of my own that have nothing much to do with the book. In any event, I know from experience that there’s very likely nothing wrong with the book, and that if I push on and get over the hump I’ll probably have a relatively easy time with the final third of the manuscript, and that the book itself will be fine.

If I put it aside, however, and wait for something wonderful to happen, I’ll very likely never get back to it.

It may not work this way for everyone, but I’ve learned to my cost that it works this way for me. The temptation to take a break from a novel when it runs out of gas is overwhelming. It seems so logical that such a break will have a favorable effect; phrases like “recharging one’s batteries” come readily to mind. The wish, I’m afraid, is father to the thought; struggling with a difficult book is unpleasant, and one very naturally wishes to be doing something else—anything else!—instead. But such a move is generally undertaken at the cost of completing the book.