Writing the Novel (3 page)

Westerns typically adhere to one of five or six standard plotlines. Similarly, there are a handful of basic book types in the mystery and science-fiction fields. And, in the world of mainstream fiction, consider how many novels each year deal with nothing more original than the loss of innocence.

This is not to say that the novel does not demand ingenuity. It is this quality which enables the novelist to take a standard theme and hang upon it a book which will seem quite fresh and new to everyone who reads it. As he writes, characters come to life, scenes acquire dimension upon the page, and a wealth of original incident serves to make this particular book significantly different from all those other novels to which it is thematically identical.

Sometimes these elements of characterization and incident which make a novel unique exist in the forefront of the author’s mind when he sits down to the typewriter. Sometimes they emerge from his creative unconscious as he goes along.

I enjoy writing short stories myself. They offer me considerable satisfaction, for all that their production is economically unsound. I very much enjoy being able to sit down at the typewriter with an idea fully formed in my head and devote myself to a day’s work of transforming that idea into a finished piece of fiction.

The enjoyment’s so keen that I’d do this sort of thing more often—except that each story requires a reasonably strong central idea, and the idea itself gets used up in the space of a couple of thousand words. I simply don’t get that many ideas that I find all that appealing.

Ed Hoch makes a living writing nothing but short stories, and he manages this superhuman feat because he seems to be a never-ending fount of ideas. The development of short story ideas and their speedy metamorphosis into fiction is what gives him personal satisfaction as a writer. I sometimes find myself envying him, but I know I couldn’t possibly come up with half a dozen viable short story ideas every month the way he does. So I take the easy way out and write novels.

You can learn more. Writing has this in common with most other skills: we develop it best by practicing it. Whatever writing we do helps us to become better writers.

It has been my observation, however, that there is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel. I learned quite a bit by writing short stories. I learned much much more when I wrote my first novel, and I have continued to learn something or other with virtually every novel I have written since.

Short story writing taught me quite a bit about effective use of the language. I learned, too, how to construct a scene and how to handle dialogue. Everything I learned in this fashion was valuable.

When I wrote a novel, it was as if I were working out now with heavy weights; I felt growth in muscles I had not previously been called upon to use at all.

Characterization was at once a very different matter. Before my characters had existed to perform specific functions and speak specific lines. Some were well drawn, some were not, but none had the sort of fictive life that transcended their role on the page. When I wrote a novel, the characters came to life for me. They had backgrounds, they had families, they had quirks and attitudes that added up to more than the broad lines of caricature. I had to know more about them in order to make them maintain vitality over a couple of hundred pages, and thus there was more substance to them. This not to say that my characterization in my earliest novels was particularly good. It was not. But I learned immeasurably from it.

I learned, too, how to deal with time in fiction. My short stories had often consisted of a single scene, and rarely of more than three or four scenes. The novels I wrote seemed to cover a matter of days or weeks, and of course consisted of a great many scenes. I learned to deal with any number of technical matters—viewpoint shifts, flashbacks, internal monologues, etc.

You can earn while you learn.
It’s curious how many writers tend to expect instant gratification. We’ve barely rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter than we expect to see our efforts on the best seller list.

It seems to me that other artists are rather less impatient of tangible success. What painter expects to sell the first canvas he covers? More often than not he plans to paint over it once it’s dried. What singer counts on being booked into Carnegie Hall the first day he hits a high note? Every other artistic career is assumed to have an extended and arduous period of study and apprenticeship, yet all too many writers think they ought to be able to write professionally on their first attempt, and mail off their first stories before the ink is dry.

There must be reasons for this. I suppose the whole idea of communication is so intrinsic a part of what we do that a piece of writing which goes unread by others is like Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling where no human ear can hear it. If nobody reads it, it’s as if we hadn’t even written it.

Then too, unpublished writing strikes us as unfinished writing. An artist can hang a canvas on his own wall. A singer can croon in the shower. A manuscript, though, is not complete until it is in print.

At first glance this desire to receive money and recognition for early work would look like the height of egotistic arrogance. It seems to me, however, that what it best illustrates is the profound insecurity of the new writer. We yearn to be in print because without this recognition we have no way of establishing to our own satisfaction that our work is of any value.

I would not for a moment advise a new writer to expect to get any recognition or financial gain out of a first novel. Unless you are fully prepared to spend months writing a book with no greater reward than the doing of it, you would very likely be better off getting rid of your typewriter and taking up some leisure pastime which places less of a premium on achievement.

This notwithstanding, there is no gainsaying the fact that any number of first novels are published every year. Publishers typically bitch about the difficulty of breaking even on a first novel, conveniently ignoring the several first novels per season to achieve best seller status. True, most first novels are not published. True too, most that are sell very poorly. The wonder is that any are published at all.

Thus it is possible to make certain gains, in money and in recognition, while acquiring those skills which can only be acquired through experience. And this sort of paid apprenticeship is far more readily accessible to the novelist than the short story writer.

It wasn’t always this way. When the newsstands teemed with pulp magazines, the pulps were precisely where the new writer earned a living—albeit a precarious one—while developing his skills and refining his technique. A similar kind of magazine apprenticeship is standard procedure to this day in the field of nonfiction; article writers earn while they learn by writing for house organs and trade journals before they are ready to write either nonfiction books or articles for more prestigious magazines.

Some of the surviving fiction magazines are certainly open to new writers—
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
for example, makes a special point of publishing first stories, having printed over five hundred maiden efforts to date. But ever since the decline of the pulps in the 1950s, there has not been sufficient depth to the magazine fiction market for a writer to serve out his apprenticeship there.

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.