Writing the Novel (7 page)

Reading slowly and deliberately is something that’s come on me over the years, and I can relate it directly to my own development as a writer. Before I got into this business, and during my early years in it, I raced through books. The more I have come to read
like a writer,
the more deliberate the pace of my reading.

Once you’ve read all of the books at a thoughtful pace, it’s time to take them apart and see how they work. First, try summing up each book in a couple of sentences, like so:

A young widow is hired to catalogue the antique furniture in a house on the moors in Devon. The chauffeur-handyman tries to warn her off and she knows he’s up to something. She’s drawn to the son and heir, whose wife is coughing her lungs out in an attic bedchamber. Turns out the son has been selling off the good furniture, replacing it with reproductions and junk, and slowly poisoning his wife. He tries to kill our heroine when she uncovers the truth but she’s saved by the handyman, who’s actually the disguised second son of the Earl of Dorset, and ….

Well, you get the idea. I don’t write gothics myself, and I see no reason why I should squander my creativity plotting this one just as an example of what a summary is. Boil each of the six novels into a paragraph. The length doesn’t matter terribly much. No one else is going to read these things. The object is to reduce the sprawl of a novel to something you can grasp in a hundred words or so.

This method is useful in analyzing short fiction, too. A short-story writer would do well to write out brief summaries of dozens of short stories, paring away the writer’s facility with prose and dialogue and characterization and reducing each story to its basic plot. The novelist-to-be works with a smaller number of examples and winds up studying them rather more intensively.

By this I don’t mean you have to examine the plot summaries you’ve prepared like a paleontologist studying old dinosaur bones. Instead, you’ll return to the books you’ve summarized and go through them again, this time outlining them chapter by chapter. For each chapter you’ll write down what happens in a couple of sentences. To return to our mythical gothic, we might see something like this:

Chapter One—Ellen arrives at Greystokes. Liam meets her at the train and tells her the legend of the ghost in the potting shed. She is interviewed by Mrs. Hallburton who explains her duties and shows her to her room. She lies down on her bed and hears a woman coughing and sobbing on the floor above.

Chapter Two—Flashback. The cough triggers her recollection of her husband’s death. She remembers their meeting, tender moments in their courtship, the discovery of his illness, and his final days. She recalls her determination to resume her life and the circumstances that brought her to Greystokes.

Chapter Three—Dinner the first night. She meets Tirrell Hallburton, whose wife is coughing in the room above her own. After dinner she goes to the attic to look in on Glacia, the invalid. Glacia tells her that Death is on his way to Greystokes. “Someone will die soon—take care it isn’t you!” Ellen leaves, certain Glacia has a premonition of her own death ….

Maybe I ought to write this thing after all. It’s beginning to come to life for me in spite of myself.

I think you see how the process works. The outline may be as sketchy or as comprehensive as you want it to be—and the same rules will apply when you prepare an outline for your own novel. Because these outlines, like the outline you create for your own book, are designed to be tools. You’ll use them to get a grasp on what a novel is.

Although they’re often easier to write than short stories, for reasons we’ve already discussed at sufficient length, novels are often harder to master. So much more goes on in them that it’s difficult to see their structure. Just as our summaries served to give us a clear picture of what these several novels are
about,
so will our outlines show us their structure, their component parts. Stripped to outline form, the novel is like a forest in winter; with their branches bare, the individual trees become visible where once the eye saw nothing but a mass of green.

To repeat, your outlines may be as detailed as you wish. I would suggest that you make them as complete as possible in terms of including a scene-by-scene report of what is actually taking place. There’s no need in this sort of outline for explanation—why the characters do what they do, or how they feel about it—so much as there’s a need to put down everything that goes on, every scene that exists as a part of the whole.

In this fashion, you’ll develop a sense of the novel as a collection of scenes. God knows it’s not necessary to do this in order to write a novel, or even to understand how novels are constructed, but I think it helps.

It helps in an even more obvious fashion when you set out to outline your own novel. We’ll discuss this point at more length in Chapter Six; meanwhile, suffice it to say that the best way to prepare yourself to outline your own book is by outlining someone else’s book first.

Question
—
with all this reading and analyzing and outlining, all this mechanical swill, aren’t we stifling creativity? I have a feeling I’ll be trying to duplicate what’s been written rather than write my own novel.

That’s not how it works. But it’s easy to understand the anxiety. I’ve heard young would-be writers explain that they want to avoid reading fiction altogether in order to avoid being influenced by what’s already been done. They use phrases like “natural creativity” a lot. What happens, more often than not, is that such writers unwittingly produce trite stories because they haven’t read widely enough to know what’s been done to death already. An isolated tribesman who spontaneously invents the bicycle in 1982 may be displaying enormous natural creativity, but one wouldn’t expect the world to beat a path to his door.

The outlining process I’ve discussed doesn’t stifle creativity. At least it shouldn’t. I suppose a person could copy a character here and a plot line there and a setting from somewhere else, jumbling things up and putting together a novel from the chopped-up corpses of the novels he’s read. But that’s certainly not what we’re trying to do, and it’s not the best way to write something that will be commercially and artistically successful. Our object is to learn how to cast our own stories within the framework of a particular kind of novel, to stimulate our unconscious to produce plot and character ideas which lend themselves to this chosen type of novel so that it will be natural for our minds to think in these terms.

The best defense I can offer is the following exchange which appeared in an interview in the
New York Times Book Review
for December 24, 1978. The interviewer is Steve Oney; the writer interviewed is Harry Crews, the highly regarded author of
A Feast of Snakes
and several other novels noted for their imagination, originality, and technical proficiency:

Q. For someone who had been exposed to very little literature, how did you actually learn how to write?

A. I guess I really learned, seriously learned, how to write just after I got out of college when I pretty much literally ate Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair.” My wife and I were living in a little trailer … in Jacksonville, Fla., where I was teaching seventh grade … I wrote a novel that year, and here’s how I did it. I took “The End of the Affair,” and I pretty much reduced the thing to numbers. I found out how many characters were in it, how much time was in it—and that’s hard to do as there is not only present time in a book but past time as well. I found out how many cities were in the book, how many rooms, where the climaxes were and how long it took Greene to get to them.

And there were a lot of other things I reduced to numbers. I read that book until it was dog-eared and was coming apart in my hands. And then I said, “I’m going to write me a damn novel and do everything he did.” I knew I was going to waste—but it wasn’t a waste—a year of my time. And I knew that the end result was going to be a mechanical, unreadable novel. But I was trying to find out how in the hell you did it. So I wrote the novel, and it had to have this many rooms, this many transitions, etc. It was the bad novel I knew it would be. But by doing it I learned more about writing fiction and writing a novel and about the importance of time and place—Greene is a freak about time and place—than I had from any class or anything I’d done before. I really, literally, ate that book. And that’s how I learned to write.

I have no trouble believing the method Crews describes was every bit as instructive as he says it was. I don’t know that I would care to write a book in this fashion, or that I would be able to discipline myself sufficiently to complete a book I knew would be unsalable by definition, but I would surely imagine that the educational potential of the process is considerable. Even without going so far as to write an imitative novel of one’s own, a writer could greatly increase his understanding of what novels are and how they work by following the first stages of Crews’ system—i.e., by taking an admired novel apart, reducing it to numbers, and learning how the author handles such matters as time and place and action and pace and so forth.

Getting back to the question you asked a couple of pages ago, it’s evident that Crews’ approach did stifle creativity in the particular novel he describes. His purpose was not creative development but technical progress—he wanted to learn what made a novel tick so he took one apart to find out, then tried putting it back together again. But you’ll be studying not one but half a dozen books, books which may have the common features of their genre but which differ considerably each from the other. The book you write will in turn differ from each of them while presumably retaining those elements which make them a satisfying experience for the people who read them. That’s not a matter of stifling creativity but one of finding the right frame for it and lighting it properly.

This outlining sounds like a WPA project. I can see doing some extensive reading, sort of soaking up the market that way, but I hate the idea of purposeless work. Is it absolutely essential to do this?

Of course not.

I think outlining other people’s novels as I’ve described it is as effective and expedient a way as I know to learn what a particular sort of novel is and how it works. But it’s not the only way, and it’s certainly no prerequisite for writing your own novel. If you find it tedious to such an extent that it seems counter-productive, by all means give it up.

You don’t even have to read widely in your chosen field, as far as that goes. The only thing you absolutely
have
to do to produce a novel is sit down and write the thing. Some people profit greatly by such preparatory work as I’ve described. Others get along just fine without it.

I wouldn’t be so sure, though, that outlining is purposeless work, or a waste of time. On the contrary, I’d be inclined to guess it saves time for most of the people who do it—time spent repairing mistakes and reworking false starts that might not have occurred had they laid the groundwork properly before starting their own novels.

But pick the approach that feels right for you as a writer. That, ultimately, is the most important thing you can do.

Chapter 4

Developing Plot Ideas

“Where do you get your ideas?” is one of the questions writers get asked all the time. What’s galling about it, in addition to its banality, is the questioner’s implicit assumption that coming up with a clever idea is all there really is to the business of being a writer. Turning that idea into a book—well, that’s just a matter of typing, isn’t it?

But of course not. Were that the case, I’d run books through my typewriter at seventy or eighty words per minute, not four or five agonizing pages per day.

While ideas are not the
sine qua non
in the novel that they often are in the short story, they are nevertheless essential.

A handful of writers can produce books that are not specifically
about
something and make them work. It scarcely matters what
Finnegan’s Wake
is about, for example. For the rest of us, a strong central idea is basic to our novels. How we are to get these ideas, and how we can best develop them into strong plots, is something with which we might well concern ourselves.

It’s my own conviction that we do not
get
our ideas. They are given to us, bubbling up out of our own subconscious minds as if from some dark and murky ferment. When the conditions are right, it is neither more nor less than the natural condition of things for a writer’s imagination to produce those ideas which constitute the raw material of his fiction.

I don’t know that I have much control over this process of generating ideas. This is not to say that I don’t
want
to control the process, or even that I don’t
try
to control it. But I’ve gradually come to see that I can’t stimulate ideas by hitting myself in the forehead with a two-by-four.

This does not mean that there’s nothing the writer can do to foster the development of novelistic ideas. Note, please, my argument that the process occurs of its own accord
when the conditions are right.

My job, when I want ideas to bubble up, is to make sure the conditions are right. Then I can let go of the controls and pick ideas like plums when they come along.

That’s a little hazy. Can’t we get a bit more specific? How do I adjust the conditions?

We can get a whole lot more specific. And as far as adjusting the conditions is concerned, you’ve already been doing that. The reading and studying and analysis we talked about in the preceding chapter has as one of its functions the development of fictional ideas. By immersing ourselves in these books and turning them inside out, we come to know them on a gut level, so that our imaginations are encouraged to toy with the kinds of plot material which will be useful to us.

There are other things we can do as well. For instance:

Pay attention.
The little atoms of fact and attitude which can link up into the molecules of an idea are all over the damn place. Each of us sees and hears and reads a dozen things a day that we could feed into the idea hopper—if we were paying attention.