Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

CHAPTER 4

Novel Approaches

WHEN I first got started in this ridiculous profession, I wrote nothing but short stories. For a year after my first sale I hammered out crime fiction, a couple of thousand words at a clip. I peddled some of it for a cent a word, some for a cent and a half a word, and watched much of it go unsold.

After a year of this, I finally got courageous enough to write a novel. It took me two or three weeks to write it, sold to the first publisher who saw it, and brought me a vast sense of accomplishment and an advance of two thousand dollars. It did not make me rich and famous, but I was a youth of nineteen summers at the time and as callow as they come, and fame and fortune would have spoiled me for sure.

I've recounted all this because I think my initial approach was typical for most beginning writers. We start out writing short stories because it certainly looks like the easiest way to break in. The short story is a compact and controllable form. One can grasp it all at once. It's short?that's how it got its name?and it won't take a year and a day to write. A person can do a few dozen of them, learning as he goes along, in less time than it might take him to write a novel.

These arguments sound logical enough, but they overlook some basic facts. Foremost of these is that the short story is infinitely more difficult to sell than the novel. The market for short fiction was minuscule when I was starting out twenty years ago. Since then it has consistently shrunk to the point of invisibility. Every year there are fewer magazines buying short stories and still more hopeful writers submitting manuscripts to them.

The economics of the short-story business are discouraging at best. Hitchcock and Queen, my markets for short fiction, pay the same nickel a word they doled out twenty years ago. The confession mags pay a shade less than they did then, and are less eager to buy than they used to be. And each year it seems as though a few more of the top magazines have (a) gone out of business, (b) discontinued fiction, or (c) stopped reading unsolicited manuscripts.

I don't mean to talk anyone out of writing short stories. I wouldn't go on writing them myself if I didn't find them a great source of satisfaction. It's more my intention to suggest that the novel is a much better place for the beginner to get started.

But wait a moment. My vaunted writer's imagination sees a lot of you waving your hands in the air. Ask your questions, then, and perhaps I can answer them.

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Isn't it harder to write a novel than a short story?

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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. Matter of fact, you don't have to be a beginner to be intimidated in this fashion. I'm writing this chapter during a momentary respite from a World War II novel which will ultimately run to five or six hundred pages. My suspense novels generally stop at two hundred pages or thereabouts, and I had a lot of trouble starting this book because its vastness scared the adverbs out of me.

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 session at the typewriter. The process of writing the book is going to occupy you for weeks or months?perhaps years. But each day's stint at the typewriter is simply that?one day's work. That's 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.

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I'd love to write a novel. But I don't know how to begin.

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Page one's as good a place as any.

I'll tell you a secret?nobody knows how to start a novel. There are no rules, because each novel is a case unto itself.

Sometimes an outline helps. I've used outlines frequently and have mixed feelings about them. It's comforting, certainly, to know where a book is going, and an outline spells all of that out for you in advance and saves you worrying that you'll plot yourself into a corner.

On the other hand, an outline can keep a novel from developing organically. There's no way an outline can include absolutely everything, and the little elements of characterization and incident that crop up while you're writing can change the shape and direction of your novel. If you're tied to an outline, the book can't grow as it wants to; its final form is as predetermined as a paint-by-number canvas. Of course you can always modify the outline as you feel the need, but that's sometimes easier said than done.

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Even if you don't use an outline, isn't it necessary to know where the book is going?

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Not really. I know several writers who have written quite a few books by rolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter just to see what happens.

My friend Don