The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [47]
And later, when the book was done, no one including Hugh would be able to tell the easy work from the hard, the smooth pages that hurried their way to completion from the ones over which he sweated blood. The work itself was all of a piece. It made no sense to him, seemed as though it should not be that way, but it was so.
The summer after the divorce he lectured at a writers’ conference in New Hampshire. He had received similar invitations frequently in the past and had always regretted them, considering such conferences a waste of time for all concerned, the students at least as much as the instructors. He accepted this invitation because it was something to do and some place to go at a time when he was doing nothing and going nowhere. They paid his expenses and a fee of five hundred dollars, which they called an honorarium and which he alternately regarded as too much or too little.
The conference was about what he had expected. Tfte other instructors included a lesbian poetess of whom he had never heard, a screenwriter who arrived drunk, gave one disastrous lecture and fled to the Coast, and a painfully earnest woman from Washington who wrote articles for general magazines. Hugh avoided them all. The students included some who, like Hugh, seemed to find the idea of a week in New Hampshire agreeable. Others really thought the conference would help their work, and they were as agonizingly sincere about it as the magazine writer. Finally there was a sprinkling of women who wanted to sleep with a successful author. Hugh could not imagine their reasons, but he obliged one a night for seven nights and spent the rest of his time drinking.
His lectures went over well enough. Idiotically enough, his audience sat there taking meaningless notes while he told them how to write novels. Afterward he couldn’t remember what he had told them, and hoped their memories were equally selective.
Because he had no idea how to write a novel.
There was a time when he thought there was a way. After the success of One If by Land he had had considerable second-novel trouble. He threw away one effort after another, ten pages of this and thirty pages of that and once a hundred pages that simply died on him. In desperation he began reading books purporting to tell how to write a novel.
Most of them were too vague to do any harm. But one had reduced the entire process to a systematic method which anyone with a typewriter could follow. First you drew a chart with all your characters and the relationship of each to the others. Then for each character you filled out a series of index cards with all their quirks and foibles and the details of their lives from cradle to grave. Then you did an outline of the entire book, indicating every scene and conversation. Then, with your chart and your index cards and your outline to guide you, you filled in the blanks and wrote the book.
He had proceeded as far as the index cards and had filled out a series about his lead character before he came to his senses and burned cards and chart in the fireplace. He also burned the book that had involved him in this idiocy, and other books of its ilk, and all the false starts he had thus far made on his second novel. Then he wrote the book as he had written One If by Land, by the simple method of putting the chair in front of the typewriter and his ass on the chair and going ahead and doing it.
He still didn’t know how he did it. From time to time he tried outlines, only to discard them as overly rigid once the book took on life of its own. All he knew now was that there was a magic that had to happen. The characters had to become real, had to speak their own lines to him so that he could put those lines on the paper.
The magic was not always there. His best books had parts that lacked it. His worst ones—the ones he liked least, which was no criterion of their critical or popular reception—always had parts that worked perfectly.