Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [1]
Chapter 6 Outlining. First, learn about outlines, by writing one of an existing book. How to write an outline of your own. How to expand it step by step into a book. Advantages of not using an outline. Avoiding outline-enslavement.
Chapter 7 Using What You Know … and What You Don’t Know. How to put the background you have to work in your novel. Capitalizing on your own experience. Research—how and when to do it, how and when to do without it.
Chapter 8 Getting Started. Beginnings. How to open the book up, when to begin at the beginning and when not to.
Chapter 9 Getting It Written. How to harness self-discipline for the long haul of novel-writing: Take it a day at a time.
Chapter 10 Snags, Dead Ends and False Trails. What to do when a wheel comes off.
Chapter 11 Matters of Style. Grammar, diction, usage. Dialogue. First vs. third person. Single vs. multiple viewpoint. How to handle transitions, descriptive passages.
Chapter 12 Length. How long is long enough? Length as a market consideration. Writing the right length for your particular book.
Chapter 13 Rewriting. All at once or as you go along? Structural revision. Stylistic polishing. How rewriting sharpens prose.
Chapter 14 Getting Published. Difficulties facing the first novelist. Queries. Finding an agent, if you think you need one. Dealing with editors. Subsidy publishers.
Chapter 15 Doing It Again. Moving on to the next book. Special aspects of sequels and series books.
A New Afterword by the Author
A Biography of Lawrence Block
Introduction
This is a book designed to help you write a novel. It contains the distillation of my own experience of twenty years as a published novelist, plus a considerable amount that I’ve learned from other writers. My goal throughout has been to produce the sort of book I might have found useful when I set out to write my own first novel.
But there are no guarantees. Just because you’ve bought this book, just because you’ve studied it diligently, does not mean for a moment that your success as a novelist is a foregone conclusion. You may never write so much as the first paragraph of a novel. You may begin work on a book and find yourself unable to complete it. Or you may labor long and hard on a book, working your way through outline and first draft and final polish, only to discover that you’ve turned a perfectly good ream of paper into something commercially unviable and artistically indefensible.
These things happen. That they happen constantly to neophyte writers should hardly be surprising news. What may be more of a surprise is that they happen to seasoned professional novelists as well.
They even happen to me. Over the years, I’ve published, at last count, twenty novels under my own name, plus perhaps five times that number under various pseudonyms. You would think that all that furious typing would have resulted in my having learned something, that while I might not know how to tie my shoes or cross the street I ought certainly to have the mechanics of writing a novel down cold by now.
But in the past two or three years I’ve had perhaps half a dozen ideas for novels that got no further than the first chapter. I’ve written three novels that died after I’d written over a hundred pages; they repose in my file cabinet at this very moment, like out-of-gas cars on a highway, waiting for someone to start them up again. I very much doubt they’ll ever be completed.
That’s not all. During that same stretch of time I’ve seen two novels through to completion and succeeded only in producing books that no one has wanted to publish—and, I’ve come to believe, for good and sufficient reason. Both were books I probably shouldn’t have tried writing in the first place. Both failures constituted learning experiences that will almost certainly prove beneficial in future work. While I could by no means afford the time spent on these books, neither can I properly write that time off as altogether wasted.
But how could an established professional write an un-publishable book? If he’s written a dozen or two