Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [13]
During the first of my several vexingly undistinguished years as a college student, a cartoon hung for months on the English Department bulletin board. I returned to that campus twenty years after my precipitous departure from it, a prodigal son come home to teach a writing seminar, and as I walked across the greensward that cartoon came vividly back to me.
It showed a sullen eight-year-old boy staring down an earnest school principal. “It’s not enough to be a genius, Arnold,” the man was saying. “You have to be a genius at something.”
I recall identifying very strongly with Arnold. I had known several years before college that I wanted to be a writer. But it seemed it wasn’t enough merely to be a writer.
You had to be a writer of something.
Some people get the whole package as a gift. Not only are they endowed with writing talent but they seem to have been born knowing what to write about. Equipped at the onset with stories to tell, they have only to get on to the business of telling them.
Some people, in short, have it easy.
But some of us don’t. We know that we want to write without knowing what we want to write.
It’s encouraging to note that we’re in the majority, that most writers have been obsessed with the idea of becoming writers before the nature of what they might write about revealed itself to them. It’s easy to accept this premise about the nuts-and-bolts commercial writer, but the same initial uncertainty is every bit as likely to characterize the early years of writers with impeccable critical reputations. The identification of self as writer comes for most of us before we know what sort of writer we’ll be or what we’ll write about, and that seems to be just as true whether our ultimate literary product is Moby Dick or Trailer Trollop.
(This might be a good place to suggest, incidentally, that fiction writers of every stripe have a great deal more in common that the disparity of our work might suggest. The fact that we write unites us far more than the nature of what we write separates us.)
Let’s suppose, then, that all you know at this point is that you want to write a novel. Why you have this curious urge is not terribly important. It’s enough that you have it in good measure. Whether you’ll prove to have other elements essential to novelistic success—talent, perseverance, resourcefulness—is not something you have to know at this stage. Indeed, it’s not something you’re in a position to know. You’ll find out in due course.
How do you decide what novel to write?
It seems to me that this question can best be answered by asking a few others. First of all, what kind of novel do you like to read? I would not go so far as to say that we can only produce the sort of fiction that we most enjoy reading ourselves.
I’ve known of too many instances where this is simply untrue. When I was knocking out soft-core sex novels, for instance, I did not commonly spend my free hours reading other people’s soft-core sex novels. And I’ve observed that a substantial number of people who write westerns are very much averse to reading in the genre. Contrariwise, most mystery and science-fiction writers seem to enjoy reading in their respective fields.
When I was starting out, confession magazines constituted the most receptive market for new writers. They paid fairly well, too. Their numbers have shrunk since then and their rates of payment have actually declined, illustrating once more how the short story writer’s lot has gotten worse over the years, but back then they were an excellent place for a neophyte to get started.
I think, because I read a lot of them, I understood what a confession story was, the basic structure of its plot, and what made one story good and another unacceptable. During the year I spent working for a literary agent, the two confessions I yanked out of the slush pile both sold on their initial submissions, and the author of one of them came to be a leader