Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [16]
I wouldn’t dream of it. One of the innumerable unpleasant facts I have to face about myself is that I’m a sluggard when it comes to research. I don’t enjoy it and I don’t do a very good job of it. I force myself when I have to, and I’ve become better about this in recent years, less given to slipshod fakery, but the idea of deliberately setting out to write a book which requires a vast amount of academic research is anathema to me.
Beyond that, I’m not comfortable with the idea of writing something set in a time other than my own. I wasn’t around then, so how could I presume to know how people talked? How could I expect to get their dialogue right, or to have the faintest idea what it felt like to be around in eighteenth-century Ireland, say, or Renaissance Italy? The fact that no one else knows how people talked or felt back then does nothing to put my mind at rest. I have to be able to believe in the fictive reality of what I’m doing in order to make it work.
This is not to say that I’m comfortable only when I write out of my own experience. I probably know as much about eighteenth-century Ireland as I do about contemporary Yugoslavia, yet I’ve blithely set several books in that country without doing more than cursory research. I’ve never killed anyone—yet—but I’ve written a great deal about murderers. I wrote a book from the point of view of a professional burglar and found the voice so natural that the book became the first of a series. I’ve written several books from a woman’s point of view. It’s a matter of identification, I suppose, of one’s ability to project oneself into certain environments and situations and not into others.
More simply, it’s a matter of identifying with an author. One of the things that makes fiction work is one’s identification with the characters. And one of the things that makes it writable, if you will, is identification with the person who wrote it.
I can remember the first time I felt it. It was the summer after my first year at college. I picked up a paperback anthology of short stories entitled The Jungle Kids. The author was Evan Hunter, who had recently made a name for himself with The Blackboard Jungle—hence the book’s title, not to mention the fact of its publication. The dozen or so stories in the book all dealt with juvenile delinquents and virtually all of them had been originally published in Manhunt. I identified, not so much with the characters in these stories, but with Evan Hunter himself.
I was genuinely excited when I reached the end of the book. Here was someone writing and publishing well-written stories that I could respect and enjoy—and, most important, I could see myself doing what he had done. I felt it was within my abilities, and I felt plots and characters of this sort could engage and stimulate my creative imagination. And I also felt that the whole thing was eminently worth doing.
I ultimately did make my first short story sale to Manhunt, but that’s another story. More to the point, my first novel grew directly out of a similar case of identification with the author.
I had at the time been writing and publishing crime stories for a year and felt it was time to write a novel. A senior colleague at the literary agency where I was working had suggested I try a light romance of the type Avalon was then publishing; because the rate of payment was awful, this was an easy market for the beginner to hit. I read one, and it was confessions all over again. I couldn’t get through the thing and knew I’d be incapable of coming up with an idea for one, let alone writing it.
What I really wanted to do was a detective novel. I’d read hundreds, liked the form very much, and made a couple of stabs at knocking out one of my own. But for one reason or another I couldn