Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [17]
During this time I had read perhaps a dozen lesbian novels. The sensitive novel of female homosexuality constituted a small but quite popular category in the fifties. I probably read the books more for information and titillation than anything else. I wasn’t personally acquainted with any lesbians at the time, nor did my knowledge of their lives go beyond what I read in those novels or witnessed on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.
For whatever reason, I did find the books compulsively readable, and one day I finished one and realized that I could have written it myself. Or one quite like it. Possibly, by Georgia, one a shade better than what I’d just read.
In the name of research, I promptly read every lesbian novel I could get my hands on. Elements of a novel of my own began percolating in my mind—fragments of a character, a scene, a setting. Then one morning I awakened with the plot ready to happen, and I sat down and typed up a two or three page outline. After a gestation period of perhaps another month I sat down and wrote the thing in two weeks flat.
It sold first time out to Fawcett, then the leading market for that sort of book, and I was a published novelist just like that. I was not an overnight success, nor did I find an immediate identity for myself as a writer of lesbian novels; curiously enough, it was years before I wrote another. But I learned a tremendous amount writing the book, as one does writing any first novel, and it was that jolting realization of I-could-do-this that got me going.
This sort of identification with the writer, this recognition of one’s own capacity to write a certain type of book, is not limited to category fiction. Whatever makes you want to become a novelist, whatever sort of novelist you want to become, the process I’ve described is a basic starting point for finding your own first novel.
If you’ve decided that money is the spur that goads you and that you want to reach for the brass ring right away rather than work your way up to it, you would do well to have a broad acquaintance with the sorts of books that have made their authors rich. By regularly reading best-selling novels, and especially by concentrating on the works of those authors who consistently hit the best seller list, you’ll develop a sense of the sorts of books which tend to earn big money.
Some books make the best seller lists by happy accident. Perhaps they are category novels which have acquired a greater than usual readership because of increasingly widespread recognition of the author’s particular excellences. John D. MacDonald and Ross Macdonald are two cases in point; both continue to write the excellent hard-boiled suspense novels they’ve been writing for years, but their audience has swelled to the point where the books they write are best sellers.
Other books on the list are novels of considerable literary merit which have enough breadth of appeal to make them best sellers. E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is a good example of this phenomenon, as are The World According to Garp, by John Irving, and Final Payments, by Mary Gordon. Similarly, a few highly esteemed authors hit the best seller list routinely, not because of the type of books they write but because of the prominence they have achieved and the size of their personal following among readers. John Updike’s an example. So are Gore Vidal and John Cheever.
The remainder of the best seller list is chiefly composed of books with certain qualities common to best sellers—and here we find ourselves on marshy terrain indeed, because I don’t feel it’s proper to think in terms of a best seller class or category. Certainly there’s no magic formula, and certainly these books differ enormously from one another. By familiarizing yourself with best-selling fiction, you’ll get a sense of what qualities they have in common.
Perhaps more important, you’ll find that you like best sellers of one sort while disliking others. And, somewhere along the line, you’ll find one or more best-selling novels that spark that identification