Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [19]
Now what do you do?
Well, it’s possible you’re ready to sit down and go to work at the typewriter. Maybe you’ve already got your book firmly in mind, plot and characters and all. If that’s the case, by all means sit down and start hitting the keys. The book may or may not work, depending on the extent of your readiness, but in any event you’ll learn a great deal from the experience.
It’s very likely, though, that you’d do well to take another step before plunging in. This step consists of subjecting your chosen field to a detailed analysis by reading extensively and submerging yourself in what you read. The analytical process is such that you wind up with both an ingrained gut-level understanding of what constitutes a successful novel of your chosen type and a mind trained to conceive, produce and develop the ideas for such a novel.
I can’t think of a better name for this process than “market analysis,” yet something in me recoils at the term. It’s too clinical, for one thing, and it seems to imply that writing a salable gothic novel lends itself to the Harvard Business School case-study approach. We’re talking about writing, for Pete’s sake. We’re dealing with creativity. We’re artists, aren’t we? Market analysis is something they do in Wall Street offices, not Greenwich Village garrets.
Besides, the process I’m talking about is oriented more to the work than to the market. What we study here is the individual novel, and our concern is in discovering what makes it work, not what has induced some particular editor to publish it or some group of readers to buy it.
Okay. Whatever you call it, I want to do it. What do I do first?
Good question.
As I said, what you do is you read.
When you picked a type of book to write, one of the criteria was that it was one you were capable of reading with a certain degree of pleasure. This had better be the case, because you’re going to have to do some intensive reading. Fortunately, the odds are that reading is a habit for you from the start. That’s true for most people who want to write, and it’s especially true for most of those who wind up successful at it. Some of us find ourselves reading less fiction as time passes, and many of us are inclined to avoid reading other people’s novels while writing our own, but I rarely encounter a writer who’s not a pretty enthusiastic reader by nature.
So there’s a fair chance that you’ve been reading books in your chosen field for some time now, beginning long before you selected this field for your own novelistic endeavors. I’d had this sort of prior experience with suspense novels, for example, before I seriously attempted one of my own. On the other hand, I had not read widely in the soft-core sex novel field when the opportunity arose for me to write one. Few people had; the genre was just beginning to emerge.
Makes no difference. Either way, you have fresh reading to do. You have to read not as a normally perceptive reader, but with the special insight of a writer.
My first venture into this sort of reading came when I first began writing stories for the crime fiction magazines, but the process is pretty much the same for both short stories and novels. What I did, having made my first short story sale to Manhunt, was to study that magazine and every other crime fiction magazine far more intensively than I have ever studied anything before or since. I bought every magazine in the field the instant it appeared on the stands. In addition, I made regular visits to back-magazine shops, where I picked up every back issue of the leading magazines that I could find. I carried check lists of these publications in my wallet to avoid buying the same issue twice, and I carted the magazines home and arranged them in orderly fashion on my shelves. At night