Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [22]
It helps in an even more obvious fashion when you set out to outline your own novel. We’ll discuss this point at more length in Chapter Six; meanwhile, suffice it to say that the best way to prepare yourself to outline your own book is by outlining someone else’s book first.
Question—with all this reading and analyzing and outlining, all this mechanical swill, aren’t we stifling creativity? I have a feeling I’ll be trying to duplicate what’s been written rather than write my own novel.
That’s not how it works. But it’s easy to understand the anxiety. I’ve heard young would-be writers explain that they want to avoid reading fiction altogether in order to avoid being influenced by what’s already been done. They use phrases like “natural creativity” a lot. What happens, more often than not, is that such writers unwittingly produce trite stories because they haven’t read widely enough to know what’s been done to death already. An isolated tribesman who spontaneously invents the bicycle in 1982 may be displaying enormous natural creativity, but one wouldn’t expect the world to beat a path to his door.
The outlining process I’ve discussed doesn’t stifle creativity. At least it shouldn’t. I suppose a person could copy a character here and a plot line there and a setting from somewhere else, jumbling things up and putting together a novel from the chopped-up corpses of the novels he’s read. But that’s certainly not what we’re trying to do, and it’s not the best way to write something that will be commercially and artistically successful. Our object is to learn how to cast our own stories within the framework of a particular kind of novel, to stimulate our unconscious to produce plot and character ideas which lend themselves to this chosen type of novel so that it will be natural for our minds to think in these terms.
The best defense I can offer is the following exchange which appeared in an interview in the New York Times Book Review for December 24, 1978. The interviewer is Steve Oney; the writer interviewed is Harry Crews, the highly regarded author of A Feast of Snakes and several other novels noted for their imagination, originality, and technical proficiency:
Q. For someone who had been exposed to very little literature, how did you actually learn how to write?
A. I guess I really learned, seriously learned, how to write just after I got out of college when I pretty much literally ate Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair.” My wife and I were living in a little trailer … in Jacksonville, Fla., where I was teaching seventh grade … I wrote a novel that year, and here’s how I did it. I took “The End of the Affair,” and I pretty much reduced the thing to numbers. I found out how many characters were in it, how much time was in it—and that’s hard to do as there is not only present time in a book but past time as well. I found out how many cities were in the book, how many rooms, where the climaxes were and how long it took Greene to get to them.
And there were a lot of other things I reduced to numbers. I read that book until it was dog-eared and was coming apart in my hands. And then I said, “I’m going to write me a damn novel and do everything he did.” I knew I was going to waste—but it wasn’t a waste—a year of my time. And I knew that the end result was going to be a mechanical, unreadable novel. But I was trying to find out how in the hell you did it. So I wrote the novel, and it had to have this many rooms, this many transitions, etc. It was the bad novel I knew it would be. But by doing it I learned more about writing fiction and writing a novel and about the importance of time and place—Greene is a freak about time and place—than I had from any class or anything I’d done before. I really, literally, ate that book. And that’s how I learned to write.
I have no trouble believing the method Crews describes was every bit as instructive as he says it was. I don’t know that I would