• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 547 0

care to write a book in this fashion, or that I would be able to discipline myself sufficiently to complete a book I knew would be unsalable by definition, but I would surely imagine that the educational potential of the process is considerable. Even without going so far as to write an imitative novel of one’s own, a writer could greatly increase his understanding of what novels are and how they work by following the first stages of Crews’ system—i.e., by taking an admired novel apart, reducing it to numbers, and learning how the author handles such matters as time and place and action and pace and so forth.

Getting back to the question you asked a couple of pages ago, it’s evident that Crews’ approach did stifle creativity in the particular novel he describes. His purpose was not creative development but technical progress—he wanted to learn what made a novel tick so he took one apart to find out, then tried putting it back together again. But you’ll be studying not one but half a dozen books, books which may have the common features of their genre but which differ considerably each from the other. The book you write will in turn differ from each of them while presumably retaining those elements which make them a satisfying experience for the people who read them. That’s not a matter of stifling creativity but one of finding the right frame for it and lighting it properly.

This outlining sounds like a WPA project. I can see doing some extensive reading, sort of soaking up the market that way, but I hate the idea of purposeless work. Is it absolutely essential to do this?

Of course not.

I think outlining other people’s novels as I’ve described it is as effective and expedient a way as I know to learn what a particular sort of novel is and how it works. But it’s not the only way, and it’s certainly no prerequisite for writing your own novel. If you find it tedious to such an extent that it seems counter-productive, by all means give it up.

You don’t even have to read widely in your chosen field, as far as that goes. The only thing you absolutely have to do to produce a novel is sit down and write the thing. Some people profit greatly by such preparatory work as I’ve described. Others get along just fine without it.

I wouldn’t be so sure, though, that outlining is purposeless work, or a waste of time. On the contrary, I’d be inclined to guess it saves time for most of the people who do it—time spent repairing mistakes and reworking false starts that might not have occurred had they laid the groundwork properly before starting their own novels.

But pick the approach that feels right for you as a writer. That, ultimately, is the most important thing you can do.

Chapter 4

Developing Plot Ideas

“Where do you get your ideas?” is one of the questions writers get asked all the time. What’s galling about it, in addition to its banality, is the questioner’s implicit assumption that coming up with a clever idea is all there really is to the business of being a writer. Turning that idea into a book—well, that’s just a matter of typing, isn’t it?

But of course not. Were that the case, I’d run books through my typewriter at seventy or eighty words per minute, not four or five agonizing pages per day.

While ideas are not the sine qua non in the novel that they often are in the short story, they are nevertheless essential.

A handful of writers can produce books that are not specifically about something and make them work. It scarcely matters what Finnegan’s Wake is about, for example. For the rest of us, a strong central idea is basic to our novels. How we are to get these ideas, and how we can best develop them into strong plots, is something with which we might well concern ourselves.

It’s my own conviction that we do not get our ideas. They are given to us, bubbling up out of our own subconscious minds as if from some dark and murky ferment. When the conditions are right, it is neither more nor less than the natural condition of things for a writer’s imagination to produce those ideas which constitute the raw material