Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [24]
I don’t know that I have much control over this process of generating ideas. This is not to say that I don’t want to control the process, or even that I don’t try to control it. But I’ve gradually come to see that I can’t stimulate ideas by hitting myself in the forehead with a two-by-four.
This does not mean that there’s nothing the writer can do to foster the development of novelistic ideas. Note, please, my argument that the process occurs of its own accord when the conditions are right.
My job, when I want ideas to bubble up, is to make sure the conditions are right. Then I can let go of the controls and pick ideas like plums when they come along.
That’s a little hazy. Can’t we get a bit more specific? How do I adjust the conditions?
We can get a whole lot more specific. And as far as adjusting the conditions is concerned, you’ve already been doing that. The reading and studying and analysis we talked about in the preceding chapter has as one of its functions the development of fictional ideas. By immersing ourselves in these books and turning them inside out, we come to know them on a gut level, so that our imaginations are encouraged to toy with the kinds of plot material which will be useful to us.
There are other things we can do as well. For instance:
Pay attention. The little atoms of fact and attitude which can link up into the molecules of an idea are all over the damn place. Each of us sees and hears and reads a dozen things a day that we could feed into the idea hopper—if we were paying attention.
Back in the early sixties I was reading one of the newsmagazines when I happened on an article on sleep. I learned no end of things, all of which I promptly forgot except for one delicious nugget of information—there seems to be a certain number of cases in medical literature of human beings who do not sleep at all. They get along somehow, leading lives of permanent insomnia, but otherwise not demonstrably the worse for wear.
Fortunately, I wasn’t sleeping when I read that item. I rolled it around in my brain, filed it for cocktail-party conversation, and never dreamed I’d wind up writing seven books about a character named Evan Tanner, a free-lance secret agent whose sleep center had been destroyed during the Korean War.
A few million people probably read that article without writing a book about an insomniac. Conversely, I’ve undoubtedly come up against a few million facts which might have sparked a character or a setting or a plot, but didn’t. What made the difference, I think, is that I happened to find this particular fact oddly provocative. My unconscious mind was eager to play with it, to add it to the murky ferment we talked about earlier. That my mind ultimately made Tanner the particular character he is is very likely attributable to the particular character I am—as we’ll observe when we look at the process of character development more closely in another chapter. That the plot in which I put Tanner took the shape it did is attributable to two things. First, I’d schooled myself and/or had been inclined by nature to develop plots that lent themselves to suspense fiction. Second, another key principle operated, to wit:
Two and two makes five. Which is to say that synergy is very much at work in the process of plot development. The whole is ever so much greater than its parts. The writer, in possession of one fact or anecdote or notion or concept or whatever, suddenly gifted with another apparently unrelated fact or anecdote or et cetera, takes one in each hand and automatically turns them this way and that, playing with the purposefulness of a child, trying to see if they’ll fit together.
Let’s get back to Tanner. A full three years after that newsmagazine item, I spent an evening with a numismatic journalist just back from Turkey, where he’d spent a couple of years earning a very precarious living smuggling ancient coins and Roman glass out of the country. Among the stories on which he was dining out was one about a rumor he’d heard of a cache of gold coins secreted in the front