Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [3]
First you went to work on your character cards. You wrote out one or more of those for each and every character to appear in the book, from the several leads to the most minor bit players. For the major characters, you might use several cards, devoting one to a physical description of the character, another to his background, another to his personal habits, and a fourth, say, to the astrological aspects at the moment of his birth.
Then you prepared your scene cards. Having used some other cards to rough out the plot, you set about working up a file card for every scene which would take place in your novel. If one character was going to buy a newspaper somewhere around page 384, you’d write out a scene card explaining how the scene would play, and what the lead would say to the newsdealer, and what the weather was like.
There was, as I recall, rather more to this method. By the time you were ready to write the book you had innumerable shoeboxes filled with three-by-five cards and all you had to do was turn them into a novel—which, now that I think of it, sounds rather more of a challenge than converting a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or base metal into gold.
I read this book all the way through, finding myself drawing closer to despair with every passing chapter. Two things were crystal clear to me. First of all, this man knew how to write a novel, and his method was the right method. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly manage it.
I finished the book, heaved a sigh, and gave myself up to feelings of inadequacy. I decided I’d have to stick to short stories for the time being, if not forever. Maybe someday I’d be sufficiently organized and disciplined and all to get those file cards and dig in. Maybe not.
Couple of months later I got out of bed one morning and sat down and wrote a two-page outline of a novel. About a month after that I sat down to the typewriter with my two-page outline at hand and a ream of white bond paper at the ready. I felt a little guilty without a shoebox full of file cards, but like the bumblebee who goes on flying in happy ignorance of the immutable laws of physics, I persisted in my folly and wrote the book in a couple of weeks.
Shows what a jerk that other writer was, doesn’t it? Wrong. It shows nothing of the sort. The extraordinarily elaborate method he described, while no more inviting in my eyes than disembowelment, was obviously one that worked like a charm—for him.
Perhaps he said as much. Perhaps he qualified things by explaining that his method was not the way to write a novel but merely his way to write a novel. It’s been a long time since I read his book—and it’ll be donkey’s years until I read it again—so I can’t trust my memory on the point. But I do know that I was left with the distinct impression that his method was the right method, that all other methods were the wrong method, and that by finding my own way to write my own novel I was proceeding at my own peril. It’s unlikely that he put things so strongly, and my interpretation doubtless owes a good deal to the anxiety and insecurity with which I approached the whole prospect of writing a book-length work of fiction.
Nevertheless, I would hate to leave anyone with the impression that the following pages will tell you everything to know about how to write a novel. All I’ll be doing—all I really can do—is share my own experience. If nothing else, that experience has been extensive enough to furnish me with the beginnings of a sense of my own ignorance. After twenty years and a hundred books, I at least realize that I don’t know how to write a novel, that nobody does, that there is no right way to do it. Whatever method works—for you, for me, for whoever’s sitting in the chair and poking away at the typewriter keys—is the right way to do it.
Chapter 1
Why Write a Novel?