Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [30]
He might have begun work immediately upon a book about a vigilante who goes around killing people after someone slashes his convertible top—and that’s not the worst premise for a book I’ve ever heard. But Brian gave the book plenty of time to take shape, let the character of accountant Paul Benjamin emerge from wherever our ideas grow, made the motivating experience the rape and beating of Benjamin’s wife and daughter by a trio of hoodlums, with the wife dying and the daughter shocked into madness, and let the story grow from there. The result, Death Wish, was an artistic success as a novel and an enormous commercial triumph as a film.
Don Westlake, on the other hand, once wrote a first chapter in which a surly fellow walks across the George Washington Bridge into New York, snarling at motorists who offer him rides. Don didn’t know where he was going with that one but found out as he went along. The result was the lengthy series of novels Don wrote under the pen name Richard Stark, all of them featuring Parker, a professional heist man and as unobliging a chap as he was the day he walked across the bridge.
As the years go by, which is something they do with increasing rapidity lately, I find myself giving ideas more rather than less time to take shape. I’m no longer so anxious to rush Chapter One through the typewriter if I have no idea what’ll happen in Chapter Two. One learns from experience, and I’ve had the experience of watching far too many first chapters wither on the vine to dismiss the possibility of its happening again. I’m less inclined to worry that an idea will evaporate if I don’t get it into production as quickly as possible. If I make a note of it so I won’t forget it, and if I read through my notebook from time to time and make it a point to think about what I find there, the good ideas will survive and grow. The bad ones will drop out along the way, and that’s fine; I don’t feel compelled to add to my stack of first-chapters-of-books-destined-never-to-have-a-second-chapter.
On the other hand, the next book I intend to write is one I’ve been thinking about for several months now, getting more and more of a sense of the lead character, considering and rejecting any number of geographical settings, changing my mind over and over again about the nature of the plot.
I got the idea, incidentally, by the serendipitous process that yields so many ideas. I was at the library, doing research on patron saints for the sake of a bit of conversational by-play in a light mystery novel, The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. This led me to a passage from Aquinas that amounted to a marvelous moral justification for larceny. Then, because I was tired of saints, patron or otherwise, I started browsing magazines, something I rarely do, and came across an interview with Dennis Hopper. I felt I really ought to go home and get to work, but I felt self-indulgent that day and read the Hopper interview, and there was the idea for my next novel, just waiting there for me to find it. (I won’t tell you what it is—I don’t want to leave my fight in the gym.)
Anyway, I expect I’ll start writing the book in a couple of months. I know the book will have benefited greatly from the time I’ve spent thinking about it off and on ever since I read that interview. But I’m quite certain that I won’t know very much about the direction the plot will take. I’ll have my first chapter pretty well worked out in my mind, and I’ll know a lot about the characters, and I’ll have a variety of possible directions for the book to go, but ….
But I won’t be able to sit down and paint the thing by numbers. That’s what makes it hard, no matter how much plotting time you give a book, but it’s also what keeps it exciting.
Chapter 5
Developing Characters
The chief reason for almost any reader to go