Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [36]
Who indeed? I could, and did. I carried the poor clown through five hundred pages of tedious manuscript and never had the feeling that he could stand up without my support. He remained a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, mouthing the lines required to fit a situation, going places and doing things, acting and reacting and doing it all like a brainwashed zombie.
Why didn’t he come to life? I don’t know. It wasn’t because there was anything fundamentally unsympathetic about the sort of person he was or the acts he performed. A few minor characters in the same novel did verge on animation, including a few whom I found distinctly unpleasant, but my lead remained dead and hollow at the core. Perhaps my inability to breathe life into him owed something to my own negative feelings about the novel itself. Perhaps I couldn’t get past seeing him as an instrument rather than a person.
In contrast, Bernie Rhodenbarr came to life on the very first page of the first draft of the first novel in which he made an appearance.
Previously, I’d written a couple of chapters of a Scudder novel in which a burglar’s suspected of murder because he knocks off an apartment with a dead body in it. That particular burglar was a sort of gentle oaf, and Scudder was going to come to his rescue, but the book never got off the ground.
Later I decided to revive that plot notion, eliminate the detective, change the tone entirely from downbeat to sprightly, and let the burglar himself solve the crime and go on to tell the tale.
I decided to open with the initial burglary, so I sat down and typed out the following:
A handful of minutes after nine I hoisted my Bloomingdale’s shopping bag and moved out of a doorway and into step with a tall blond fellow with a faintly equine cast to his face. He was carrying an attaché case that looked too thin to be of much use. Like a high-fashion model, you might say. His topcoat was one of those new plaid ones and his hair, a little longer than my own, had been cut a strand at a time.
“We meet again,” I said, which was an out-and-out lie. “Turned out to be a pretty fair day after all.”
He smiled, perfectly willing to believe that we were neighbors who exchanged a friendly word now and then. “Little brisk this evening,” he said.
I agreed that it was brisk. There wasn’t much he might have said that I wouldn’t have gladly agreed with. He looked respectable and he was walking east on Sixty-seventh Street and that was all I required of him. I didn’t want to befriend him or play handball with him or learn the name of his barber or coax him into swapping shortbread recipes. I just wanted him to help me get past a doorman.
By the time I had that much written, I knew who Bernie Rhodenbarr was. More important, he’d already begun to take on a life of his own. I didn’t have to stop and think how he would phrase something; it was simply a matter of shifting gears and speaking in his voice—or, if you will, of letting go and allowing him to recite his own lines spontaneously.
I don’t want to make this sound too mystical. Books don’t write themselves and characters don’t relieve their creators of the necessity of getting the right words on the page. But when a character does come to life in this fashion, when you find yourself knowing him from the inside out, you are then able to bring to the process of literary creation the assurance of the natural athlete.
How does one manage to make characters distinct and memorable? Is it a matter of little traits—pet expressions, a perpetually untied shoelace, a drooping eyelid? These are the little tricks of caricature, to be sure, and they are more or less effective depending on the skill with which they are managed.
In Time to Murder and Create, for instance, I made use of a character named Spinner Jablon. He’s not onstage long; he’s a stool pigeon turned blackmailer