Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [4]
If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.
If it persists, you probably ought to write a novel. Interestingly, most embryonic fiction writers accept the notion that they ought to write a novel sooner or later. It’s not terribly difficult to see that the world of short fiction is a world of limited opportunity. Both commercially and artistically, the short-story writer is quite strictly circumscribed.
This has not always been the case. Half a century ago, the magazine story was important in a way it has never been since. During the twenties, a prominent writer typically earned several thousand dollars for the sale of a short story to a top slick magazine. These stories were apt to be talked about at parties and social gatherings, and the reputation a writer might establish in this fashion helped gain attention for any novel he might ultimately publish.
The change since those days has been remarkable. In virtually all areas, the short fiction market has shrunk in size and significance. Fewer magazines publish fiction, and every year they publish less of it. The handful of top markets pay less in today’s dollars than they did in the much harder currency of fifty or sixty years ago. Pulp magazines have virtually disappeared as a market; a handful of confession magazines and a scanter handful of mystery and science-fiction magazines are all that remain of a market once numbered in the hundreds. Whole categories of popular fiction have categorically vanished; the western, the sports story, the light romance—these were once published in considerable quantity, twelve or fifteen stories per magazine, and now they have simply gone the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon.
The remaining pulps are scarcely worth writing for. Consider the plight, for example, of the writer of detective fiction. Twenty years ago, the two leading magazines in the field paid five cents a word for material, and their rejects sold quite readily to any of a batch of lesser markets. Now, at a time when the erstwhile nickel candy bar has gone to twenty cents, those two magazines still pay the same nickel a word—and only a single cent-a-word publication exists to skim the cream of the stories they reject.
The outlook is not much more promising for writers of “quality” fiction. Very few magazines publish stories of literary distinction and pay a decent price for the privilege. After a piece has made the rounds of The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, and a few others, its author is reduced to submitting it to the small literary magazines that pay off in contributor’s copies or, at best, token payment. It is not merely impossible to make a living in this fashion; it is very nearly impossible, over the course of a year, to cover one’s mailing expenses.
On the other hand, one can make a living writing novels.
I’m not going to make you drool by rattling on about the stratospheric sums certain writers have received of late for their novels. The earnings of best sellers, the fortunes paid for film and paperback rights, have relatively little to do with the average writer, be he neophyte or veteran. James Michener once remarked that America is a country in which a writer can make a fortune but not a living—i.e., a handful of successful writers get rich while the rest of us can’t even get by. There’s some truth in this—the gap between success and survival is, I submit, an unhealthily yawning one—but there’s some hyperbole in it as well. A writer can indeed make a living in America; if he’s a reasonably productive novelist, he can make a living verging on comfortability.
Financial considerations aside, I have always felt there are satisfactions in the novel which are not to be found in shorter fiction. I began as a writer of short stories, and to have written and published a short story was an accomplishment in which I took an inordinate amount of pride. But genuine literary achievement, as far as I was concerned, lay in being able to hold in my own hands a book with