Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [40]
In the same fashion, the best preparation for writing an outline is reading outlines, not reading novels. By studying the outlines themselves you will see how an outline looks on a typed page; as important, you will develop the ability to see other novels—and, ultimately, your own novel—with x-ray eyes; i.e., you’ll see through the prose and dialogue to the bare bones beneath.
How do you outline another person’s novel? Whatever way you wish. Your outline of somebody else’s book can be as sketchy or as detailed as you like, just as the outline you eventually work up for your own novel may be sketchy or detailed, brief or lengthy. Do whatever seems most natural to you.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with outlines of other writers’ novels—or once you’ve decided not to bother with that step—it’s time to get to work on your own outline. At this point some warm-up exercises and wind sprints can be useful. Few of us would care to do as much pre-outline work as Richard S. Prather describes, with preparatory writing running to almost double the length of the finished book, but one can do as much as seems useful.
Character sketches are handy, for example. In the preceding chapter I mentioned how the evolution of my Matthew Scudder character was facilitated by the memo I wrote to myself, in which I discussed Scudder at some length, talking about his background, his habits, his current way of life, his likes and dislikes, and how he likes his eggs for breakfast. In his journals, Chekhov suggests that a writer ought to know everything he can about a character—his shoe size, the condition of his liver, lungs, clothes, habits, and intestinal track. You may not mention the greater portion of this in your writing, but the better you know your characters the more effectively you’ll be able to write about them. I always keep learning new things about my characters as I go along; I’m still learning about Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, even after several books about each of them—but the better I know them in advance, the better equipped I am for outlining and, later, for writing the novel.
It’s also occasionally helpful to write an answer to the question “What is this book about?” In the early days of Hollywood, the conventional wisdom held that a story line ought to be capable of being conveyed in a single sentence. While I suspect this theory was originally propounded by illiterates who couldn’t hold more than one sentence in their heads at a time, and while it unquestionably overstates the case, there’s some merit to the argument. If nothing else, one feels more confident about approaching a book when one is able to say, if only to oneself, what the thing is about.
Burglars Can’t Be Choosers is about a cheeky professional burglar who steals an object to order, and the cops walk in on him and catch him in the act, and there’s a dead body in the apartment and he escapes and has to clear himself by solving the crime, which he does.
That’s what one novel is about, all in one sentence, cumbersome though that sentence be. Explaining what your book is to be about may take several sentences or paragraphs. It’s possible, certainly, to write a book without consciously knowing in advance what it’s to be about; sometimes we write the books in order to answer that very question. And it’s possible to know what the book’s about without spelling it out on paper. But sometimes getting it down improves one’s grasp on the whole thing.
The next step is to write the outline itself, in as much or as little detail as you wish. I have frequently found it useful to make this a chapter outline, with a paragraph given to describe the action that will take place in each chapter. If you take this approach, don’t be unduly concerned with just how you’ll divide your narrative into chapters. When you do the actual writing, you may very well discover that the breaks