Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [43]
Just how long and detailed an “outline-for-submission” must be varies greatly with circumstances. Random House contracted for my third mystery novel about burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr on the basis of a one-page letter to my editor, Barbé Hammer. In the letter I told her the book’s basic premise and some of the general avenues I intended to explore. There was nothing in the letter to show that I knew how to resolve the plot complications I intended to develop, and there was considerable vagueness even in the opening premise—I said, for instance, that Bernie was going to be hired to steal a particular collector’s item, from one enthusiast for another’s benefit, but I didn’t say what the gimcrack would be because I admittedly hadn’t yet decided.
I got by with this rather cavalier approach because of the particular circumstances that were operating. Barbé knew and liked my work. Random House had already published two books about Bernie and folks there were pleased with them aesthetically and commercially. All I really had to do to get a contract was indicate that I had a sound idea for a book, that it was sufficiently “the same only different” to continue the series, and that I at least was confident of my ability to tie everything up neatly by the end of the book.
In contrast, my outline for my World War II novel ran a dozen or so pages and was as detailed as I could comfortably arrange. In this instance I was offering to write a book of a sort with which I had no real prior experience, and a more substantial outline was necessary not only to convince a publisher that I knew what I was setting out to do but to make me similarly confident. Before I began a 500-page monster of a novel, I wanted to assure myself that I wouldn’t wind up somewhere around page 374 having painted myself into some plotting corner. In retrospect, I wish I’d written this particular outline two or three or four times as long; had I done so, I might have had an easier time of writing the book.
To sum up:
An outline is a tool, the equivalent of a painter’s preliminary sketches. Use it to whatever extent it is helpful. Don’t be a slave to it; if the book begins to grow away from the outline, let the book chart its own course.
Above all, remember there’s no one right way to do it. You can sit down with no outline whatsoever and write the whole book from first page to last. Or you can write a one-page synopsis, expand it into a chapter outline, expand that into a detailed chapter outline with each scene sketched in, and even expand that outline into a super-treatment with bits of dialogue included and point-of-view changes indicated. Some writers operate this way, blowing up the balloon of their novel one breath at a time, until the writing of the novel’s actual first draft is just a matter of doubling the length of the final outline. If that’s what works for them, then that’s the right way to do it—for them.
Finally, for anyone interested in the best illustration I can recall of what an outline is and how it all works, I would recommend Donald E. Westlake’s hilarious novel, Adios, Scheherazade. The narrator is a hapless hack who has written a sex novel a month for the past twenty-eight months and who confronts a massive writer’s block when he attempts to write Opus Twenty-Nine. At one point he produces an outline for the book, an outline that’s very instructive to any apprentice novelist while it finds its way to one of the funniest punchlines I ever read. I can’t reproduce it here, but I earnestly commend the book to your attention.
Chapter 7
Using What You Know… and What You Don’t Know
Write about what you know.