Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [44]
That’s the conventional wisdom, and it seems as sensible now as it did when I first heard it back around the time when the idea of becoming a writer first occurred to me. Several writers whom I greatly admire—Thomas Wolfe for one, James T. Farrell for another—had written whole series of novels which I recognized as frankly autobiographical. Others wrote books that clearly derived from their own life experience. One dust jacket blurb after another would recount the author’s background, and each of those writers seemed to have the sort of job résumé that would strike terror into the heart of a personnel manager. A writer, I quickly learned, was someone who grew up on an Indian reservation before running off with a circus. Then over a period of years he worked as an itinerant fruit picker, a gandy dancer on the railroads, a fry cook in a lumber camp, and a teacher in ghetto schools. He saw combat in an infantry division and spent a few years as a merchant seaman. He wrestled a grizzly bear and made love to an Eskimo woman—or was it the other way around?
Never mind. In any event, it was evident to me that I had two choices. I could ramble around the world gathering up subject matter for stories and novels or I could probe the depths of my life to date, telling an eager world just what it was like to grow up in Buffalo, New York, in one of those happy families that Tolstoy has assured us are all alike.
I recognized at a very early date that I was not temperamentally equipped to write the conventional autobiographical novel. While I would not argue that my family and childhood contain nothing of the stuff of which novels are wrought, I was neither sufficiently perceptive nor of the right emotional bent to turn that background into fiction, though many writers have done that successfully.
Nor did I seem inclined to stride adventurously into the world, ready to take on whatever grizzly bears and grizzlier women presented themselves. I was in a hell of a hurry—not to amass experience but to get busy with the actual business of writing. As I’ve recounted, I wound up writing for a living at rather a tender age; I couldn’t write out of my own experience because I hadn’t had any, for heaven’s sake.
One way or another, this is the case with a great many of us. While a few of us actually have the adventures first and then learn how to type, that’s not usually the way it goes. In actual practice most real-life adventurers never get around to writing; there’s always another grizzly bear in their future, and they’re too much inclined to pursue fresh experience to bother with emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth characterized the origin of poetry. Even when we start out with a background of extensive life experience, adventurous or otherwise, we generally tend to use up our past in our fiction and find ourselves stranded like an overzealous general who has outrun his supply lines. It doesn’t take too many books for most of us to exhaust the experiences we’ve piled up before we started writing. And how are we to gather fresh experience after that point? We’ve just been sitting in rooms, staring into space and banging away at typewriter keys, and how are we to fashion that experience into a novel?
The difficulty of writing out of one’s experience can be vividly demonstrated in the field of genre fiction. In my own bailiwick of crime fiction, for example, I’m at a loss from the standpoint of experience. I have never been a private detective like Joe Gores, a cop like Joseph Wambaugh, or a district attorney like George V. Higgins. Neither have I worked the other side of the street and spent time in the clink like Malcolm Braly and Al Nussbaum—not yet, anyway.
All the same, I find myself using my own background and experience every time I go to work. Just as often, I find myself using what I don’t know—putting to work a combination of research and fakery to furnish what my own background and experience cannot supply.
Let’s take them in turn. How can you put your own presumably ordinary background and experience to work for