Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [45]
Shape your story line to fit your personal knowledge and experience. Let’s hearken back for a moment to the gothic novel we examined in outline form in an earlier chapter. Remember the premise? “A young widow is hired to catalogue the antique furniture in a house on the moors in Devon….” Perhaps you might have come up with just that plot after having done some studying of the gothic category. There’s only one trouble. You don’t know Louis Quinze from Weird Louie the Plumber, you don’t know moors from marshmallows, and the closest you’ve been to Devon is St. Joe, Mo.
It might seem as though the obvious answer is to write about a weird Missouri plumber with a passion for marshmallows, but the resultant manuscript might be tricky to place with an editor of gothics. A less radical solution calls for examining your plot line and seeing how you can adapt it to fit what you’ve got going for you.
You say you don’t know zip about antique furniture? Well, that’s okay, but what do you know about? Rare books? Maybe your heroine has been hired to catalogue the ancestral library. Have you got some background in fine art? Maybe she was hired to clean and restore paintings, or to evaluate them or something. Is there some sort of collectible with which you have a fair degree of familiarity? Rare stamps or coins? Old porcelain? Nineteenth-century patent medicine bottles? Roman glass? Oceanic art? A good many plots are almost infinitely adaptable in this fashion, and it doesn’t take too much in the way of ingenuity to discover a means of channeling such a story to fit whatever expertise you can furnish.
Use familiar settings for your material. Let’s say you haven’t wandered far afield from St. Joe, Mo. Or Butte or Buffalo or Bensonhurst. How are you going to write this story about the young widow on the Devonshire moors and make it authentic?
First thing you can do is decide whether or not your story really has to take place in Devon. Maybe there’s a lonely house on the outskirts of St. Joseph that could serve as the setting for your story as well as any creaking windswept old manse in the West of England. Maybe there’s no such place in reality, but you can build one in your imagination readily enough. Maybe you can readily figure out how people living in such a house, and warped by the strains and stresses built into your basic plot, would relate to and interact with the local people in St. Joseph, much as those moor dwellers in your original outline would relate to the townspeople in Devon. In short, maybe you can transplant all the significant elements of your plot into your own native soil.
If you can manage this, you won’t be cheating; on the contrary, you’ll simply be making the story that much more your own, one that derives from your own experience and reflects your own perceptions. Perhaps any of a hundred writers could turn out an acceptable book about an imagined Devon moor, but how many could write your story of an old farmhouse on the outskirts of your own town, occupied now by the descendants of the original inhabitants, the farm acreage sold off piece by piece over the years, the house itself surrounded by suburban tract houses, but still awesome and forbidding, and….
See?
On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason why your book has to take place in Devon, because of some particular plot component which you regard as intrinsic to the story you want to write. Just as a writer of westerns is locked into setting his books in the old west, you must set this book in Devon.
Fine. As we’ll see shortly, there’s a great deal you can do by way of research to make your setting authentic. But there’s also a way in which you can exploit your own background in order to construct a setting halfway around the world.
You may not know moors from marshmallows, but if you’ve crossed the Central Plains you may recall the sense of infinite space, the loneliness, the uninterrupted flatness. You may have had a similar feeling in the desert. Or you may have experienced a comparable