Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [46]
Similarly, you can pick a house you know and plunk it down on the moors. Your research may have told you that you need a beamed Tudor dwelling, and indeed you may so describe the house in your narrative. Once you get past the beams, however, you can fill in with details of that house down the road that all the kids were scared of when you were in grade school.
Explore your background and experience as a source for story ideas. Earlier, when we talked about reading and analysis, we saw how familiarity with a genre trains the mind to come up with plot ideas suitable for that genre. Similarly, the study you do and the perception you have of yourself as a writer should result in your sifting your background for elements that will prove useful in your writing.
Once when I was in high school I came home one afternoon to find that my mother had left the place locked. I went around and crawled in through the milk chute, an accomplishment which looked to be as likely as slipping a camel through the eye of a needle, given the tiny dimensions of the milk chute and the unpleasantly plump dimensions of the embryonic author. I was to repeat this procedure on numerous occasions when the door was unlocked, for the entertainment of friends and relatives, and I can still recall squirming through that hole in the wall and landing upside down in a confusion of mops and brooms and scrub buckets; the milk chute, unused since the war, opened into a cluttered broom closet.
Nowadays I write books about a burglar. (Perhaps the seed was planted all those many years ago, when I first discovered the thrill of illicit entry.) I’ve written three novels to date about Bernie Rhodenbarr without making use of that milk-chute entrance, but I recalled it a week or so ago, and this time I saw it from the stance of one who writes about burglary. I immediately saw any number of ways such a bit of business could fit into a novel about a burglar, and I let my mind play with the possibilities, and I filed them all away in the cluttered broom closet I call a mind; someday I’ll quite probably get some use out of it.
In the same fashion, ongoing experience becomes grist for the mill. I can’t seem to enter a building without pondering how Bernie would enter it illegally. When I visit a museum I see not merely objects of artistic and historical significance, but things for him to steal. On a recent trip to London, a visit to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields turned up a display of the photograph of a pistol which Soane purchased in the belief that it had belonged to Napoleon. It was actually an utter fake and the whole story about its provenance a pawnbroker’s fabrication; however, only the photo was on display because the actual pistol, fake or no, had been stolen from the museum in 1969.
I think I’d like that story even if I wrote nothing but stories about kittens and bunny rabbits for preschoolers. Given the kind of writing I do, I immediately thought of six different ways to work that item into fiction. I may never use it at all, but my writer’s eye and my writer’s imagination have taken a museum exhibit and turned it into the raw material out of which fiction may someday be fashioned.
Cultivating this habit becomes increasingly important the more time you spend in this business. Consider the paradox of the full-time professional writer: He writes out of his experience, using up his past, and the greater his success the less likely he is to store up useful new experiences. I don’t get a hell of a lot of fresh input sitting at a desk with a typewriter for company. And, while I derive enormous