Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [5]
Short-story writing, as I saw it, was estimable. One required skill and cleverness to carry it off. But to have written a novel was to have achieved something of substance. You could swing a short story on a cute idea backed up by a modicum of verbal agility. You could, when the creative juices were flowing, knock it off start-to-finish on a slow afternoon.
A novel, on the other hand, took real work. You had to spend months on the thing, fighting it out in the trenches, line by line and page by page and chapter by chapter. It had to have plot and characters of sufficient depth and complexity to support a structure of sixty or a hundred thousand words. It wasn’t an anecdote, or a finger exercise, or a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. It was a book.
The short-story writer, as I saw it, was a sprinter; he deserved praise to the extent that his stories were meritorious. But the novelist was a long-distance runner, and you don’t have to come in first in a marathon in order to deserve the plaudits of the crowd. It is enough merely to have finished on one’s feet.
These arguments presented above would all seem to urge the writer to turn eventually to the novel. But it’s my contention that the beginner at fiction ought to focus his attention on the novel not sooner or later but right away. The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.
At first, this may well seem illogical. We’ve just seen the short story likened to a sprint, the novel to a marathon. Shouldn’t a marathon runner work up to that distance gradually? Shouldn’t a writer develop his abilities in the short story before attempting the more challenging work of the novel?
Certainly a great many of us do begin that way. I did myself, as far as that goes. In my earliest efforts, it was extremely difficult for me to sustain a prose narrative for the fifteen hundred words necessary to constitute a proper short-short. Over a period of time I became increasingly at ease writing full-length short stories, and then I finally wrote my first novel. Other writers have followed a similar path, but perhaps as many have leaped directly into the novel without any serious effort at short stories. There doesn’t seem to be any traditional path to follow in becoming a writer. Whatever road leads to the destination turns out to have been the right road for that particular traveler.
With the understanding, then, that all roads lead to Rome, here are some of the reasons why I believe a writer is best advised to begin with a novel.
Skill is less at a premium. This may seem paradoxical—why should a novel require less skill than a short story? You’d think it would be the other way around.
Don’t you have to be a better craftsman to manage a novel? I don’t think so. Often a novelist can get away with stylistic crudity that would cripple a shorter piece of fiction.
Remember, what a novel affords you as a writer is room. You have space to move around in, space to let your characters develop and come to life, space for your story line to get itself in motion and carry the day. While a way with words never hurts, it’s of less overwhelming importance to the novelist than the sheer ability to grab ahold of the reader and make him care what happens next.
The best seller list abounds with the work of writers whom no one would want to call polished stylists. While I wouldn’t care to name them, I can think offhand of half a dozen writers whose first chapters are very hard going for me. I’m perhaps overly conscious of style—writing does radically change one’s perceptions as a reader—and I find their dialogue mechanical, their transitions awkward, their scene construction clumsy, their descriptions imprecise. But if I can make myself hang on for the first twenty or thirty or forty pages, I’ll lose my excessive awareness of the trees and start to perceive the forest. The author’s pure storytelling ability grips