Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [50]
Sometimes a few little details will turn the trick, doing far more to provide the illusion of reality than a mind-numbing assortment of empty facts and figures. Sometimes a phony detail works as well as a real one. Bernie Rhodenbarr talks admiringly of the Rabson lock, making me sound quite the expert; there is no Rabson lock—I borrowed the name from Rex Stout’s novels. Archie Goodwin always has things to say about the Rabson lock.
Sometimes these little “authentic touches” can happen quite by accident. When I read galleys of Two For Tanner, I was startled when a CIA agent in Bangkok pointed out “drops and meeting places and fronts—a travel agency, a tobbo shop, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant….”
A tobbo shop?
What on earth was a tobbo shop?
I checked my manuscript. I’d written “a tobacco shop” and a creative linotypist had vastly improved on it. I decided a tobbo shop would be the perfect CIA front, adding a cracker-jack bit of local color.
So I left it like that.
And now I look forward to the day when I spot in someone else’s fiction a reference to the notorious tobbo shops of Thailand. And who’s to say that the day will never come when some enterprising Thai opens a tobbo shop of his own? Stranger things have happened.
A very important part of research consists of making use of acquaintances and friends. You’ll learn more about what it’s like to be a sandhog or a scrap dealer or a bond salesman by hanging out with one than by reading books on the subject. Friends with an expert’s knowledge of an area can frequently help you work out bits of plot business; if you present them with a problem, they may be able to think of a solution which would never occur to you.
I’ve found people even more useful after the book is written. They can read the manuscript and may spot the sort of howlers that, once in print, will draw you no end of angry letters from outraged readers. I don’t know much about guns, for instance, and I doubt I ever will; the subject is of limited fascination to me. But I’ve learned to check points occasionally with a friend of mine who’s a gun enthusiast; otherwise the mailman gets tired of bringing me letters from indignant gun nuts.
I wouldn’t worry too much over imposing upon acquaintances in this fashion. People like to help writers in their own areas of expertise. I suppose it’s ego food. Then too, it gives them a brief role in the writing world, a world which appears to those outside of it to be somehow touched with glamour and romance. I don’t know what they think is glamourous about it, but I do know that an astonishing percentage of people go out of their way to help writers, and it makes sense to take advantage of this help when you can use it.
Chapter 8
Getting Started
Every novel has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.
I picked up this nugget of information when I first studied writing in college, and I’ve heard it restated no end of times since then. I pass it on to you because I’ve never been able to challenge the essential truth of the statement.
I’ve been trying to think of one solitary instance over the past twenty years when it’s helped me to know that a novel has a beginning, a middle and an ending. And I can’t come up with a one. I learned at about the same time that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman and child in the nation, and that fact too has lingered in my mind for all these many years, and it hasn’t done me a whole hell of a lot of good either. But I pass it on, too, for whatever it’s worth.
A beginning, a middle and an ending?