Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [54]
On the other hand, I wrote a book called After The First Death knowing a great deal about the opening and not too much about what would happen later on. The premise is simple enough: a man has spent time in prison for killing a prostitute during an alcoholic blackout. He wins his release via one of those landmark decisions of the early sixties—Miranda, Escobedo, Gideon, one of those cases. The book opens First-Things-Second style, with Alex waking slowly, coming out of blackout in a Times Square hotel room, seeing a dead woman on the floor in a pool of blood and rocked with the thought that he’d done it again. In the second chapter he decides not to turn himself in, as he did the first time, but becomes a fugitive from justice. Then we’re at last told who he is and what it is that he seems to have done again, and then, the flashback completed, he searches his memory and gets a tiny flash of the moment just before he went into blackout, enough of a flash to convince him that he didn’t kill the hooker after all and that he has to find out who did. The rest of the book concerns his attempts to do so.
I didn’t know who the killer was when I started the book. I didn’t even have a clue who the various suspects would be. All I really knew was how I wanted the book to open. That scene was vivid in my mind, and during the writing of it I got enough of an idea who the lead was to write the second chapter. After that point I largely plotted the book as I went along. For all of that, I never did have to rewrite the first two chapters. They were sufficiently well realized to hold up fine despite the fact that I wrote them without knowing what would follow them.
By and large, though, first chapters are more apt to need rewriting than subsequent chapters, at least in my own novels. When this proves to be the case, I have the choice of rewriting my opening immediately or pushing on with the book and redoing the opening after I’ve completed the first draft.
Again, the decision is individual and arbitrary. Do you get it written first or do you first get it right? I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m more comfortable with a book if I rewrite this sort of thing as I go along; otherwise my concentration on Chapter Fifteen, say, is diffused by the nagging awareness that Chapters One through Three have to make another trip through the typewriter. We’ll discuss this general dilemma again in a chapter on revision, but it seems worth a brief mention here because beginning sections are so often apt to be out of synch with the rest of the book.
Knowing that an opening may very well need to be rewritten can make you sloppy. For this reason, I always proceed on the premise that what I’m writing is what will one day be set in type, word for imperishable word.
But that’s just my approach. For another writer, that sort of sloppiness might be worth encouraging; he might be infinitely less inhibited typing an unabashedly rudimentary first draft on yellow second sheets than if he felt his words were being carved on stone tablets.
The important thing, as I’ve said before, is neither to get it written nor to get it right. The important thing is to do what works.
Chapter 9
Getting It Written
Writing a novel is hard work.
Now writing anything well is work, whether it’s an epic trilogy or the last line of a limerick for a deodorant contest. But when it comes to the novel you have to work long and hard even to produce a bad one. This may help explain why there are so many more bad amateur poets around than there are bad amateur novelists. Writing a good poem may be as difficult as writing a good novel. It may even be harder. But any clown with a sharp pencil can write out a dozen lines of verse and call them a poem. Not just any clown can fill 200 pages with prose and call it a novel.