Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [55]
“I could never be a writer,” countless acquaintances have told me, “because I just don’t have the necessary self-discipline. I’d keep finding other things to do. I’d never get around to working on the book. I wouldn’t get anything accomplished.”
Let’s not kid ourselves. It does take self-discipline. On the dullest day imaginable, I can always find something to do besides writing. I have innumerable choices. I can read, I can watch television, I can pick up the phone and call somebody, I can hit the refrigerator—or I can decide instead to sit at a typewriter, pick words out of the air, put them in order, and spread them on the page.
Unless I can consistently choose to work, I’m not going to get books written.
Self-discipline takes a variety of forms. In this regard we might consider two of the most prolific novelists the world has ever known, Georges Simenon and John Creasey. Each wrote several hundred books, and each achieved considerable prominence in the field of crime fiction.
John Creasey wrote every day. He worked seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, producing approximately 2,000 words each morning before breakfast. His routine never varied; at home or abroad, tired or bursting with energy, he got up, brushed his teeth, and started writing. He admitted his behavior was compulsive, explaining that he couldn’t relax and enjoy the rest of the day unless he’d first tended to his writing chores. If you write 2,000 words a day, you are going to turn out close to a dozen books a year, and Creasey did just that for most of his lifetime.
Georges Simenon’s approach was altogether different. You may have seen a television documentary on his writing habits; it has had considerable exposure over the educational channels. Typically, he would pack a bag and a typewriter and travel to one European city or another where he would check into a hotel. There he would work in the most intense manner imaginable, immersing himself utterly in his work, avoiding human contact for the duration, and producing a finished manuscript in ten or twelve days. The book finished, he would return home and resume his everyday life, letting the plot gradually develop for his next novel, and ultimately heading off to another city and repeating the process once again.
My own writing methods have changed constantly over the past twenty years, forever shaping themselves to fit my state of mind, time of life, and various special circumstances. In the early years, the Simenon approach had a tremendous appeal for me. I can still see something to be said for the idea of completing a book in as short a total span of time as possible; that way one remains very much in the book during the term of its production, and one’s involvement can be very intense indeed.
I have on occasion written books in as little as three days; I’ve written a couple that took only seven or eight days that are probably as good as anything I’ve done. I can’t argue that I made a mistake writing those books as rapidly as I did. Nor am I at all inclined to attempt to do that sort of thing now.
Nowadays I try to write not twenty or thirty pages in a day’s time but five or six or seven. Age may very well be a factor, but I rather doubt that it’s the only one, or even the major one. It’s at least as significant, I think, that I’ve become a more careful writer and a more flexible one. When I was a brash and cocky young scribbler I was blessed with a very useful sort of tunnel vision; i.e., I could just see one way to do something in a book, and so I lowered my head and charged right in and did it. Now my vision has widened. I’m apt to be more aware of possibilities, of the multiplicity of options available to me as a writer. I’m able to see any number of ways to structure a scene. A slower pace helps me choose among them, selecting the one I’m most comfortable with.
Years ago I was apt to work late at night, and that’s something else I don’t do any more. I’m sure part of the appeal of the midnight oil lay in the image that went