Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [6]
In shorter fiction, the storyline wouldn’t have this chance to take over. The story would have run its course before I ceased to notice the author’s style.
Similarly, some novels triumph over the style in which they are written because of the grandeur of their themes or the fascination of their subject matter. The epic novel, presenting in fictional form the whole history of a nation, catches the reader up because of the sheer power of its scope. Leon Uris’s Exodus is a good example of this type of book. And Arthur Hailey’s books exemplify the novel that conveys an enormous amount of information to the reader, telling him almost more than he cares to know about a particular industry. This is not to say that these novels, or others of their ilk, are stylistically clumsy, but merely to point out that style becomes a considerably less vital consideration than it must be in short fiction.
The idea is less important. I’ve known any number of writers who have postponed writing a novel because they felt they lacked a sufficiently strong or fresh or provocative idea for one. I can understand this, because similar feelings delayed my own first novel. Logic would seem to suggest that a novel, by virtue of its length, would require more in the way of an idea than a short story.
If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, you may well be better off with a novel than with short stories. Because each short story absolutely demands either a new idea or a new slant on an old one. Often the short story amounts to very little more than an idea fleshed out and polished into a piece of fiction. This is particularly likely to be the case with the short-short, which is typically not much more than a fifteen-hundred-word preamble leading up to a surprise ending, an idea thinly cloaked in the fabric of fiction.
Novels, on the other hand, are time and again written with no original central idea to be found. Every month sees the publication of new gothic novels, for example, and the overwhelming majority of them hew quite closely to a single plotline—a young woman is in peril in a forbidding house, probably on the moors; she is drawn to two men, one of whom turns out to be a hero, the other a villain. Another category, the historical romance of the Love’s Tender Fury variety, has an initially innocent heroine getting ravished in various historical periods and with varying degrees of enjoyment.
Westerns typically adhere to one of five or six standard plotlines. Similarly, there are a handful of basic book types in the mystery and science-fiction fields. And, in the world of mainstream fiction, consider how many novels each year deal with nothing more original than the loss of innocence.
This is not to say that the novel does not demand ingenuity. It is this quality which enables the novelist to take a standard theme and hang upon it a book which will seem quite fresh and new to everyone who reads it. As he writes, characters come to life, scenes acquire dimension upon the page, and a wealth of original incident serves to make this particular book significantly different from all those other novels to which it is thematically identical.
Sometimes these elements of characterization and incident which make a novel unique exist in the forefront of the author’s mind when he sits down to the typewriter. Sometimes they emerge from his creative unconscious as he goes along.
I enjoy writing short stories myself. They offer me considerable satisfaction, for all that their production is economically unsound. I very much enjoy being able to sit down at the typewriter with an idea fully formed in my head and devote myself to a day’s work of transforming that idea into a finished piece of fiction.
The enjoyment’s so keen that I’d do this sort of thing more often—except that each story requires a reasonably strong central idea, and the idea itself gets used up in the space of a couple of thousand words. I simply don’t get that many ideas that I find all that appealing.
Ed Hoch makes a living writing