Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [60]
All the same, it’s never fun investing substantial time and effort, not to mention mental and emotional involvement, in a never-to-be-finished book. Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” is part of every symphony orchestra’s repertoire, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood has remained in print since Dickens left it unfinished at his death, but this doesn’t mean any of my stillborn literary offspring will ever get anywhere. While regretting them is a waste of time, I’d certainly like to have as few of those abortive efforts as possible in my future.
One thing I’ve come to recognize is that I tend to run into a wall at a certain point in almost all of my books. I’ve been given to understand that marathon runners experience this sort of exhaustion somewhere around the twenty-mile mark when their glycogen stores run out. They keep going anyway and generally finish the race on their feet.
Most of my suspense novels run a shade over two hundred pages in manuscript, which probably comes to something like sixty thousand words. More often than not, these books hit the wall somewhere around page 120. It’s around that point that I find myself losing confidence in the book—or, more precisely, in my ability to make it work. The plot seems to be either too simple and straightforward to hold the reader’s interest or too complicated to be neatly resolved. I find myself worrying that there’s not enough action, that the lead’s situation is not sufficiently desperate, that the book has been struck boring while my attention was directed elsewhere.
I have come to realize that this conviction is largely illusory. I don’t know what causes this misperception of mine, but I would suspect it reflects attitudes of my own that have nothing much to do with the book. In any event, I know from experience that there’s very likely nothing wrong with the book, and that if I push on and get over the hump I’ll probably have a relatively easy time with the final third of the manuscript, and that the book itself will be fine.
If I put it aside, however, and wait for something wonderful to happen, I’ll very likely never get back to it.
It may not work this way for everyone, but I’ve learned to my cost that it works this way for me. The temptation to take a break from a novel when it runs out of gas is overwhelming. It seems so logical that such a break will have a favorable effect; phrases like “recharging one’s batteries” come readily to mind. The wish, I’m afraid, is father to the thought; struggling with a difficult book is unpleasant, and one very naturally wishes to be doing something else—anything else!—instead. But such a move is generally undertaken at the cost of completing the book.
I hardly ever go back to the books I abandon. Maybe that’s as well, maybe they’re better off rusting out on the side of the road, but I don’t think so. It seems to me that some of the ones I let go of had just run into that wall around page 120; if I’d stayed with them they’d have worked out fine. By taking a break from them I sacrificed all the momentum I’d built up. In addition, I let my grasp of the characters and settings loosen up. The book drew away from my consciousness and from my unconscious as well.
Understand, please, that I’m not referring to an occasional break of a day or two. That may be useful for me when I’ve been working too hard for too long and I need to relax. But when I put a book aside for a week or a month, when I deliberately elect to shelve it while I work on something else, I’m really laying it aside forever.
This said, the fact remains that many books do hit snags, run into dead ends, or wander off down false trails. Having established that the thing to do is press on with them, the question arises as to how best to manage this.
Frequently the trouble is plot. If you outline