Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [61]
But people who outline carefully can have the same sort of plot trouble. For them—or for me, with those books in which I use a detailed outline—the problem comes when the book grows apart from its outline. Perhaps a certain character has taken shape in such a way as to make what’s scheduled to happen no longer viable. We spoke earlier of the need for flexibility, stressing that you have to be willing to adapt your outline to allow for the organic growth of your novel. When this happens, you’re in the same place as the person writing without an outline to start with. You have to figure out what happens next.
The image that comes to mind when I think of this sort of snag is that of a log jam. I’ve generally got enough ideas in my mind but they’re snarled up like floating timber in a river, pinning each other down, getting in each other’s way. If I could just shake things loose the book would flow downstream with no trouble at all.
The best way I’ve found to jar thoughts loose is to talk to myself at the typewriter, babbling away at myself without regard to style or sense, producing something that’s a combination of stream-of-consciousness, letter to self, and outline of the remainder of the book. I usually throw these things away when they’ve ceased to be useful—I’ve never seen the point in saving remnants for posterity, figuring it’s unlikely enough that posterity will be interested in my books, let alone my literary fingernail clippings. With my most recent book, however, I ran headlong into what looked at the time to be a serious plotting problem. I resolved it by chattering to myself at the typewriter, and I haven’t yet discarded the gibberish I produced, having realized at the time that it might come in handy to illustrate a point in this present volume. Here, then, is how I talked to myself during a difficult stage of The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling:
All right, where’s the book going? Bernie stole the book from Arkwright on Whelkin’s orders. Then went to meet Whelkin at Porlock’s apartment. She drugged him, and when he woke he was framed for her murder. Meanwhile, a Sikh tried to get the book from Bernie and went off with the wrong book.
Okay. Say the Sikh worked for the Maharajah of Jaipur. Madeleine Porlock was being kept by somebody, stole the book and sold it to Arkwright. Suppose Porlock was sleeping with Arkwright, kept by him. Bernie could know this from fur labels in her closet. She and Whelkin knew each other—that’s why she wore the wig to the bookstore—and she managed to learn that Whelkin was going to try to steal the book via Bernie.
Suppose Arkwright wanted the book to swing an import-export deal with a Saudi Arabian big shot who collects anti-Semitic material. The book would be a sweetener. Arkwright’s enough of a collector to have gotten into a book discussion with the Saudi.
Suppose there were a couple of dozens of these books. Whelkin got hold of the cache in England and faked the Haggard inscription on all of them, selling them one at a time to rich book collectors with the proviso that they keep it a secret. He’s sold a copy to Arkwright. Then he finds out Arkwright is going to show his copy to the Saudi. He has to get the Arkwright copy back or the Saudi will know there’s been fraud committed.
Who killed Porlock?
Could be Whelkin. Say Whelkin worked through Porlock to get Arkwright to buy the book. Porlock was trying to recover the book herself to sell it elsewhere. Whelkin entered the apartment after she drugged Bernie and killed her, framing Bernie for it.
Or suppose it was Arkwright? When he found the book missing he suspected Porlock engineered the theft. He figured she played