Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [7]
You can learn more. Writing has this in common with most other skills: we develop it best by practicing it. Whatever writing we do helps us to become better writers.
It has been my observation, however, that there is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel. I learned quite a bit by writing short stories. I learned much much more when I wrote my first novel, and I have continued to learn something or other with virtually every novel I have written since.
Short story writing taught me quite a bit about effective use of the language. I learned, too, how to construct a scene and how to handle dialogue. Everything I learned in this fashion was valuable.
When I wrote a novel, it was as if I were working out now with heavy weights; I felt growth in muscles I had not previously been called upon to use at all.
Characterization was at once a very different matter. Before my characters had existed to perform specific functions and speak specific lines. Some were well drawn, some were not, but none had the sort of fictive life that transcended their role on the page. When I wrote a novel, the characters came to life for me. They had backgrounds, they had families, they had quirks and attitudes that added up to more than the broad lines of caricature. I had to know more about them in order to make them maintain vitality over a couple of hundred pages, and thus there was more substance to them. This not to say that my characterization in my earliest novels was particularly good. It was not. But I learned immeasurably from it.
I learned, too, how to deal with time in fiction. My short stories had often consisted of a single scene, and rarely of more than three or four scenes. The novels I wrote seemed to cover a matter of days or weeks, and of course consisted of a great many scenes. I learned to deal with any number of technical matters—viewpoint shifts, flashbacks, internal monologues, etc.
You can earn while you learn. It’s curious how many writers tend to expect instant gratification. We’ve barely rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter than we expect to see our efforts on the best seller list.
It seems to me that other artists are rather less impatient of tangible success. What painter expects to sell the first canvas he covers? More often than not he plans to paint over it once it’s dried. What singer counts on being booked into Carnegie Hall the first day he hits a high note? Every other artistic career is assumed to have an extended and arduous period of study and apprenticeship, yet all too many writers think they ought to be able to write professionally on their first attempt, and mail off their first stories before the ink is dry.
There must be reasons for this. I suppose the whole idea of communication is so intrinsic a part of what we do that a piece of writing which goes unread by others is like Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling where no human ear can hear it. If nobody reads it, it’s as if we hadn’t even written it.
Then too, unpublished writing strikes us as unfinished writing. An artist can hang a canvas on his own wall. A singer can croon in the shower. A manuscript, though, is not complete until it is in print.
At first glance this desire to receive money and recognition for early work would look like the height of egotistic arrogance. It seems to me, however, that what it best illustrates is the profound insecurity of the new writer. We yearn to be in print because without this recognition we have no way of establishing to our own satisfaction that our work is of any value.
I would not for a moment advise a new writer to expect to get any recognition