Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [70]
This difficulty was most pronounced in first-person novels. If I had a character in conversation at a bar one night, and then I had something for him to do the next morning, I wasn’t sure how to get him through the intervening hours. I figured I had to explain where he went and what he did at all times.
I found out that’s not necessary. I could let the bar conversation run its course. Then I could skip an extra space, and then I could write, “At ten the next morning I showed up at Waldron’s office. I was wearing my blue pinstripe and his secretary seemed to like the looks of it.”
They learned some years ago in the film business that the best transitions are nice clean abrupt ones. Remember the slow dissolves you used to see in movies? Remember how they would indicate the passage of time by showing different shots of a clock, or pages flipping on some dumb calendar? They don’t do that any more, and that’s largely because they realized that they don’t have to. Contemporary audiences are hip enough to put two and two together.
So can readers. I learned a lot about transitions by reading Mickey Spillane. In the early Mike Hammer books, he hardly ever explained how Hammer got from one place to another, or wasted time setting scenes up elaborately. There were no slow dissolves in those books. They were all fast cuts, with each scene beginning right on the heels of the one before it. Since the books had enormous appeal to a generally unsophisticated audience, I would assume few readers had trouble following the action line, for all the abruptness of the transitions.
Temporal transitions—jumps back and forth in time—can be handled most expeditiously simply by crediting the reader with the intelligence to figure out what you’re doing without over-explaining yourself. In this area, too, I suspect the techniques of the visual media, including not only the cinema but especially television commercials with their intricate crosscut-ting in a thirty- or sixty-second span, have contributed greatly to the sophistication of the public.
I can recall seeing Two For The Road, a film with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, sometime in the late sixties. Director Stanley Donen salted the film with flashbacks, providing no special indication of the temporal changes, simply cutting from one present-time sequence to one in past time. I was as interested in the audience as in the film. Some older viewers, I noticed, were utterly confounded; their frame of reference was too rigidly linear for them to know what the hell was going on. But the majority of the audience, including all of its younger members, seemed perfectly at ease.
For a particularly well-crafted example of a novel in which several temporal phases of a story are simultaneously related, you might have a look at Some Unknown Person, by Sandra Scoppettone. The book is based on the life and death of Starr Faithfull, the star-crossed girl-about-town who served as a model for Gloria Wandrous in John O‘Hara’s Butterfield Eight. Scoppettone interweaves her lead character’s early years, the life story of a man instrumental in her death, the events leading up to her death, the last days years later of the aforementioned man, and several other aspects of the story, cutting back and forth through time in a most instructive fashion.
Chapter 12
Length
In Threesome, one of Jill Emerson’s characters wants to know how long a chapter ought to be. As long as Abraham Lincoln’s legs, another character assures her. (Lincoln, you may recall, informed a heckler that a man’s legs ought to be long enough to extend from his body to the ground.)
A chapter, then, should be long enough to reach from the one before it to the one that follows it. In other words, there is no fit and proper length for a chapter.
When I wrote sex novels, I tended to be compulsive about chapter length. Originally my books were two hundred pages long, and were written in the form often twenty-page chapters. Then, when