Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [75]
I never washed my garbage in those days. Thinking back, I’m astonished at the sangfroid with which I presumed to forego revision altogether. I scarcely ever retyped a page.
There was one time I well remember when, checking the pages at the end of the day’s work, I discovered that I’d written pages 31 through 45 but had somehow jumped in my page numbering from 38 to 40. Rather than renumber the pages, I simply sat down and wrote page 39 to fit. Since page 38 ended in the middle of a sentence, a sentence which then resumed on page 40, it took a little fancy footwork to slide page 39 in there, but the brash self-assurance of youth was evidently up to that sort of challenge.
Jacqueline Susann used to tell talk show audiences how she rewrote every book four or five times, using yellow paper for one draft, green for a second, pink for a third, blue for a fourth, and finally producing finished copy on white bond. I don’t seem to recall the point of this rainbow approach to revision, nor am I sure I believe Susann actually did this; anyone as accomplished as she at self-promotion might well have been capable of embroidery.
But that hardly matters. What’s relevant, I think, is that Susann knew her audience. The public evidently likes the idea of reading books over which writers have labored endlessly. Perhaps readers find it galling to shell out upwards of $8.95 for a book that flowed from its author’s typewriter like water from a cleft rock. The stuff’s supposed to read as though it came naturally and effortlessly, but one wants to be assured that a soul-satisfying amount of hard work went into it.
That’s nice to know when Dick Cavett holds your book up and asks you how you did it, but in the meantime you’re naturally more concerned with producing the best possible novel than with figuring out how best to push it on the tube. Is revision necessary? And what’s the proper approach to it?
For me, the best approach involves a sort of doublethink. If I take it for granted while writing a book that I’m going to have to sit down and do it over, I’m encouraging myself to be sloppy. I don’t have to find the right word or phrase. I don’t have to think a scene through and decide which way I want to tackle it. I can just slap any old thing on the page, telling myself that the important thing is to get words on paper, that I can always clean up my act in the rewrite.
Now this may be precisely what you require in order to conquer your inhibitions at the typewriter. Earlier I mentioned a couple of writers who produce lengthy first drafts, throwing in everything that occurs to them, then pruning ruthlessly in their second drafts.
I find, though, that unless I regard what I’m writing as final copy, I don’t take it seriously enough to give it my best shot. For this reason I proofread as I go along, do my first drafts on damnably expensive high-rag-content white bond, and get each page right before I go on to the next one. I don’t necessarily rewrite as I go along, but neither do I leave anything standing if it bothers me. Sometimes I’ll have twenty or thirty crumpled pages in or around my wastebasket by the time I’ve produced my daily five pages of finished copy. Other times I won’t have to throw out a single page, but even then I’ll be doing what you might call rewriting-in-advance in that I’ll try sentences and paragraphs a few different ways in my mind before committing them to the page.
In the chapter on starting your novel, I mentioned that I frequently rewrite the opening chapters of a book. Aside from that, I usually push on all the way through to the end without any substantial rewriting other than the polish-as-you-go business just described. Now and then, however, upon proofreading yesterday’s work prior to beginning today’s production, I’ll find something bothersome in the last couple of pages. This may happen because the unconscious mind, laboring during the night with what’s to be written next, will have come up with something that calls