Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [8]
This notwithstanding, there is no gainsaying the fact that any number of first novels are published every year. Publishers typically bitch about the difficulty of breaking even on a first novel, conveniently ignoring the several first novels per season to achieve best seller status. True, most first novels are not published. True too, most that are sell very poorly. The wonder is that any are published at all.
Thus it is possible to make certain gains, in money and in recognition, while acquiring those skills which can only be acquired through experience. And this sort of paid apprenticeship is far more readily accessible to the novelist than the short story writer.
It wasn’t always this way. When the newsstands teemed with pulp magazines, the pulps were precisely where the new writer earned a living—albeit a precarious one—while developing his skills and refining his technique. A similar kind of magazine apprenticeship is standard procedure to this day in the field of nonfiction; article writers earn while they learn by writing for house organs and trade journals before they are ready to write either nonfiction books or articles for more prestigious magazines.
Some of the surviving fiction magazines are certainly open to new writers—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, for example, makes a special point of publishing first stories, having printed over five hundred maiden efforts to date. But ever since the decline of the pulps in the 1950s, there has not been sufficient depth to the magazine fiction market for a writer to serve out his apprenticeship there.
In contrast, the market for original paperback fiction continues to be quite strong, and quite receptive to the work of beginners. The relative viability of the various categories of category fiction—suspense, adventure, western, science fiction, gothic, light romance, historical romance—runs a cyclical course, but there are always several categories which constitute a healthy market.
I served my own novelistic apprenticeship in the field of paperback sex novels. In the summer of ’58, I had just finished my first novel and was wondering what to do next. My agent was marketing the book; I had no idea whether it would sell or fail completely.
The agent got in touch with me to say that a new publisher was entering the field of sex novels. Did I know what these books were? Could I read a few and try one of my own?
I bought and skimmed several representative examples in the field. (If I had all of this to do over again, I’d spend more time on this analysis, as detailed in Chapter Three.) I then sat down at the typewriter with the assurance of youth and batted out three chapters and an outline of what turned out to be the start of a career.
I didn’t know how many sex novels I was to write in the years to follow. For quite a while I was doing a book a month for one publisher with occasional books for other houses as well, along with a certain amount of more ambitious writing. I suppose I must have turned out a hundred of them. Maybe not—I really don’t know, and my copies of most of the books were lost in the course of a move some years ago. Let’s just agree that I wrote a lot of them and let it go at that.
I learned an immeasurable amount from doing this. Bear in mind that these books were written in more innocent times; while they were the most inflammatory reading matter then on the market, they can barely qualify as soft-core pornography by contemporary standards. Unprintable words were not to be found, and descriptive passages were airbrushed like an old-fashioned Playboy centerfold.
The books had a sex scene per chapter, but the scene couldn’t take up the whole chapter. There was plenty of room left for incident and characterization, for dialogue and conflict and plot development,