Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [89]
Finally, there’s one more argument for writing a second novel. If you don’t, how can reviewers complain that it doesn’t fulfill the promise of your first novel?
Has this helped any?
I wonder, looking over what I’ve written, whether I’ve done what I set out to do. I’m often similarly uncertain when I write the last words of a novel, skip a few spaces, and type “The End” in the center of the page. Does the story hold up? Are the characters interesting? Is the book I’ve written the book I wanted to write in the first place? It never quite is, perhaps because one’s reach exceeds one’s grasp, but is it at least a good book?
Maybe you’ll get something out of it. I don’t know. In the final analysis, you can no more learn the gentle art of novel writing from a book than you can learn how to ride a bicycle. The only way you really learn is by doing it yourself, and you may fall off a lot before you get the hang of it.
I wish you luck.
I won’t read your manuscript, or recommend an agent, or put you in touch with a publisher. I’ll answer letters—if I can make the time, and if you enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope. But that’s as much as I’ll do. You have to do the rest yourself. That, I’m afraid is how it works in this business.
I hope you write your novel. I hope you write a lot of them, and that they’re very good books indeed. Not because I would presume to regard your work as a sort of literary grandchild of mine—let’s face it, you’d write it whether or not you read this book.
But simply because, while there are far too many books in this world, there are far too few good ones.
And I don’t ever want to run out of things to read.
A New Afterword by the Author
In the spring of 1976 I sold a piece to Writer’s Digest, the monthly magazine for writers. I was in Los Angeles at the time, in mute testimony to H. L. Mencken’s observation that a Divine Hand had taken hold of the United States by the State of Maine, and lifted, whereupon everything loose wound up in Southern California. The article I sold them was a reply to the perennial question, Where do you get your ideas?, and when they accepted it I got an idea on the spot.
My idea was to sell them on the idea of hiring me as a columnist. They had a couple of columnists, but nobody was writing about fiction, and that was the chief interest of most of their audience, so the need seemed to be there. Rather than push this through the mail, I waited until I could do it in person; my daughters flew out in July to spend the summer with me, and we stayed that month in LA and spent the month of August on a leisurely drive back to New York, where they lived with their mother—and where I had lived, until that Divine Hand sent me spinning.
I mapped out our route east so that I could work in a lunch in Cincinnati with John Brady, then the editor at Writer’s Digest. He’d bought my article, and over lunch he bought my idea for a fiction column, to run six times a year, alternating with their cartoon column. I got back to New York and sent in the first column, and by the time I’d written the third one they’d booted the cartoonist. My column would appear in the magazine every month for the next fourteen years.
I’d been doing it for a little over a year when Brady got in touch. Their book division felt the need for a book telling how to write a novel. And they liked the way I wrote about writing, and wanted me to do the book for them.
I was living in New York again, in an apartment on Greenwich Street. (It’s no more than a two-minute walk from where I live now, thirty-three years later, but I’ve had a slew of addresses in the interim.) I wrote the book and sent it off, and the folks in Cincinnati