Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [90]
I didn’t like it at the time, felt it made the whole process sound more mechanical than I thought it to be. I’d made a particular point in my book of not telling the reader, “This is the way to do it.” There were, as I saw it, at least as many ways to do it as there were writers, and arguably as many ways as there were books. But they really liked the title, and I went along with it, and I have to say it seems OK to me now.
The book has remained continually in print for more than thirty years. I guess the title hasn’t hurt it any.
Fifteen years ago, Writer’s Digest Books wanted me to revise Writing the Novel. They felt it was dated. I talk about the Gothic novel, for example, and while books fitting that pattern may continue to be written and read, the category by that name has long since ceased to exist. If I could go through it and update it, then they could bring out a new edition with the words “updated new edition” on it, and increase sales accordingly.
I thought about it, and ultimately decided against it. The book seemed to be one readers find useful, and the techniques and principles discussed struck me as essentially timeless, as pertinent in 1995 as they had been in 1978. And the whole idea of updating a book bothers me, anyway. I knew a writer once who’d updated a novel, or tried to; it was being reissued after fifteen or twenty years, and he’d gone through it page by page, updating the cost of a telephone call from a nickel to a dime (this was a few years ago), changing the stars of a movie his character watches from William Powell and Myrna Loy to William Holden and June Havoc (yes, this was a while ago), and otherwise altering the book’s temporal setting.
Well, it didn’t work. One way or another, every word in that book was attached to the year it was written. It had a certain integrity, and you altered it at your peril.
Writing the Novel is not a novel, and thus may not need to adhere to the same standard of artistic integrity, but it’s nonetheless a creature of the time of its writing, and my inclination is to leave it alone. I’m also predisposed to avoid work, and this looked to me to be work to no purpose.
Now, fifteen years after I decided the book wasn’t broke and didn’t need to be fixed, it is in fact another decade and a half older, and that much further out of date. But it still ain’t broke, as I can tell by the enthusiastic word-of-blog I keep encountering on the Internet, and I’m still predisposed to avoid work. So I’m not fixing it. I hope it does for you all a book of this sort can possibly hope to do. I hope it helps you speak in your own voice, map out your own route, and find your very own way to your very own book.
Bon voyage!
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
A Biography of Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years,