Writing the Novel (6 page)

It sold first time out to Fawcett, then the leading market for that sort of book, and I was a published novelist just like that. I was not an overnight success, nor did I find an immediate identity for myself as a writer of lesbian novels; curiously enough, it was years before I wrote another. But I learned a tremendous amount writing the book, as one does writing any first novel, and it was that jolting realization of I-could-do-this that got me going.

This sort of identification with the writer, this recognition of one’s own capacity to write a certain type of book, is not limited to category fiction. Whatever makes you want to become a novelist, whatever sort of novelist you want to become, the process I’ve described is a basic starting point for finding your own first novel.

If you’ve decided that money is the spur that goads you and that you want to reach for the brass ring right away rather than work your way up to it, you would do well to have a broad acquaintance with the sorts of books that have made their authors rich. By regularly reading best-selling novels, and especially by concentrating on the works of those authors who consistently hit the best seller list, you’ll develop a sense of the sorts of books which tend to earn big money.

Some books make the best seller lists by happy accident. Perhaps they are category novels which have acquired a greater than usual readership because of increasingly widespread recognition of the author’s particular excellences. John D. MacDonald and Ross Macdonald are two cases in point; both continue to write the excellent hard-boiled suspense novels they’ve been writing for years, but their audience has swelled to the point where the books they write are best sellers.

Other books on the list are novels of considerable literary merit which have enough breadth of appeal to make them best sellers. E. L. Doctorow’s
Ragtime
is a good example of this phenomenon, as are
The World According to Garp,
by John Irving, and
Final Payments,
by Mary Gordon. Similarly, a few highly esteemed authors hit the best seller list routinely, not because of the type of books they write but because of the prominence they have achieved and the size of their personal following among readers. John Updike’s an example. So are Gore Vidal and John Cheever.

The remainder of the best seller list is chiefly composed of books with certain qualities common to best sellers—and here we find ourselves on marshy terrain indeed, because I don’t feel it’s proper to think in terms of a best seller class or category. Certainly there’s no magic formula, and certainly these books differ enormously from one another. By familiarizing yourself with best-selling fiction, you’ll get a sense of what qualities they have in common.

Perhaps more important, you’ll find that you like best sellers of one sort while disliking others. And, somewhere along the line, you’ll find one or more best-selling novels that spark that identification with the author we’ve talked about. You’ll realize you could have written a particular book, or one a good deal like it. When this happens, you will have found a direction for your writing which holds the promise of the rewards you seek while remaining compatible with your own literary inclinations.

That last point is worth a digression.

A great many people seem to believe that all it takes for a talented writer to produce a best-selling novel is a sound idea and the will to carry it out. Writers frequently make the mistake of believing this themselves, and the results can be markedly unsuccessful.

The writers who consistently produce best-selling fiction are not writing down to their audience. They are not making deliberate compromises between the books they’d like to write and what the public wants. On the contrary, they are turning out precisely the books they were born to write, working at the top of their form, and while they may wistfully wish they were geared to write the kind of thing that wins awards and sparks doctoral theses, just as Norman Rockwell occasionally expressed regret that he didn’t paint like Picasso, they have become successes by being themselves.

Best sellers are occasionally written cynically. William Faulkner batted out
Sanctuary
with the intention of producing a potboiler that would make him rich; he remained an artist in spite of himself, and while
Sanctuary
did sell impressively it remained quintessential Faulkner. On the other hand, it’s probably safe to assume that John Updike wrote
Couples
out of comparable cupidity.
Couples
did sell very well, but it’s hardly vintage Updike, and the author’s own detachment from it is evident throughout.

I’ve known several writers of category fiction who have tried to break through into the world of bestsellerdom, a natural ambition in a world where success is largely measured in dollars and cents. Some writers manage this rather neatly; they’d written category fiction as an apprenticeship, or their development carried them to a point where they are comfortable working on a broader canvas—for one reason or another, their books work. Others of us have found ourselves trying to be something we’re not in order to attain a goal to which we unwisely aspire. The result, more often than not, is a book which is satisfying to neither its authors nor its readers, a financial and artistic failure. The Peter Principle seems to apply; we extend our literary horizons until we reach our level of incompetence.

I’m sorry to say that I know whereof I speak, and the knowledge was not gained painlessly. What I have learned to my cost is that I do my best work when all I am trying to do is my best work. And it is when I do this that I incidentally achieve the most critical and financial success in the bargain.

There’s a moral there somewhere, and I have a hunch it shouldn’t be too hard to spot.

Suppose I don’t want to write category fiction? I want to write a serious mainstream novel. But I don’t know what I want to write about. I don’t have a setting or a plot or a character. I just know that I want to write a serious novel. How do I get started?

Maybe you’re not ready yet.

Give yourself time. Read the sorts of novels you enjoy and admire, and try to spot those which afford a measure of the author-identification we’ve discussed. You may not want to write books which specifically resemble what you’ve read, but this identification process, this reading from the writer’s point of view, may help your subconscious mind to begin formulating ideas for your own book.

Sooner or later, you’ll begin to get ideas—out of your own background and experience, out of your imagination, out of some well of story material within yourself. This process will happen when the time is right. Until it does, there’s not very much you can do.

Chapter 3

Read … Study… Analyze

Let’s suppose that you’ve managed to zoom in on a type of novel you think might make for comfortable writing. You don’t know that you’re ready to embark on a lifelong career as a writer of sweet savage romances, say, or shoot-’em-up westerns, but you feel it might be worthwhile to take a shot at writing one of them. You’ve found something you enjoy reading and it’s also something you can see yourself writing. The talent you perceive yourself having seems likely to lend itself to this particular sort of book.

Now what do you do?

Well, it’s possible you’re ready to sit down and go to work at the typewriter. Maybe you’ve already got your book firmly in mind, plot and characters and all. If that’s the case, by all means sit down and start hitting the keys. The book may or may not work, depending on the extent of your readiness, but in any event you’ll learn a great deal from the experience.

It’s very likely, though, that you’d do well to take another step before plunging in. This step consists of subjecting your chosen field to a detailed analysis by reading extensively and submerging yourself in what you read. The analytical process is such that you wind up with both an ingrained gut-level understanding of what constitutes a successful novel of your chosen type and a mind trained to conceive, produce and develop the ideas for such a novel.

I can’t think of a better name for this process than
“market analysis,”
yet something in me recoils at the term. It’s too clinical, for one thing, and it seems to imply that writing a salable gothic novel lends itself to the Harvard Business School case-study approach. We’re talking about
writing,
for Pete’s sake. We’re dealing with creativity. We’re artists, aren’t we? Market analysis is something they do in Wall Street offices, not Greenwich Village garrets.

Besides, the process I’m talking about is oriented more to the work than to the market. What we study here is the individual novel, and our concern is in discovering what makes it work, not what has induced some particular editor to publish it or some group of readers to buy it.

Okay. Whatever you call it, I want to do it. What do I do first?

Good question.

As I said, what you do is you read.

When you picked a type of book to write, one of the criteria was that it was one you were capable of reading with a certain degree of pleasure. This had better be the case, because you’re going to have to do some intensive reading. Fortunately, the odds are that reading is a habit for you from the start. That’s true for most people who want to write, and it’s especially true for most of those who wind up successful at it. Some of us find ourselves reading less fiction as time passes, and many of us are inclined to avoid reading other people’s novels while writing our own, but I rarely encounter a writer who’s not a pretty enthusiastic reader by nature.

So there’s a fair chance that you’ve been reading books in your chosen field for some time now, beginning long before you selected this field for your own novelistic endeavors. I’d had this sort of prior experience with suspense novels, for example, before I seriously attempted one of my own. On the other hand, I had not read widely in the soft-core sex novel field when the opportunity arose for me to write one. Few people had; the genre was just beginning to emerge.

Makes no difference. Either way, you have fresh reading to do. You have to read not as a normally perceptive reader, but with the special insight of a writer.

My first venture into this sort of reading came when I first began writing stories for the crime fiction magazines, but the process is pretty much the same for both short stories and novels. What I did, having made my first short story sale to
Manhunt,
was to study that magazine and every other crime fiction magazine far more intensively than I have ever studied anything before or since. I bought every magazine in the field the instant it appeared on the stands. In addition, I made regular visits to back-magazine shops, where I picked up every back issue of the leading magazines that I could find. I carried check lists of these publications in my wallet to avoid buying the same issue twice, and I carted the magazines home and arranged them in orderly fashion on my shelves. At night when I got home from the office I read magazine after magazine, going through every last one of them from cover to cover.

Understand, please, that I did not learn any formulae. I don’t know that such things exist. What I did learn, in a manner I cannot entirely explain, is a sense of the possible variations that could be worked upon the crime story, a sense of what worked and what didn’t.

Does this mean I have to read hundreds and hundreds of novels? I’ll be spending eternity in the library.

You won’t have to read as many novels as I read short stories. You’ll probably read hundreds of them over the years—I think it’s vital to continue reading in one’s field, even when one’s established oneself as a writer in the field. Remember, though, a distinction we observed earlier between the short story and the novel. The short-story writer has to come up with a constant supply of ideas. The novelist, on the other hand, deals with a smaller number of ideas but must be far more concerned with their extensive development.

So you won’t have to read so many novels. Eight or ten or a dozen should give you a sufficient reading background for your own first attempt. But you’ll have to read them far more exhaustively than the beginning short-story writer has to read examples in his field. It’s not enough simply to read these books. You’ll have to take them apart and see what makes them work.

How do you go about that?

Well, let’s say you’ve decided to take aim at the gothic novel. Chances are you’ve read more than a few of them in reaching this decision, but maybe not; perhaps you read one and knew in a flash it was your kind of thing. Whatever the case, you’ll want to have half a dozen books on hand in order to launch this project of analyzing the gothic novel. You may elect to use your favorites among the books you’ve already read or make a trip to the newsstand for some new material. I’d suggest that you pick books by six different writers, choosing a mixture of established names in the field and neophytes, but that’s not necessary. I’ve heard tell of a writer, for example, who sat down and pored over the gothic novels of Dorothy Daniels as if they were holy writ. Then he turned out a book that was described by the editor who bought it as an absolutely perfect example of second-rate Dorothy Daniels. Second-rate Dorothy Daniels is still good enough to sell, and sell it did.

I wouldn’t recommend so limited an approach. While it may not be the worst way in the world to break into print, it can’t do much to bring out the writer within oneself. What we’re trying to achieve by this market analysis is not slavish imitation but synthesis. By digesting a genre and absorbing its parameters into one’s system, one prepares oneself to write one’s own books within the particular confines of that genre.

That’s theoretical. Let’s get down to practical matters. Having bought a half-dozen suitable gothics, what do I do?

Read them, for openers. Read them one after the other, without reading anything else in between. And don’t rush this reading process. Forget any speedreading courses you may have taken. If you’ve gotten in the habit of skimming, break it. Slow yourself down. You want to find out more than what happens and who’s the bad guy and whether or not the girl gets to keep the house at the end. You want to find out what the author’s doing and how he’s doing it, and you can only manage that feat by spending plenty of time with the book.