Writing the Novel

Introduction

This is a book designed to help you write a novel. It contains the distillation of my own experience of twenty years as a published novelist, plus a considerable amount that I’ve learned from other writers. My goal throughout has been to produce the sort of book I might have found useful when I set out to write my own first novel.

But there are no guarantees. Just because you’ve bought this book, just because you’ve studied it diligently, does not mean for a moment that your success as a novelist is a foregone conclusion. You may never write so much as the first paragraph of a novel. You may begin work on a book and find yourself unable to complete it. Or you may labor long and hard on a book, working your way through outline and first draft and final polish, only to discover that you’ve turned a perfectly good ream of paper into something commercially unviable and artistically indefensible.

These things happen. That they happen constantly to neophyte writers should hardly be surprising news. What may be more of a surprise is that they happen to seasoned professional novelists as well.

They even happen to me. Over the years, I’ve published, at last count, twenty novels under my own name, plus perhaps five times that number under various pseudonyms. You would think that all that furious typing would have resulted in my having learned something, that while I might not know how to tie my shoes or cross the street I ought certainly to have the mechanics of writing a novel down cold by now.

But in the past two or three years I’ve had perhaps half a dozen ideas for novels that got no further than the first chapter. I’ve written three novels that died after I’d written over a hundred pages; they repose in my file cabinet at this very moment, like out-of-gas cars on a highway, waiting for someone to start them up again. I very much doubt they’ll ever be completed.

That’s not all. During that same stretch of time I’ve seen two novels through to completion and succeeded only in producing books that no one has wanted to publish — and, I’ve come to believe, for good and sufficient reason. Both were books I probably shouldn’t have tried writing in the first place. Both failures constituted learning experiences that will almost certainly prove beneficial in future work. While I could by no means afford the time spent on these books, neither can I properly write that time off as altogether wasted.

But how could an established professional write an unpublishable book? If he’s written a dozen or two dozen or five dozen publishable ones in a row, wouldn’t you think he’d have the formula down pat?

The answer, of course, is that there’s no such thing as a formula. Except in the genuinely rare instances of writers who tend to write the same book over and over, every novel is a wholly new experience.

In Some Thoughts I Have in Mind When I Teach, Wendell Berry makes the point that

Some of the books I write involve series characters. I’ve done three books, for example, about a burglar named Bernie Rhodenbarr; in each of them he becomes the prime suspect in a homicide investigation because of his activities as a burglar, and in order to get himself out of the jam he has to solve the murder himself. There is, clearly, a similarity to the structure of all three of these books which at a cursory glance might well look like a formula.

But each plot is significantly different and each book, let me assure you, has presented its own specific problems. You might think the books would become easier to write. The third, just recently completed as I write these lines, was by a fair margin the most difficult of the three.

As a noun, novel means a book-length prose narrative. As an adjective, it means “of a new kind or nature.” The dual definition is historic, of course, deriving from a time when the novel was a new fictional form. Still, I see it as a happy accident, for every novel is novel.

I would suppose that a majority of this book’s readers have yet to write a book-length work of fiction. It is commonplace to hear that the first novel presents special problems to author and publisher alike. But in a larger sense every novel is a first novel, presenting no end of unique problems, carrying enormous risks, and offering immense excitement and other rewards.

If you’re unprepared for the risks, perhaps you’d like to rethink this whole business of novel-writing. If you’re unwilling to live with the possibility of failure, perhaps you’d be more comfortable writing laundry lists and letters to the editor.

If you really want to write a novel, stick around.

One thing you won’t find in this book is an explanation of the way to write a novel.

Because I don’t believe there is one. Just as every novel is unique, so too is every novelist. The study I’ve made of the writing methods of others has led me to the belief that everybody in this business spends a lifetime finding the method that suits him best, changing it over the years as he himself evolves, adapting it again and again to suit the special requirements of each particular book. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another; what works with one book won’t necessarily work with another.

Some novelists outline briefly, some in great detail, and a few produce full-fledged treatments that run half the length of the final book itself. Others don’t outline at all. Some of us revise as we go along. Others do separate drafts. Some of us write sprawling first drafts and wind up cutting them to the bone. Others rarely cut three paragraphs overall.

Some months before I wrote my own first novel — of which there will be more later — I read a book which purported to tell how to write a novel. The author taught writing at one of America’s leading universities and had written a couple of well-received historical novels, and he had set out to tell the great audience of would-be novelists how to go and do likewise.

His method was a dilly. What you did if you wanted to write a novel, I was given to understand, was to trot down to the nearest stationery store and pick up several packs of three-by-five file cards. Then you sat at a desk with the cards and a trayful of sharp pencils and got down to business.

First you went to work on your character cards. You wrote out one or more of those for each and every character to appear in the book, from the several leads to the most minor bit players. For the major characters, you might use several cards, devoting one to a physical description of the character, another to his background, another to his personal habits, and a fourth, say, to the astrological aspects at the moment of his birth.

Then you prepared your scene cards. Having used some other cards to rough out the plot, you set about working up a file card for every scene which would take place in your novel. If one character was going to buy a newspaper somewhere around page 384, you’d write out a scene card explaining how the scene would play, and what the lead would say to the newsdealer, and what the weather was like.

There was, as I recall, rather more to this method. By the time you were ready to write the book you had innumerable shoeboxes filled with three-by-five cards and all you had to do was turn them into a novel — which, now that I think of it, sounds rather more of a challenge than converting a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or base metal into gold.

I read this book all the way through, finding myself drawing closer to despair with every passing chapter. Two things were crystal clear to me. First of all, this man knew how to write a novel, and his method was the right method. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly manage it.

I finished the book, heaved a sigh, and gave myself up to feelings of inadequacy. I decided I’d have to stick to short stories for the time being, if not forever. Maybe someday I’d be sufficiently organized and disciplined and all to get those file cards and dig in. Maybe not.

Couple of months later I got out of bed one morning and sat down and wrote a two-page outline of a novel. About a month after that I sat down to the typewriter with my two-page outline at hand and a ream of white bond paper at the ready. I felt a little guilty without a shoebox full of file cards, but like the bumblebee who goes on flying in happy ignorance of the immutable laws of physics, I persisted in my folly and wrote the book in a couple of weeks.

Shows what a jerk that other writer was, doesn’t it? Wrong. It shows nothing of the sort. The extraordinarily elaborate method he described, while no more inviting in my eyes than disembowelment, was obviously one that worked like a charm — for him.

Perhaps he said as much. Perhaps he qualified things by explaining that his method was not the way to write a novel but merely his way to write a novel. It’s been a long time since I read his book — and it’ll be donkey’s years until I read it again — so I can’t trust my memory on the point. But I do know that I was left with the distinct impression that his method was the right method, that all other methods were the wrong method, and that by finding my own way to write my own novel I was proceeding at my own peril. It’s unlikely that he put things so strongly, and my interpretation doubtless owes a good deal to the anxiety and insecurity with which I approached the whole prospect of writing a book-length work of fiction.

Nevertheless, I would hate to leave anyone with the impression that the following pages will tell you everything to know about how to write a novel. All I’ll be doing — all I really can do — is share my own experience. If nothing else, that experience has been extensive enough to furnish me with the beginnings of a sense of my own ignorance. After twenty years and a hundred books, I at least realize that I don’t know how to write a novel, that nobody does, that there is no right way to do it. Whatever method works — for you, for me, for whoever’s sitting in the chair and poking away at the typewriter keys — is the right way to do it.