Writing the Novel

Chapter 2 Deciding Which Novel to Write What to do when you don’t have a specific novel in mind. How to pick your type of novel

You may not need this chapter. A certain proportion of novelists start off knowing pretty much what book they want to write, and you may very well be one of them. Although the precise shape of the plot and the structure of the book may be vague in your mind, it’s possible that you know certain things about the book. You know that it is a novel, for example, and you know what it’s about.

Perhaps the book you have decided to write is based upon your own life experience. Maybe you’ve endured something that strikes you as the raw material for a novel — a hitch in the military, a stretch in the slammer, or four years in a coed dormitory, say. Colorful or bland, anyone’s life can be turned into arresting fiction if it is incisively perceived and dramatically portrayed.

Similarly, you may be caught up in the notion of a novel that has nothing whatever to do with your visible life experience. Something from your reading or fantasy may have stimulated your creative imagination in such a way that you have a book to write firmly in mind. Perhaps your lead is a member of the Children’s Crusade, or an intergalactic explorer, or a contemporary private detective with a taste for Armagnac and a collector’s passion for oriental snuffboxes. Or your central character might as easily be a realistic contemporary figure with whom you identify on some inner plane — an abused child, an ex-athlete recovering from a failed marriage, a nun breathless with adoration. The possibilities are quite literally infinite; the only requisite is that there’s a character or conflict or fundamental situation somewhere along the line that makes you want to write a novel about it.

If this is the case, you have a slight advantage; you at least know what you want to write about, and the knowledge puts you one important step closer to the act. Skip ahead to the next chapter, if you’re so inclined.

During the first of my several vexingly undistinguished years as a college student, a cartoon hung for months on the English Department bulletin board. I returned to that campus twenty years after my precipitous departure from it, a prodigal son come home to teach a writing seminar, and as I walked across the greensward that cartoon came vividly back to me.

It showed a sullen eight-year-old boy staring down an earnest school principal. “It’s not enough to be a genius, Arnold,” the man was saying. “You have to be a genius at something.”

I recall identifying very strongly with Arnold. I had known several years before college that I wanted to be a writer. But it seemed it wasn’t enough merely to be a writer.

You had to be a writer of something.

Some people get the whole package as a gift. Not only are they endowed with writing talent but they seem to have been born knowing what to write about. Equipped at the onset with stories to tell, they have only to get on to the business of telling them.

Some people, in short, have it easy.

But some of us don’t. We know that we want to write without knowing what we want to write.

It’s encouraging to note that we’re in the majority, that most writers have been obsessed with the idea of becoming writers before the nature of what they might write about revealed itself to them. It’s easy to accept this premise about the nuts-and-bolts commercial writer, but the same initial uncertainty is every bit as likely to characterize the early years of writers with impeccable critical reputations. The identification of self as writer comes for most of us before we know what sort of writer we’ll be or what we’ll write about, and that seems to be just as true whether our ultimate literary product is Moby Dick or Trailer Trollop.

(This might be a good place to suggest, incidentally, that fiction writers of every stripe have a great deal more in common that the disparity of our work might suggest. The fact that we write unites us far more than the nature of what we write separates us.)

Let’s suppose, then, that all you know at this point is that you want to write a novel. Why you have this curious urge is not terribly important. It’s enough that you have it in good measure. Whether you’ll prove to have other elements essential to novelistic success — talent, perseverance, resourcefulness — is not something you have to know at this stage. Indeed, it’s not something you’re in a position to know. You’ll find out in due course.

How do you decide what novel to write?

It seems to me that this question can best be answered by asking a few others. First of all, what kind of novel do you like to read? I would not go so far as to say that we can only produce the sort of fiction that we most enjoy reading ourselves.

I’ve known of too many instances where this is simply untrue. When I was knocking out soft-core sex novels, for instance, I did not commonly spend my free hours reading other people’s soft-core sex novels. And I’ve observed that a substantial number of people who write westerns are very much averse to reading in the genre. Contrariwise, most mystery and science-fiction writers seem to enjoy reading in their respective fields.

When I was starting out, confession magazines constituted the most receptive market for new writers. They paid fairly well, too. Their numbers have shrunk since then and their rates of payment have actually declined, illustrating once more how the short story writer’s lot has gotten worse over the years, but back then they were an excellent place for a neophyte to get started.

I think, because I read a lot of them, I understood what a confession story was, the basic structure of its plot, and what made one story good and another unacceptable. During the year I spent working for a literary agent, the two confessions I yanked out of the slush pile both sold on their initial submissions, and the author of one of them came to be a leader in the field, ultimately going on to make a name for herself in the field of romantic fiction.

Well, I was game. Confessions back then paid several times what I was earning for suspense short stories, so on several occasions I went out and bought or borrowed confession magazines and set about reading my way through them. I never quite made it. I could not read one of the damned things all the way through without skimming. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. And I couldn’t shake the conviction that the entire magazine, from front to back and including the bust-developer ads, was nothing but mind-rotting swill.

Nor, consequently, could I produce a confession story. The ideas my mind came up with were either mind-numbingly trite or at odds with the market’s requirements. I never did turn one of these ideas into a story that I stayed with beyond a couple of tentative pages, never completed a confession until one bizarre weekend when I wrote three of them to order for a publisher with a couple holes to fill and a deadline fast approaching. I wrote them somehow because I’d accepted the assignment, and he printed them because he had to, and that was not the easiest money I ever made in my life, let me tell you.

How much do you have to like a type of novel in order to have a chance of success at it yourself? Well, let’s suppose you sit down one weekend with a stack of gothics or male adventure novels or light romances or whatever. If you have to flail yourself with a whip or whip yourself with a flail in order to get them read, fighting a constant urge to hurl the books across the room, and if your ultimate response is something along the lines of “This stuff is garbage and I hate it,” I think you might want to look a little further.

On the other hand, if you find the stories reasonably riveting even though you never lose sight of the fact that you’re not reading War and Peace, and if your final reaction is more in the vein of “This stuff’s garbage, all right, but it’s not bad garbage, and while I might not want word to get around I’ve got to admit that I sort of like it,” then perhaps you’ve found a place to start.

There are other questions to ask yourself. Here’s one — how important is it for you to be rewarded for your work? And what sort of reward’s most important? Money? Recognition? Or simply seeing your work in print? While the three are by no means mutually exclusive, and while the great majority of us want all three — in large portions, thank you — each of us is likely to find one of the three of maximum importance.

When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, and secure in the knowledge that I’d been placed on this planet to be a writer, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder what sort of thing I would write. I was at the time furiously busy reading my way through the great novels of the century, the works of Steinbeck and Hemingway and Wolfe and Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and all their friends and relations, and it was ever so clear to me that I would in due course produce a Great Novel of my own.

I’d go to college first, naturally, where I might get a somewhat clearer notion of just what constituted a Great Novel. Then I’d emerge into the real world where I would Live. (I wasn’t quite certain what all this capital-L Living entailed, but I figured there would be a touch of squalor in there somewhere, along with generous dollops of booze and sex.) All of this Living would ultimately distill itself into the Meaningful Experiences out of which I would eventually produce any number of Worthwhile Books.

Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this approach. Any number of important novels are produced in this approximate fashion, and the method has the added advantage that, should you wind up writing nothing at all, you’ll at least have treated yourself to plenty of booze and sex en route.

In my own case, though, I learned quickly that my self-image as a writer was stronger than my self-image as a potential great novelist. I didn’t really care all that deeply about artistic achievement, nor did I aspire to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. I wanted to write something and see it in print. I don’t know that that’s the noblest of motives for doing anything, but it was at the very core of my being.

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that you regard yourself as similarly motivated. While you’d certainly like to write something in which you can take great personal pride, something that might win you a measure of critical recognition, something that might lead stockbrokers and accountants to vie for your custom, your primary purpose as a writer is to get something published.

If that’s the case, you would probably be best advised to find a place for yourself in the field of category fiction, a term which covers the broad group of novels — generally paperback originals — which lend themselves readily to categorization as mysteries, adventure, romance, gothic, science fiction, historical saga, western, or whatever. These categories change slightly over the years; too, they go hot and cold, with one year’s hot ticket next year’s drug on the market. Every once in a while a novel achieves overwhelming success, to the point where its imitators quickly come to constitute a brand-new category. Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo went through printing after printing before other writers began to work the same vein; in due course the slave novel defined itself as a staple category of paperback fiction. Similarly, but far more rapidly, the first two steamy historical romances — Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower and Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love — rolled up impressive instant sales and sparked a new category overnight.

Some writers move with no apparent effort from one category to another over the years, furnishing a steady supply of whatever the market demands. When gothics are hot they write gothics; when a publisher calls with a demand for war stories or romantic intrigue, they shift gears and maintain full production. Typically, these jacks-of-all-trades meet minimal standards in every genre they take up without really distinguishing themselves in any one area. They are always competent but never inspired.

Which, come to think of it, is not terribly surprising. Professional competence is too rare a jewel to be dismissed summarily as hack work. Nevertheless, the writer who can do every type of novel with equal facility is a writer who has not managed to zero in on a type of novel that is uniquely his own. While you may prove to be this variety of writer, and while you may be happiest covering a wide range of fictional categories, I think you would do well first to determine if there’s a particular kind of novel that appeals to you more than the others.

We’ve established that the novel you set out to write ought to be of a type you would not find yourself unable to read had someone else written it. The converse of this argument is not necessarily true. Just because you can enjoy reading a particular sort of novel doesn’t mean you’d be well advised to try writing it.

Take me, for example; there was a time when I read a great deal of science fiction. I liked most S-F stories, and I liked the good ones a lot. Furthermore, I used to hang out with several established science fiction writers. I found them a congenial bunch, fellows of infinite jest and an engagingly quirky turn of mind. I liked the way they grabbed hold of ideas and turned them into stories.

But I couldn’t write science fiction. No matter how much of the stuff I read, no matter how much I enjoyed what I read, my mind simply did not yield up workable S-F ideas. I might read those stories with a fan’s intense enjoyment, but what I couldn’t do was get the sort of handle on what I read that left me saying to myself, “I could have written that. I could have come up with that idea, and I could have developed it along those lines. I might even have improved it by doing thus and so. By gum, I could have been the writer of that story.”

I’ve enjoyed a good many historical novels over the years, and I’ve been deeply interested in history for as long as I can remember. There was a period of several years during which a fair percentage of my leisure-time reading consisted of works of English and Irish history. One might think I’d do well to combine business and pleasure and turn my sights on the historical novel, trying my hand at a novel the theme and background of which might suggest itself from my reading.

I wouldn’t dream of it. One of the innumerable unpleasant facts I have to face about myself is that I’m a sluggard when it comes to research. I don’t enjoy it and I don’t do a very good job of it. I force myself when I have to, and I’ve become better about this in recent years, less given to slipshod fakery, but the idea of deliberately setting out to write a book which requires a vast amount of academic research is anathema to me.

Beyond that, I’m not comfortable with the idea of writing something set in a time other than my own. I wasn’t around then, so how could I presume to know how people talked? How could I expect to get their dialogue right, or to have the faintest idea what it felt like to be around in eighteenth-century Ireland, say, or Renaissance Italy? The fact that no one else knows how people talked or felt back then does nothing to put my mind at rest. I have to be able to believe in the fictive reality of what I’m doing in order to make it work.

This is not to say that I’m comfortable only when I write out of my own experience. I probably know as much about eighteenth-century Ireland as I do about contemporary Yugoslavia, yet I’ve blithely set several books in that country without doing more than cursory research. I’ve never killed anyone — yet — but I’ve written a great deal about murderers. I wrote a book from the point of view of a professional burglar and found the voice so natural that the book became the first of a series. I’ve written several books from a woman’s point of view. It’s a matter of identification, I suppose, of one’s ability to project oneself into certain environments and situations and not into others.

More simply, it’s a matter of identifying with an author. One of the things that makes fiction work is one’s identification with the characters. And one of the things that makes it writable, if you will, is identification with the person who wrote it.

I can remember the first time I felt it. It was the summer after my first year at college. I picked up a paperback anthology of short stories entitled The Jungle Kids. The author was Evan Hunter, who had recently made a name for himself with The Blackboard Jungle — hence the book’s title, not to mention the fact of its publication. The dozen or so stories in the book all dealt with juvenile delinquents and virtually all of them had been originally published in Manhunt. I identified, not so much with the characters in these stories, but with Evan Hunter himself.

I was genuinely excited when I reached the end of the book. Here was someone writing and publishing well-written stories that I could respect and enjoy — and, most important, I could see myself doing what he had done. I felt it was within my abilities, and I felt plots and characters of this sort could engage and stimulate my creative imagination. And I also felt that the whole thing was eminently worth doing.

I ultimately did make my first short story sale to Manhunt, but that’s another story. More to the point, my first novel grew directly out of a similar case of identification with the author.

I had at the time been writing and publishing crime stories for a year and felt it was time to write a novel. A senior colleague at the literary agency where I was working had suggested I try a light romance of the type Avalon was then publishing; because the rate of payment was awful, this was an easy market for the beginner to hit. I read one, and it was confessions all over again. I couldn’t get through the thing and knew I’d be incapable of coming up with an idea for one, let alone writing it.

What I really wanted to do was a detective novel. I’d read hundreds, liked the form very much, and made a couple of stabs at knocking out one of my own. But for one reason or another I couldn’t get a handle on a suspense novel.

During this time I had read perhaps a dozen lesbian novels. The sensitive novel of female homosexuality constituted a small but quite popular category in the fifties. I probably read the books more for information and titillation than anything else. I wasn’t personally acquainted with any lesbians at the time, nor did my knowledge of their lives go beyond what I read in those novels or witnessed on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

For whatever reason, I did find the books compulsively readable, and one day I finished one and realized that I could have written it myself. Or one quite like it. Possibly, by Georgia, one a shade better than what I’d just read.

In the name of research, I promptly read every lesbian novel I could get my hands on. Elements of a novel of my own began percolating in my mind — fragments of a character, a scene, a setting. Then one morning I awakened with the plot ready to happen, and I sat down and typed up a two or three page outline. After a gestation period of perhaps another month I sat down and wrote the thing in two weeks flat.

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.