Writing the Novel

Chapter 4 Developing Plot Ideas How to encourage ideas to bubble up from the unconscious. How ideas come together to create plot. Ways to sharpen up a plot

“Where do you get your ideas?” is one of the questions writers get asked all the time. What’s galling about it, in addition to its banality, is the questioner’s implicit assumption that coming up with a clever idea is all there really is to the business of being a writer. Turning that idea into a book — well, that’s just a matter of typing, isn’t it?

But of course not. Were that the case, I’d run books through my typewriter at seventy or eighty words per minute, not four or five agonizing pages per day.

While ideas are not the sine qua non in the novel that they often are in the short story, they are nevertheless essential.

A handful of writers can produce books that are not specifically about something and make them work. It scarcely matters what Finnegan’s Wake is about, for example. For the rest of us, a strong central idea is basic to our novels. How we are to get these ideas, and how we can best develop them into strong plots, is something with which we might well concern ourselves.

It’s my own conviction that we do not get our ideas. They are given to us, bubbling up out of our own subconscious minds as if from some dark and murky ferment. When the conditions are right, it is neither more nor less than the natural condition of things for a writer’s imagination to produce those ideas which constitute the raw material of his fiction.

I don’t know that I have much control over this process of generating ideas. This is not to say that I don’t want to control the process, or even that I don’t try to control it. But I’ve gradually come to see that I can’t stimulate ideas by hitting myself in the forehead with a two-by-four.

This does not mean that there’s nothing the writer can do to foster the development of novelistic ideas. Note, please, my argument that the process occurs of its own accord when the conditions are right.

My job, when I want ideas to bubble up, is to make sure the conditions are right. Then I can let go of the controls and pick ideas like plums when they come along.

That’s a little hazy. Can’t we get a bit more specific? How do I adjust the conditions?

We can get a whole lot more specific. And as far as adjusting the conditions is concerned, you’ve already been doing that. The reading and studying and analysis we talked about in the preceding chapter has as one of its functions the development of fictional ideas. By immersing ourselves in these books and turning them inside out, we come to know them on a gut level, so that our imaginations are encouraged to toy with the kinds of plot material which will be useful to us.

There are other things we can do as well. For instance:

Pay attention. The little atoms of fact and attitude which can link up into the molecules of an idea are all over the damn place. Each of us sees and hears and reads a dozen things a day that we could feed into the idea hopper — if we were paying attention.

Back in the early sixties I was reading one of the newsmagazines when I happened on an article on sleep. I learned no end of things, all of which I promptly forgot except for one delicious nugget of information — there seems to be a certain number of cases in medical literature of human beings who do not sleep at all. They get along somehow, leading lives of permanent insomnia, but otherwise not demonstrably the worse for wear.

Fortunately, I wasn’t sleeping when I read that item. I rolled it around in my brain, filed it for cocktail-party conversation, and never dreamed I’d wind up writing seven books about a character named Evan Tanner, a free-lance secret agent whose sleep center had been destroyed during the Korean War.

A few million people probably read that article without writing a book about an insomniac. Conversely, I’ve undoubtedly come up against a few million facts which might have sparked a character or a setting or a plot, but didn’t. What made the difference, I think, is that I happened to find this particular fact oddly provocative. My unconscious mind was eager to play with it, to add it to the murky ferment we talked about earlier. That my mind ultimately made Tanner the particular character he is is very likely attributable to the particular character I am — as we’ll observe when we look at the process of character development more closely in another chapter. That the plot in which I put Tanner took the shape it did is attributable to two things. First, I’d schooled myself and/or had been inclined by nature to develop plots that lent themselves to suspense fiction. Second, another key principle operated, to wit:

Two and two makes five. Which is to say that synergy is very much at work in the process of plot development. The whole is ever so much greater than its parts. The writer, in possession of one fact or anecdote or notion or concept or whatever, suddenly gifted with another apparently unrelated fact or anecdote or et cetera, takes one in each hand and automatically turns them this way and that, playing with the purposefulness of a child, trying to see if they’ll fit together.

Let’s get back to Tanner. A full three years after that newsmagazine item, I spent an evening with a numismatic journalist just back from Turkey, where he’d spent a couple of years earning a very precarious living smuggling ancient coins and Roman glass out of the country. Among the stories on which he was dining out was one about a rumor he’d heard of a cache of gold coins secreted in the front stoop of a house in Balekisir, where the Armenian community had presumably hidden its wealth at the time of the Smyrna massacres. He and some associates actually located the house as described by a survivor, broke into the stoop in the dead of night, established that the gold had been there, but also established, alas, that someone had beat them to it by a couple of decades.

Now I hadn’t consciously been carrying my insomniac character around in the forefront of my mind, waiting for a plot to materialize for him. But I must have been carrying him around subconsciously, because shortly after my evening with the journalist I began a book about a young man, his sleep center destroyed by shrapnel, who goes to Turkey and finds that elusive Armenian gold.

Fawcett published that book as The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. For my part, I decided to write more books about Tanner, and there was a point when I could barely pick up a newspaper without running across something that would turn into plot material. Tanner was a devotee of political lost causes and national irredentist movements, and it seemed as though every other story in the first section of the daily New York Times was grist for my mill. By perceiving news stories this way, picking them up and seeing what I could do with them, I was following yet another principle:

Remember what you’re looking for. Here’s an example that happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was with a group of people, and one woman complained about a problem she was having with her upstairs neighbor. He was evidently a drunk, and was given periodically to turning his radio on at top volume and then either leaving the apartment or passing out cold on the floor. Efforts to reach him invariably failed, and the radio blared all night, keeping the woman awake and doing very little for her peace of mind.

People suggested a variety of things — that she call the police, kick the door in, report him to the landlord, and so on. “Get a flashlight,” I told her, “and go down to the basement and find the fuse box and remove the fuse for his apartment. Just turn him off altogether. Pull the plug on the clown.”

I don’t know if she did this. That’s her problem, not mine. But after the conversation shifted, I was left to think about the basic problem and let my mind wander with it. That I’d thought of the fuse box ploy was not inconsistent with my choosing burglars and such types as viewpoint characters; I’m blessed or cursed, as you prefer, with that type of mind. I thought of that, and I thought that my burglar hero, Bernie Rhodenbarr, would certainly offer the same suggestion if a friend called him in the middle of the night with that particular problem.

And then, because I’ve learned not to walk away from thoughts along these lines, I asked myself what Bernie would do if, for some reason or other, his friend couldn’t pull the fuse, or get access to the fuse box, or whatever. Some fuse boxes in New York apartments are located within the individual apartment, for instance. Suppose Bernie’s sidekick Carolyn Kaiser called him because of this blaring radio, and suppose Bernie was obliging enough to trot over with his burglar’s tools, and suppose he did what he does best, letting himself into the offending apartment just to turn off the radio, and suppose there was a dead body spread out on the living room rug, and suppose...

I may or may not use it. But a few minutes of rumination had provided me with the opening for a novel. It’s not a plot. It’s not enough for me to sit down and start writing. I’m not ready to write another book about Bernie just now and won’t be for six or eight months. By then, if I remember who I am and what I’m looking for, I’ll very likely have picked up other stray facts and thoughts and bits and pieces, and I’ll have played with them and tried fitting them together, and if two and two makes five I may have a book to write.

Stay awake. I heard very early on that a writer works twenty-four hours a day, that the mind is busy sifting notions and possibilities during every waking hour and, in a less demonstrable manner, while the writer sleeps as well. I liked the sound of this from the start — it was a nice rejoinder to my then wife if she said anything about my putting in only two hours a day at the typewriter, or skipping work altogether and going to the friendly neighborhood pool hall for the afternoon. But I’m not sure I believed it.

I believe it now, but with one qualification. I believe we can be on the job twenty-four hours a day. I believe we can also choose not to, and those of us who make this choice severely limit ourselves.

A great many writers use alcohol and drugs, ostensibly to stimulate their creativity. This very often seems to work in the beginning; the mind, jarred out of its usual channels by this unaccustomed chemical onslaught, may respond by digging new channels for itself. Similarly, some artists early in their careers find hangovers a creative if hardly comfortable time. The process of withdrawal from the drug evidently has a stimulating effect.

Eventually, these same writers commonly use alcohol and drugs to unwind, to turn off the spinning brain after the day’s work is finished. The process is not true relaxation, of course, but anesthesia. One systematically shuts off the thinking and feeling apparatus for the night. For those who ultimately become drug- or alcohol-dependent — and a disheartening proportion of the members of our profession wind up in this category — the results are devastating. One reaches a stage wherein work is impossible without the drug or the drink, and this stage is in turn succeeded by one in which work is impossible with or without the substance. Alcoholism and drug dependency have ended too many successful careers prematurely, while they’ve nipped no end of promising careers in the bud.

It’s hardly revolutionary to advise an alcoholic writer not to drink, anymore than it’s a controversial stance to urge diabetics not to binge on sugar. But I’d suggest further that heavy drinking or drug use is severely detrimental even to the writer who does not become alcoholic or drug-dependent, simply because it shuts off his mind.

For years I drank when my day’s work was done, convinced that it helped me relax. One thing it indisputably did was take my mind off my work. This, to be sure, was one of the things I wanted it to do; I felt I ought to be able to leave the work behind when I left the typewriter.

But writing, and especially novel writing, just doesn’t work that way. Writing the novel is an ongoing organic process, and we carry the book with us wherever we go. It’s during the period between one day’s work and the next that our minds play, both consciously and subconsciously, with the ideas that will enable us to perform creatively when we resume writing. We may rest the mind during these times but we hurt ourselves creatively if we shut our minds off completely. Later on we’ll talk about the value of daily writing. It’s similarly related to the notion of keeping oneself present in one’s book, day in and day out. Extended breaks in the writing interrupt this continuity, and so do those interruptions of consciousness or attentiveness or awareness caused by heavy drinking and drug use.

More recently, marijuana has been touted as a creative stimulant, presumably nonaddictive, harmless, etc. Its addictive properties and harmlessness aside, I have found that its potential for creative stimulation is largely illusory. The common marijuana experience consists of making marvelous seminal mental breakthroughs which, hard to grasp as the smoke itself, are gone the next morning. If only one could remember, if only one could hold onto those fantastic inspired insights....

Well, one can. The story’s been told of the fellow who kept paper and pencil at the ready, determined to write down his brilliant insights before they were lost. He awoke the following morning, recollected that he’d had a fantastic insight and that for once he’d managed to write it down. He wasn’t sure that it contained the absolute secret of the universe, but he knew it was dynamite.

He looked, and there on the bedside table was his pad of paper, and on it he had written, “This room smells funny.”

Whether to smoke or drink or pop pills is an individual decision, as is the extent to which you may care to employ these substances. I would suggest, though, that if you do elect to drink or drug heavily, you do so between novels, not during them. And recognize that whatever excellence your work has is in spite of the substances that you’re using, not because of them.

Stay hungry. Some time ago a friend of mine was on a television talk show with several other mystery writers, Mickey Spillane among them. After the program ended, Spillane announced that they’d neglected to talk about the most important topic. “We didn’t say anything about money,” he said.

He went on to explain that he’d spent several years on an offshore island in South Carolina, where he did nothing too much more taxing than swim and sunbathe and walk the beach for hours at a time. “Every once in a while it would come to me that it’d be fun to get started on a book,” he said. “I thought I’d keep my mind in shape and I’d enjoy doing it. But I could never get a single idea for a story. I’d sit and sit, I’d walk for miles, but I couldn’t get an idea.

“Then one day I got a call from my accountant to say that the money was starting to get low. Nothing serious, but I should start thinking about ways to bring in some dough. And boy, did I get ideas for books!”

Money makes the mare go. It’s very often the spur for what we might prefer to think of as pure creativity. I don’t believe for a moment that financial insecurity is essential to a writer’s imagination. In my own case, really severe money problems have occasionally kept me from thinking of anything beyond the desperate nature of the situation, leading to a vicious circle verging on writer’s block. Money doesn’t have to be the spur or the genuinely rich members of our profession would not continue to write productively and well. A man like James Michener, who consistently gives away most of what he earns writing best sellers, is certainly not driven by the desire for cash.

But he’s spurred on by something. There is a hunger at the root of all our creative work, whether it is for wealth or recognition or a sense of accomplishment or some tangible proof that we are not worthless human beings after all. To return to an earlier metaphor, we might call that hunger the yeast that starts that dark ferment working down in the unconscious.

If we can stay in touch with that hunger, the pot will keep bubbling — and ideas that engage us will continue rising to the surface.

When an idea does come along, make quite sure you don’t forget it.

I would recommend carrying a notebook around as routinely as you carry your house key or wallet. Whenever an idea turns up, make a note of it. The simple act of writing down a few words will help to fix the idea in your mind so your subconscious can get hold of it.

Before you go to bed at night, make a point of glancing through the notebook. If you have the wrong attitude, this process can simply load you up with guilt over all the fiction ideas you’ve left undeveloped. Don’t let this happen. Those scribbles and scraps in your notebook aren’t things you have to do, and they’re certainly not projects which must be undertaken right away. The notebook’s a tool. It’s there to make sure you don’t lose sight of things that might turn out to be worth remembering; by referring to it frequently, you use it to give your memory a jog and stimulate the unconscious development of the idea over a period of time.

For some writers, a notebook comes close to being an end in itself. They approach the notebook as an art form, using it as a sort of creative journal and devoting an hour or so at the end of the day to ruminating therein. I’ve never been able to do this, perhaps because of a constitutional incapacity for sustained work at something without at least the possibility that what I’m doing will be publishable. Then too, it’s my own feeling that the writer who puts too much energy into notebook entries is like the athlete who overtrains, like the boxer who leaves his fight in the gym.

That’s just personal prejudice. Once again, writing is an utterly individual matter, and your notebook ought to be whatever you want it to be. Whatever works is what is right.

It’s generally better, if rumination is your thing, to confine it to a notebook rather than to discuss your plot notion with friends. Sometimes this sort of discussion is useful, especially if the friends are writers themselves. When people in the business bat plot material around, the brainstorming process often results in clarifying and strengthening the ideas. All too often, though, talking about an idea winds up serving as an alternative to writing about it, especially if the people you talk to are not writers. I can lose enthusiasm for ideas if I talk them out at length. Perhaps the ideas I’ve gone stale on in this fashion are ideas that would have withered on the vine regardless, but my experience in this area has made me superstitious and secretive on the subject. I tend now to sit on my better ideas like a broody hen, letting them hatch as they will in their own good time.

One thing that I’ve learned, occasionally to my chagrin, is that it’s not enough for an idea to be a good one. It has to be a good one for me.

It’s easy to fool oneself in this area. Just because I’ve thought of an idea for a novel, and just because it’s the sort of idea that could be developed into a viable book, is no reason in and of itself for me to write that particular book. It may not be my type of book at all. But sometimes, overawed by the commercial potential of the project, I lose sight of this fact.

I recently had a painful lesson in this regard, and it was a long time coming. Some years ago I was reading something about Case Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia that was the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Germany. I got an idea — specifically, that Hitler had been manipulated into attacking Russia by a British agent who had penetrated the Berlin government. I thought that was a neat premise to hang a novel on, and discussed it with my friend, novelist Brian Garfield, figuring it was the sort of book he could do a nice job with.

Brian was intrigued, but not quite captivated enough to do anything with the notion. Time passed, and the idea lingered in my subconscious, and two or three years later on a flight to Jamaica an idea struck me out of the blue, tying the original notion I’d dreamed up with Rudolf Hess’s inexplicable flight to Scotland. A whole bunch of quirky historical elements would not fit themselves into the context of my little fiction, and the book which might result might just have the stuff of which best sellers are made.

There was only one problem. It still wasn’t my kind of book. It wasn’t really the kind of book I’d be terribly likely to read, let alone write. I might have recognized this, had I not had my judgment clouded by pure and simple greed. (Then too, I didn’t have anything else to write, and there were no other ideas hanging fire that did much for me.)

I had a terrible time with the book, and the first draft of it, certainly, was at least as terrible as the time I had. The whole project may well turn out to be salvageable, and I may indeed wind up entering this particular book on the profit side of my ledger, but I hope I never lose sight of the fact that it was a mistake for me to write this book. If I’ve learned that, and if the lesson sticks, then I’ll really have profited from the experience regardless of how it turns out financially.

For the beginner, a certain amount of experimentation in this regard is both inevitable and desirable. It takes a lot of writing to know with any degree of assurance what you are and are not capable of doing. Furthermore, at the start of a writing career any writing experience is valuable in and of itself. But as you grow to develop a surer sense of your individual strengths and weaknesses, you’ll be better able to decide what ideas to develop, what ones to give away, and what ones to forget about altogether.

Some ideas come from other people. I’ve had both good and bad experiences writing books based on the ideas of others. Years ago Donald E. Westlake got an idea for a suspense novel — a bride is raped on her wedding night and the bridal couple take direct revenge on the bad guys. He wrote an opening chapter, found it didn’t seem to go anywhere, and he put it away and forgot about it.

A year or so after that I called him up and asked if he had any plans for the idea. When he said no, I requested permission to steal the notion — it had been percolating on a back burner of my mind ever since he first mentioned it to me. He graciously told me to go ahead, and Deadly Honeymoon became my first hardcover novel, a fair success in book form and ultimately the basis of a film, called Nightmare Honeymoon for reasons I wouldn’t presume to guess.

Agents and publishers have come up with other ideas and given them to me. Sometimes I’ve written the books their ideas sparked, and sometimes they’ve turned out well.

On the other hand, I’ve had several experiences where ideas originated by other persons led me to books that proved ultimately unwritable, or books which gave me a great deal of trouble, or books which simply failed for one reason or another.

It can be quite difficult, for example, working from a publisher’s idea. The temptation to do so can be considerable, since one is not working on speculation; the publisher, along with the idea, generally dangles a contract and an advance in front of one’s eyes, and the more attractive the contract and the larger the advance, why, the better the idea is going to look. Thus you find yourself bound to an idea you might have dismissed out of hand if you’d thought it up all by yourself.

Sometimes — and I’ve had this experience — the publisher has only a vague idea of what he wants. In order to produce a book you’ll be able to write effectively, you have to transform this idea and make it your own. If the publisher’s got an open mind, that’s no problem. Occasionally, however, he’ll be struck by the discrepancy between what you’ve produced and the sublime if hazy vision with which he started. If the book’s good enough in its own right you’ll sell it somewhere sooner or later, but it doesn’t make for the best feelings all around.

What it boils down to, then, is that you really have to be sure you like another person’s idea before you use it. Remember, your own ideas bubble up from your own mind; when you work on them, that bubbling process will continue and the idea will develop. When you’re working on another person’s idea, you’re adopting it. It has to be the sort you can love as if it were your own or you won’t be able to bring your subconscious fully to bear upon it. It won’t grow organically the way an idea must if it is to become a fully realized book.

How well developed does an idea have to be before you can start writing the book? It depends.

The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep took a couple of years gestating until various plot components fitted themselves together. By the time I sat down to write the book, I had a very strong sense of the character of Tanner and a pretty good grasp of the book’s plot. I didn’t know everything else that was going to happen by any means, but I had the general outline of the book pretty clear in my mind.

With Deadly Honeymoon, I could fit the book’s premise into one sentence, and that was as much of a handle as I had on the book when I sat down and wrote the first chapter. I think now that I might have written a better book if I’d known more about the various characters and had given the plot more thought before I started, but I was impatient to get on with it, and it’s possible the book gained by the impatient enthusiasm that gripped its author.

One night Brian Garfield parked his car on the street in Manhattan and returned to it to find the convertible top slashed by some archfiend in human form who wanted to steal a coat from the back seat. Brian’s first reaction was murderous rage. He realized he couldn’t find the villain and kill him, but he could find some other villain and kill him, couldn’t he? Because Brian is a writer rather than a homicidal maniac — although admittedly the two classes are not mutually exclusive — he decided to write a book about someone so motivated rather than act out his anger directly.

He might have begun work immediately upon a book about a vigilante who goes around killing people after someone slashes his convertible top — and that’s not the worst premise for a book I’ve ever heard. But Brian gave the book plenty of time to take shape, let the character of accountant Paul Benjamin emerge from wherever our ideas grow, made the motivating experience the rape and beating of Benjamin’s wife and daughter by a trio of hoodlums, with the wife dying and the daughter shocked into madness, and let the story grow from there. The result, Death Wish, was an artistic success as a novel and an enormous commercial triumph as a film.

Don Westlake, on the other hand, once wrote a first chapter in which a surly fellow walks across the George Washington Bridge into New York, snarling at motorists who offer him rides. Don didn’t know where he was going with that one but found out as he went along. The result was the lengthy series of novels Don wrote under the pen name Richard Stark, all of them featuring Parker, a professional heist man and as unobliging a chap as he was the day he walked across the bridge.

As the years go by, which is something they do with increasing rapidity lately, I find myself giving ideas more rather than less time to take shape. I’m no longer so anxious to rush Chapter One through the typewriter if I have no idea what’ll happen in Chapter Two. One learns from experience, and I’ve had the experience of watching far too many first chapters wither on the vine to dismiss the possibility of its happening again. I’m less inclined to worry that an idea will evaporate if I don’t get it into production as quickly as possible. If I make a note of it so I won’t forget it, and if I read through my notebook from time to time and make it a point to think about what I find there, the good ideas will survive and grow. The bad ones will drop out along the way, and that’s fine; I don’t feel compelled to add to my stack of first-chapters-of-books-destined-never-to-have-a-second-chapter.

On the other hand, the next book I intend to write is one I’ve been thinking about for several months now, getting more and more of a sense of the lead character, considering and rejecting any number of geographical settings, changing my mind over and over again about the nature of the plot.

I got the idea, incidentally, by the serendipitous process that yields so many ideas. I was at the library, doing research on patron saints for the sake of a bit of conversational by-play in a light mystery novel, The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. This led me to a passage from Aquinas that amounted to a marvelous moral justification for larceny. Then, because I was tired of saints, patron or otherwise, I started browsing magazines, something I rarely do, and came across an interview with Dennis Hopper. I felt I really ought to go home and get to work, but I felt self-indulgent that day and read the Hopper interview, and there was the idea for my next novel, just waiting there for me to find it. (I won’t tell you what it is — I don’t want to leave my fight in the gym.)

Anyway, I expect I’ll start writing the book in a couple of months. I know the book will have benefited greatly from the time I’ve spent thinking about it off and on ever since I read that interview. But I’m quite certain that I won’t know very much about the direction the plot will take. I’ll have my first chapter pretty well worked out in my mind, and I’ll know a lot about the characters, and I’ll have a variety of possible directions for the book to go, but...

But I won’t be able to sit down and paint the thing by numbers. That’s what makes it hard, no matter how much plotting time you give a book, but it’s also what keeps it exciting.