Writing the Novel

Chapter 7 Using What You Know... and What You Don’t Know How to put the background you have to work in your novel. Capitalizing on your own experience. Research — how and when to do it, how and when to do without it

Write about what you know.

That’s the conventional wisdom, and it seems as sensible now as it did when I first heard it back around the time when the idea of becoming a writer first occurred to me. Several writers whom I greatly admire — Thomas Wolfe for one, James T. Farrell for another — had written whole series of novels which I recognized as frankly autobiographical. Others wrote books that clearly derived from their own life experience. One dust jacket blurb after another would recount the author’s background, and each of those writers seemed to have the sort of job résumé that would strike terror into the heart of a personnel manager. A writer, I quickly learned, was someone who grew up on an Indian reservation before running off with a circus. Then over a period of years he worked as an itinerant fruit picker, a gandy dancer on the railroads, a fry cook in a lumber camp, and a teacher in ghetto schools. He saw combat in an infantry division and spent a few years as a merchant seaman. He wrestled a grizzly bear and made love to an Eskimo woman — or was it the other way around?

Never mind. In any event, it was evident to me that I had two choices. I could ramble around the world gathering up subject matter for stories and novels or I could probe the depths of my life to date, telling an eager world just what it was like to grow up in Buffalo, New York, in one of those happy families that Tolstoy has assured us are all alike.

I recognized at a very early date that I was not temperamentally equipped to write the conventional autobiographical novel. While I would not argue that my family and childhood contain nothing of the stuff of which novels are wrought, I was neither sufficiently perceptive nor of the right emotional bent to turn that background into fiction, though many writers have done that successfully.

Nor did I seem inclined to stride adventurously into the world, ready to take on whatever grizzly bears and grizzlier women presented themselves. I was in a hell of a hurry — not to amass experience but to get busy with the actual business of writing. As I’ve recounted, I wound up writing for a living at rather a tender age; I couldn’t write out of my own experience because I hadn’t had any, for heaven’s sake.

One way or another, this is the case with a great many of us. While a few of us actually have the adventures first and then learn how to type, that’s not usually the way it goes. In actual practice most real-life adventurers never get around to writing; there’s always another grizzly bear in their future, and they’re too much inclined to pursue fresh experience to bother with emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth characterized the origin of poetry. Even when we start out with a background of extensive life experience, adventurous or otherwise, we generally tend to use up our past in our fiction and find ourselves stranded like an overzealous general who has outrun his supply lines. It doesn’t take too many books for most of us to exhaust the experiences we’ve piled up before we started writing. And how are we to gather fresh experience after that point? We’ve just been sitting in rooms, staring into space and banging away at typewriter keys, and how are we to fashion that experience into a novel?

The difficulty of writing out of one’s experience can be vividly demonstrated in the field of genre fiction. In my own bailiwick of crime fiction, for example, I’m at a loss from the standpoint of experience. I have never been a private detective like Joe Gores, a cop like Joseph Wambaugh, or a district attorney like George V. Higgins. Neither have I worked the other side of the street and spent time in the clink like Malcolm Braly and Al Nussbaum — not yet, anyway.

All the same, I find myself using my own background and experience every time I go to work. Just as often, I find myself using what I don’t know — putting to work a combination of research and fakery to furnish what my own background and experience cannot supply.

Let’s take them in turn. How can you put your own presumably ordinary background and experience to work for you? Here are a few ways to make use of what you already know.

Shape your story line to fit your personal knowledge and experience. Let’s hearken back for a moment to the gothic novel we examined in outline form in an earlier chapter. Remember the premise? “A young widow is hired to catalogue the antique furniture in a house on the moors in Devon....” Perhaps you might have come up with just that plot after having done some studying of the gothic category. There’s only one trouble. You don’t know Louis Quinze from Weird Louie the Plumber, you don’t know moors from marshmallows, and the closest you’ve been to Devon is St. Joe, Mo.

It might seem as though the obvious answer is to write about a weird Missouri plumber with a passion for marshmallows, but the resultant manuscript might be tricky to place with an editor of gothics. A less radical solution calls for examining your plot line and seeing how you can adapt it to fit what you’ve got going for you.

You say you don’t know zip about antique furniture? Well, that’s okay, but what do you know about? Rare books? Maybe your heroine has been hired to catalogue the ancestral library. Have you got some background in fine art? Maybe she was hired to clean and restore paintings, or to evaluate them or something. Is there some sort of collectible with which you have a fair degree of familiarity? Rare stamps or coins? Old porcelain? Nineteenth-century patent medicine bottles? Roman glass? Oceanic art? A good many plots are almost infinitely adaptable in this fashion, and it doesn’t take too much in the way of ingenuity to discover a means of channeling such a story to fit whatever expertise you can furnish.

Use familiar settings for your material. Let’s say you haven’t wandered far afield from St. Joe, Mo. Or Butte or Buffalo or Bensonhurst. How are you going to write this story about the young widow on the Devonshire moors and make it authentic?

First thing you can do is decide whether or not your story really has to take place in Devon. Maybe there’s a lonely house on the outskirts of St. Joseph that could serve as the setting for your story as well as any creaking windswept old manse in the West of England. Maybe there’s no such place in reality, but you can build one in your imagination readily enough. Maybe you can readily figure out how people living in such a house, and warped by the strains and stresses built into your basic plot, would relate to and interact with the local people in St. Joseph, much as those moor dwellers in your original outline would relate to the townspeople in Devon. In short, maybe you can transplant all the significant elements of your plot into your own native soil.

If you can manage this, you won’t be cheating; on the contrary, you’ll simply be making the story that much more your own, one that derives from your own experience and reflects your own perceptions. Perhaps any of a hundred writers could turn out an acceptable book about an imagined Devon moor, but how many could write your story of an old farmhouse on the outskirts of your own town, occupied now by the descendants of the original inhabitants, the farm acreage sold off piece by piece over the years, the house itself surrounded by suburban tract houses, but still awesome and forbidding, and....

See?

On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason why your book has to take place in Devon, because of some particular plot component which you regard as intrinsic to the story you want to write. Just as a writer of westerns is locked into setting his books in the old west, you must set this book in Devon.

Fine. As we’ll see shortly, there’s a great deal you can do by way of research to make your setting authentic. But there’s also a way in which you can exploit your own background in order to construct a setting halfway around the world.

You may not know moors from marshmallows, but if you’ve crossed the Central Plains you may recall the sense of infinite space, the loneliness, the uninterrupted flatness. You may have had a similar feeling in the desert. Or you may have experienced a comparable sense of isolation in terrain that has no similarity whatsoever to the moors — the North Woods, say, or smack in the middle of a milling Times Square crowd, or sealed into your own car on a high-speed freeway. The location itself doesn’t matter much. Search into your own bag of past experience, using your past like a Method actor, selecting something that will supply you not with circumstances identical to what you’re writing about but with equivalent feelings.

Similarly, you can pick a house you know and plunk it down on the moors. Your research may have told you that you need a beamed Tudor dwelling, and indeed you may so describe the house in your narrative. Once you get past the beams, however, you can fill in with details of that house down the road that all the kids were scared of when you were in grade school.

Explore your background and experience as a source for story ideas. Earlier, when we talked about reading and analysis, we saw how familiarity with a genre trains the mind to come up with plot ideas suitable for that genre. Similarly, the study you do and the perception you have of yourself as a writer should result in your sifting your background for elements that will prove useful in your writing.

Once when I was in high school I came home one afternoon to find that my mother had left the place locked. I went around and crawled in through the milk chute, an accomplishment which looked to be as likely as slipping a camel through the eye of a needle, given the tiny dimensions of the milk chute and the unpleasantly plump dimensions of the embryonic author. I was to repeat this procedure on numerous occasions when the door was unlocked, for the entertainment of friends and relatives, and I can still recall squirming through that hole in the wall and landing upside down in a confusion of mops and brooms and scrub buckets; the milk chute, unused since the war, opened into a cluttered broom closet.

Nowadays I write books about a burglar. (Perhaps the seed was planted all those many years ago, when I first discovered the thrill of illicit entry.) I’ve written three novels to date about Bernie Rhodenbarr without making use of that milk-chute entrance, but I recalled it a week or so ago, and this time I saw it from the stance of one who writes about burglary. I immediately saw any number of ways such a bit of business could fit into a novel about a burglar, and I let my mind play with the possibilities, and I filed them all away in the cluttered broom closet I call a mind; someday I’ll quite probably get some use out of it.

In the same fashion, ongoing experience becomes grist for the mill. I can’t seem to enter a building without pondering how Bernie would enter it illegally. When I visit a museum I see not merely objects of artistic and historical significance, but things for him to steal. On a recent trip to London, a visit to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields turned up a display of the photograph of a pistol which Soane purchased in the belief that it had belonged to Napoleon. It was actually an utter fake and the whole story about its provenance a pawnbroker’s fabrication; however, only the photo was on display because the actual pistol, fake or no, had been stolen from the museum in 1969.

I think I’d like that story even if I wrote nothing but stories about kittens and bunny rabbits for preschoolers. Given the kind of writing I do, I immediately thought of six different ways to work that item into fiction. I may never use it at all, but my writer’s eye and my writer’s imagination have taken a museum exhibit and turned it into the raw material out of which fiction may someday be fashioned.

Cultivating this habit becomes increasingly important the more time you spend in this business. Consider the paradox of the full-time professional writer: He writes out of his experience, using up his past, and the greater his success the less likely he is to store up useful new experiences. I don’t get a hell of a lot of fresh input sitting at a desk with a typewriter for company. And, while I derive enormous essential stimulation from the company of other writers, I don’t often get source material from them.

Happily, my inclinations are such that I spend a great deal of time away from my desk. My circle of friends includes people of all sorts, and their conversation puts me in worlds I’d never explore otherwise. Just the other day a policeman friend of mine told three or four stories that will very likely turn up in my work sooner or later; more important, his company sharpens and deepens my sense of what a cop’s life is like.

Some years ago a friend told me of an evening his father, then the manager of a Miami Beach hotel, had spent in the company of John D. MacDonald. As a long-time fan of MacDonald, I was very interested in knowing what he was like and what he’d had to say.

“Well, he didn’t have much to say at all,” my friend reported. “He got my father talking, and evidently he’s the world’s best listener. By the time the evening was done, my father didn’t know too much about John D. MacDonald, but MacDonald sure learned a lot about hotel management and the life history of Seymour Dresner.”

And that’s how it works. A lot of us enjoy holding court, sitting back and talking expansively about our work. It’s hearty fare for the ego, to be sure. But if instead we make a real effort to draw out other people’s stories, we’ll be using the time to good advantage, providing ourselves in due course with stories of our own.

The use of conversation just described is another example of the manner in which the writer is always working, even if he doesn’t know for certain what he’s working on or what he’ll ultimately wind up doing with it. Every conversation, every book read, every new place visited, is a part of the endless and all-encompassing business of nonspecific research.

Which in turn leads us — and I hope you’re paying attention to the facility with which I’m making these transitions — which leads us, then, to the business of specific research. We’ve seen a few of the ways to use what we know. How do we cover ourselves when it comes to something we don’t know?

Let’s go back to our hypothetical gothic novel, our widow’s tale of furniture appraisal on the moors of Devon. Having examined some of the ways we could change that story to fit our own areas of knowledge and experience, let’s suppose that for one reason or another we’ve considered them and ruled them out. Because of particular plot elements we like too much to sacrifice, we’re locked to the antique furniture business and the Devon location.

The obvious answer is research. Before you start to write, you have to learn enough about Devon and the antique trade to allow you to feel confident writing about them.

You do not have to become an expert. I’m italicizing this because it’s worth stressing. Research is invaluable, but it’s important that you keep it in proportion. You are not writing The Encyclopedia of Antique Furniture. Neither are you writing A Traveller’s Comprehensive Guide to Devon and Cornwall. You may well consult both of these books, and any number of others, but you’re not going to be tested on their contents.

On the whole, I don’t doubt for a moment that too much research is better than too little. Sometimes, though, research becomes a very seductive way to avoid writing.

Ages ago, before I began the first novel I’ve mentioned earlier, I decided that a historical novel set during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin would be a good first book for me to write. I knew nothing about Ireland in general or the Rising in particular, so I read several books on the subject. These made it clear to me that I lacked the necessary background. I decided it was important to begin at the beginning, and I decided further that I couldn’t properly grasp Irish history without a thorough knowledge of English history, whereupon I set about amassing an impressive library of books on the subject. You might well ask what a six-volume history of Britain before the Norman Conquest had to do with the purported subject of my novel; I can reply now, in retrospect, that I evidently found reading history a more congenial prospect than writing that novel, and that I found buying books an even more attractive occupation than reading them.

Over the years I did do considerable reading in English and Irish history, for recreational purposes rather than research, and I don’t doubt that it enriched my writing in various subtle ways. But I never did write that Irish novel and I doubt I ever shall. I didn’t really want to write it in the first place and used research as a way out.

George Washington Hill, the legendary tobacco company president, used to say that half the money he spent on advertising was a flat-out waste. “The trouble is,” he added, “there’s no way of telling which half it is.”

Research is a lot like that. For the mythical book we’ve been discussing, you would want to browse extensively in books on antique furniture, nibbling here and there, trying to get a sense of the antique business while deciding what type of furniture to deal with in the novel and picking up here and there some specific facts and labels and bits of jargon to give your writing the flavor of authenticity.

Some general reading along these lines, perhaps coupled with a few visits to antique shops and auction galleries, ought to precede the full-scale plotting of your novel, whether such plotting will involve a formal written outline or not. In this way the perspective of your research will very likely enrich the actual plot of the book. Then, having plotted the book in detail, you can return for the pinpoint research, picking up the specific fact that you now know to be necessary for the book.

This is what I did with The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. In the original proposal for the book, I supplied a vague outline, explaining that Bernie Rhodenbarr, now operating a bookstore as a cover occupation, is engaged to steal an unidentified whatsit from one collector for another. During the idea’s gestation period, I decided to make the stolen item a book of some sort, figuring this would go nicely with Bernie’s cover as bookstore proprietor.

Because I envisioned the man who hired him as a pukka sahib type, the thought came to me of making the elusive volume one of Rudyard Kipling’s. I accordingly availed myself of an armload of rare book catalogues to find out where Kipling stood in the antiquarian book market. I also got hold of a biography of the author and read it.

My research and my vaunted writer’s imagination worked hand in hand. I figured out that the particular book in question would be the sole surviving copy of a privately printed edition which Kipling saw fit to destroy; my copy would be one he’d already presented to his great good friend, writer H. Rider Haggard. I plotted the book accordingly, then went back to the research desk to learn more about Kipling now that I knew what I was looking for. I read a collection of his poems. I sifted some anecdotal material.

Then I started writing the book. And, intermittently, I stopped for some specific spot-research when points came up during the writing that required it.

I could have done more research. I could have read everything Rudyard Kipling wrote instead of limiting myself to the poetry collection and the Just So Stories. I can’t see that it would have hurt the book had I known more, because there’s always the possibility I would have stumbled on something that would have enriched my novel.

By the same token, I could have managed to write this book with considerably less research than I did. I could have invented an item of rare Kiplingana without taking pains to root it in the facts of his life. It would have been good enough with less research, I suspect, but it would not have been as good a book as it is now (whatever its overall merits may be).

How much or how little research any area demands is very definitely a subjective judgment. If the Kipling book played a less central role in the mystery, I’d have been wasting time to delve into the subject so deeply. If it played a greater role — if, say, the whole puzzle hinged on various events in the great man’s life — then more extensive research might well have been indicated.

If you substitute antique furniture for Rudyard Kipling in what I’ve just recounted, you’ll see how the same principles would apply in our gothic novel. And if you’ll substitute whatever unfamiliar subject matter plays a role in your own novel, you’ll be able to see to what extent research is required.

What about geographical research? How much do you have to know about a place in order to set a novel there?

Once again, the amount of research advisable is both subjective and relative. Feasibility is a consideration here. I spent an afternoon in Forest Hills Gardens walking around the neighborhood where Bernie was to steal The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, but Forest Hills Gardens is only a fifty-cent subway ride from my door. If I were writing that gothic novel we’ve been talking about — and I’m beginning to feel as though I am — I could hardly afford to go winging off to Devon for the sake of local color.

On the other hand, if I felt this gothic had enough going for it so that it might transcend its genre and be a candidate for “bestsellerdom,” then it might indeed be worth a trip to Devon to give it that added dimension. But if my plot’s nothing more than a good honest sow’s ear, in no way transmutable into silk-purse status, I don’t want to spend as much on research as I can legitimately expect to earn on the finished book.

When I wrote the Tanner books, my hero commonly visited eight or ten countries in a single novel, zipping sleeplessly if not tirelessly all over the globe. Equipped with a decent atlas and a library of travel guides, it’s not all that difficult to do an acceptable job of faking a location. A few details and deft touches in the right places can do more to make your book appear authentic then you might manage via months of expensive and painstaking on-the-spot research.

I don’t want to suggest that such research would be detrimental to a book, just that it’s often too costly in time and money to be undertaken. It’s worth noting, too, that in certain instances a smattering of ignorance can be useful. In the Tanner books, I’m quite sure my Balkan settings bore little relationship to reality. Then again, I’m equally certain the overwhelming majority of my readers weren’t aware of the discrepancy between my version of Yugoslavia and the real one. I was free to make Yugoslavia as I wished it to be for the purpose of the story I wanted to tell, as if I were a science-fiction writer shaping an uncharted planet to my fictive purpose.

I don’t know how comfortable I’d be working this way now; I’ve become a more meticulous writer, sacrificing brash self-confidence in the process. I know, too, that the cavalier attitude I showed would have been a mistake if I had been writing for a market composed of readers who knew Yugoslavia firsthand. One thing a reader will not abide is glaring evidence that the writer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The work of James Hadley Chase is a good example of this. Chase writes hard-boiled suspense novels set in the United States, and while he may have visited here briefly he certainly never spent substantial time on these shores. His American locations never ring true and his American slang is wildly off the mark, the American equivalent of having a dutchess drop her “aitches” like a Cockney costermonger. Because of this, his novels have never sold terribly well in the U.S. and most of them are not published over here.

But this doesn’t hurt him in England. Some of his readers may realize that the United States of James Hadley Chase bears about as much resemblance to reality as the Africa of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but the false notes don’t constantly hit them between the eyes — and they’re reading the books for action and suspense, not for their travelogue value. So Chase continues to sell very well over there, year in and year out.

Is Chase a poorer writer because the United States of his fiction differs so greatly from the real United States? I don’t think so. It’s worth remembering, I think, that fakery is the very heart and soul of fiction. Unless your writing is pure autobiography in the guise of a novel, you will continually find yourself practicing the dark arts of the illusionist and the trade of the counterfeiter. All our stories are nothing but a pack of lies. Research is one of the tools we use to veil this deception from our readers, but this is not to say that the purpose of research is to make our stories real. It’s to make them look real, and there’s a big difference.

Sometimes a few little details will turn the trick, doing far more to provide the illusion of reality than a mind-numbing assortment of empty facts and figures. Sometimes a phony detail works as well as a real one. Bernie Rhodenbarr talks admiringly of the Rabson lock, making me sound quite the expert; there is no Rabson lock — I borrowed the name from Rex Stout’s novels. Archie Goodwin always has things to say about the Rabson lock.

Sometimes these little “authentic touches” can happen quite by accident. When I read galleys of Two For Tanner, I was startled when a CIA agent in Bangkok pointed out “drops and meeting places and fronts — a travel agency, a tobbo shop, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant....”

A tobbo shop?

What on earth was a tobbo shop?

I checked my manuscript. I’d written “a tobacco shop” and a creative linotypist had vastly improved on it. I decided a tobbo shop would be the perfect CIA front, adding a cracker-jack bit of local color.

So I left it like that.

And now I look forward to the day when I spot in someone else’s fiction a reference to the notorious tobbo shops of Thailand. And who’s to say that the day will never come when some enterprising Thai opens a tobbo shop of his own? Stranger things have happened.

A very important part of research consists of making use of acquaintances and friends. You’ll learn more about what it’s like to be a sandhog or a scrap dealer or a bond salesman by hanging out with one than by reading books on the subject. Friends with an expert’s knowledge of an area can frequently help you work out bits of plot business; if you present them with a problem, they may be able to think of a solution which would never occur to you.

I’ve found people even more useful after the book is written. They can read the manuscript and may spot the sort of howlers that, once in print, will draw you no end of angry letters from outraged readers. I don’t know much about guns, for instance, and I doubt I ever will; the subject is of limited fascination to me. But I’ve learned to check points occasionally with a friend of mine who’s a gun enthusiast; otherwise the mailman gets tired of bringing me letters from indignant gun nuts.

I wouldn’t worry too much over imposing upon acquaintances in this fashion. People like to help writers in their own areas of expertise. I suppose it’s ego food. Then too, it gives them a brief role in the writing world, a world which appears to those outside of it to be somehow touched with glamour and romance. I don’t know what they think is glamourous about it, but I do know that an astonishing percentage of people go out of their way to help writers, and it makes sense to take advantage of this help when you can use it.