On Writing Read online

  This isn’t always easy on her. I gave her the manuscript of my novella Hearts in Atlantis while we were in North Carolina, where we’d gone to see a Cleveland Rockers–Charlotte Sting WNBA game. We drove north to Virginia the following day, and it was during this drive that Tabby read my story. There are some funny parts in it—at least I thought so—and I kept peeking over at her to see if she was chuckling (or at least smiling). I didn’t think she’d notice, but of course she did. On my eighth or ninth peek (I guess it could have been my fifteenth), she looked up and snapped: “Pay attention to your driving before you crack us up, will you? Stop being so goddam needy!”

  I paid attention to my driving and stopped sneaking peeks (well . . . . almost). About five minutes later, I heard a snort of laughter from my right. Just a little one, but it was enough for me. The truth is that most writers are needy. Especially between the first draft and the second, when the study door swings open and the light of the world shines in.

  – 12 –

  Ideal Reader is also the best way for you to gauge whether or not your story is paced correctly and if you’ve handled the back story in satisfactory fashion.

  Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds. There is a kind of unspoken (hence undefended and unexamined) belief in publishing circles that the most commercially successful stories and novels are fast-paced. I guess the underlying thought is that people have so many things to do today, and are so easily distracted from the printed word, that you’ll lose them unless you become a kind of short-order cook, serving up sizzling burgers, fries, and eggs over easy just as fast as you can.

  Like so many unexamined beliefs in the publishing business, this idea is largely bullshit . . . . which is why, when books like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain suddenly break out of the pack and climb the best-seller lists, publishers and editors are astonished. I suspect that most of them ascribe these books’ unexpected success to unpredictable and deplorable lapses into good taste on the part of the reading public.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with rapidly paced novels. Some pretty good writers—Nelson DeMille, Wilbur Smith, and Sue Grafton, to name just three—have made millions writing them. But you can overdo the speed thing. Move too fast and you risk leaving the reader behind, either by confusing or by wearing him/her out. And for myself, I like a slower pace and a bigger, higher build. The leisurely luxury-liner experience of a long, absorbing novel like The Far Pavilions or A Suitable Boy has been one of the form’s chief attractions since the first examples—endless, multipart epistolary tales like Clarissa. I believe each story should be allowed to unfold at its own pace, and that pace is not always double time. Nevertheless, you need to beware—if you slow the pace down too much, even the most patient reader is apt to grow restive.

  The best way to find the happy medium? Ideal Reader, of course. Try to imagine whether he or she will be bored by a certain scene—if you know the tastes of your I.R. even half as well as I know the tastes of mine, that shouldn’t be too hard. Is I.R. going to feel there’s too much pointless talk in this place or that? That you’ve underexplained a certain situation . . . . or overexplained it, which is one of my chronic failings? That you forgot to resolve some important plot point? Forgot an entire character, as Raymond Chandler once did? (When asked about the murdered chauffeur in The Big Sleep, Chandler—who liked his tipple—replied, “Oh, him. You know, I forgot all about him.”) These questions should be in your mind even with the door closed. And once it’s open—once your Ideal Reader has actually read your manuscript—you should ask your questions out loud. Also, needy or not, you might want to watch and see when your I.R. puts your manuscript down to do something else. What scene was he or she reading? What was so easy to put down?

  Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).

  As a teenager, sending out stories to magazines like Fantasy and Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I got used to the sort of rejection note that starts Dear Contributor (might as well start off Dear Chump), and so came to relish any little personal dash on these printed pink-slips. They were few and far between, but when they came they never failed to lighten my day and put a smile on my face.

  In the spring of my senior year at Lisbon High—1966, this would’ve been—I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

  I wish I could remember who wrote that note—Algis Budrys, perhaps. Whoever it was did me a hell of a favor. I copied the formula out on a piece of shirt-cardboard and taped it to the wall beside my typewriter. Good things started to happen for me shortly after. There was no sudden golden flood of magazine sales, but the number of personal notes on the rejection slips went up fast. I even got one from Durant Imboden, the fiction editor at Playboy. That communiqué almost stopped my heart. Playboy paid two thousand dollars and up for short stories, and two grand was a quarter of what my mother made each year in her housekeeping job at Pineland Training Center.

  The Rewrite Formula probably wasn’t the only reason I started to get some results; I suspect another was that it was just my time, coming around at last (sort of like Yeats’s rough beast). Still, the Formula was surely part of it. Before the Formula, if I produced a story that was four thousand words or so in first draft, it was apt to be five thousand in second (some writers are taker-outers; I’m afraid I’ve always been a natural putter-inner). After the Formula, that changed. Even today I will aim for a second-draft length of thirty-six hundred words if the first draft of a story ran four thousand . . . . and if the first draft of a novel runs three hundred and fifty thousand words, I’ll try my damndest to produce a second draft of no more than three hundred and fifteen thousand . . . . three hundred, if possible. Usually it is possible. What the Formula taught me is that every story and novel is collapsible to some degree. If you can’t get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing—literary Viagra. You’ll feel it and your I.R. will, too.

  Back story is all the stuff that happened before your tale began but which has an impact on the front story. Back story helps define character and establish motivation. I think it’s important to get the back story in as quickly as possible, but it’s also important to do it with some grace. As an example of what’s not graceful, consider this line of dialogue:

  “Hello, ex-wife,” Tom said to Doris as she entered the room.

  Now, it may be important to the story that Tom and Doris are divorced, but there has to be a better way to do it than the above, which is about as graceful as an axe-murder. Here is one suggestion:

  “Hi, Doris,” Tom said. His voice sounded natural enough—to his own ears, at least—but the fingers of his right hand crept to the place where his wedding ring had been until six months ago.

  Still no Pulitzer winner, and quite a bit longer than Hello, ex-wife, but it’s not all about speed, as I’ve already tried to point out. And if you think it’s all about information, you ought to give up fiction and get a job writing instruction manuals—Dilbert’s cubicle awaits.

  You’ve probably heard the phrase in medias res, which means “into the midst of things.” This technique is an ancient and honorable one, but I don’t like it. In medias res necessitates flashbacks, which strike me as boring and sort of corny. They always make me think of those movies from the forties and fifties where the picture gets all swimmy, the voices get all echoey, and suddenly it’s sixteen months ago and the mud-splashed c
onvict we just saw trying to outrun the bloodhounds is an up-and-coming young lawyer who hasn’t yet been framed for the murder of the crooked police chief.

  As a reader, I’m a lot more interested in what’s going to happen than what already did. Yes, there are brilliant novels that run counter to this preference (or maybe it’s a prejudice)—Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, for one; A Dark-Adapted Eye, by Barbara Vine, for another—but I like to start at square one, dead even with the writer. I’m an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give me dessert if I eat my veggies.

  Even when you tell your story in this straightforward manner, you’ll discover you can’t escape at least some back story. In a very real sense, every life is in medias res. If you introduce a forty-year-old man as your main character on page one of your novel, and if the action begins as the result of some brand-new person or situation’s exploding onto the stage of this fellow’s life—a road accident, let’s say, or doing a favor for a beautiful woman who keeps looking sexily back over her shoulder (did you note the awful adverb in this sentence which I could not bring myself to kill?)—you’ll still have to deal with the first forty years of the guy’s life at some point. How much and how well you deal with those years will have a lot to do with the level of success your story achieves, with whether readers think of it as “a good read” or “a big fat bore.” Probably J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter stories, is the current champ when it comes to back story. You could do worse than read these, noting how effortlessly each new book recaps what has gone before. (Also, the Harry Potter novels are just fun, pure story from beginning to end.)

  Your Ideal Reader can be of tremendous help when it comes to figuring out how well you did with the back story and how much you should add or subtract on your next draft. You need to listen very carefully to the things I.R. didn’t understand, and then ask yourself if you understand them. If you do and just didn’t put those parts across, your job on the second draft is to clarify. If you don’t—if the parts of the back story your Ideal Reader queried are hazy to you, as well—then you need to think a lot more carefully about the past events that cast a light on your characters’ present behavior.

  You also need to pay close attention to those things in the back story that bored your Ideal Reader. In Bag of Bones, for instance, main character Mike Noonan is a fortyish writer who, as the book opens, has just lost his wife to a brain aneurysm. We start on the day of her death, but there’s still a hell of a lot of back story here, much more than I usually have in my fiction. This includes Mike’s first job (as a newspaper reporter), the sale of his first novel, his relations with his late wife’s sprawling family, his publishing history, and especially the matter of their summer home in western Maine—how they came to buy it and some of its pre–Mike-and-Johanna history. Tabitha, my I.R., read all this with apparent enjoyment, but there was also a two- or three-page section about Mike’s community-service work in the year after his wife dies, a year in which his grief is magnified by a severe case of writer’s block. Tabby didn’t like the community-service stuff.

  “Who cares?” she asked me. “I want to know more about his bad dreams, not how he ran for city council in order to help get the homeless alcoholics off the street.”

  “Yeah, but he’s got writer’s block,” I said. (When a novelist is challenged on something he likes—one of his darlings—the first two words out of his mouth are almost always Yeah but.) “This block goes on for a year, maybe more. He has to do something in all that time, doesn’t he?”

  “I guess so,” Tabby said, “but you don’t have to bore me with it, do you?”

  Ouch. Game, set, and match. Like most good I.R.s, Tabby can be ruthless when she’s right.

  I cut down Mike’s charitable contributions and community functions from two pages to two paragraphs. It turned out that Tabby was right—as soon as I saw it in print, I knew. Three million people or so have read Bag of Bones, I’ve gotten at least four thousand letters concerning it, and so far not a single one has said, “Hey, turkey! What was Mike doing for community-service work during the year he couldn’t write?”

  The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.

  – 13 –

  We need to talk a bit about research, which is a specialized kind of back story. And please, if you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.

  Exceptions to the rule? Sure, aren’t there always? There have been very successful writers—Arthur Hailey and James Michener are the first ones that come to my mind—whose novels rely heavily on fact and research. Hailey’s are barely disguised manuals about how things work (banks, airports, hotels), and Michener’s are combination travelogues, geography lessons, and history texts. Other popular writers, like Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwell, are more story-oriented but still deliver large (and sometimes hard to digest) dollops of factual information along with the melodrama. I sometimes think that these writers appeal to a large segment of the reading population who feel that fiction is somehow immoral, a low taste which can only be justified by saying, “Well, ahem, yes, I do read [Fill in author’s name here], but only on airplanes and in hotel rooms that don’t have CNN; also, I learned a great deal about [Fill in appropriate subject here].”

  For every successful writer of the factoid type, however, there are a hundred (perhaps even a thousand) wannabes, some published, most not. On the whole, I think story belongs in front, but some research is inevitable; you shirk it at your peril.

  In the spring of 1999 I drove from Florida, where my wife and I had wintered, back to Maine. My second day on the road, I stopped for gas at a little station just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, one of those amusingly antique places where a fellow still comes out, pumps your gas, and asks how you’re doing and who you like in the NCAA tournament.

  I told this one I was doing fine and liked Duke in the tournament. Then I went around back to use the men’s room. There was a brawling stream full of snowmelt beyond the station, and when I came out of the men’s, I walked a little way down the slope, which was littered with cast-off tire-rims and engine parts, for a closer look at the water. There were still patches of snow on the ground. I slipped on one and started to slide down the embankment. I grabbed a piece of someone’s old engine block and stopped myself before I got fairly started, but I realized as I got up that if I’d fallen just right, I could have slid all the way down into that stream and been swept away. I found myself wondering, had that happened, how long it would have taken the gas station attendant to call the State Police if my car, a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, just continued to stand there in front of the pumps. By the time I got back on the turnpike again, I had two things: a wet ass from my fall behind the Mobil station, and a great idea for a story.

  In it, a mysterious man in a black coat—likely not a human being at all but some creature inexpertly disguised to look like one—abandons his vehicle in front of a small gas station in rural Pennsylvania. The vehicle looks like an old Buick Special from the late fifties, but it’s no more a Buick than the guy in the black coat was a human being. The vehicle falls into the hands of some State Police officers working out of a fictional barracks in western Pennsylvania. Twenty years or so later, these cops tell the story of the Buick to the grief-stricken son of a State Policeman who has been killed in the line of duty.

  It was a grand idea and has developed into a stro
ng novel about how we hand down our knowledge and our secrets; it’s also a grim and frightening story about an alien piece of machinery that sometimes reaches out and swallows people whole. Of course there were a few minor problems—the fact that I knew absolutely zilch about the Pennsylvania State Police, for one thing—but I didn’t let any of that bother me. I simply made up all the stuff I didn’t know.

  I could do that because I was writing with the door shut—writing only for myself and the Ideal Reader in my mind (my mental version of Tabby is rarely as prickly as my real-life wife can be; in my daydreams she usually applauds and urges me ever onward with shining eyes). One of my most memorable sessions took place in a fourth-floor room of Boston’s Eliot Hotel—me sitting at the desk by the window, writing about an autopsy on an alien bat-creature while the Boston Marathon flowed exuberantly by just below me and rooftop boomboxes blasted out “Dirty Water,” by The Standells. There were a thousand people down there below me in the streets, but not a single one in my room to be a party-pooper and tell me I got this detail wrong or the cops don’t do things that way in western Pennsylvania, so nyah-nyah-nyah.

  The novel—it’s called From a Buick Eight—has been set aside in a desk drawer since late May of 1999, when the first draft was finished. Work on it has been delayed by circumstances beyond my control, but eventually I hope and expect to spend a couple of weeks in western Pennsylvania, where I’ve been given conditional permission to do some ridealongs with the State Police (the condition—which seems eminently reasonable to me—was that I not make them look like meanies, maniacs, or idiots). Once I’ve done that, I should be able to correct the worst of my howlers and add some really nice detail-work.