All the same, it’s never fun investing substantial time and effort, not to mention mental and emotional involvement, in a never-to-be-finished book. Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” is part of every symphony orchestra’s repertoire, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood has remained in print since Dickens left it unfinished at his death, but this doesn’t mean any of my stillborn literary offspring will ever get anywhere. While regretting them is a waste of time, I’d certainly like to have as few of those abortive efforts as possible in my future.
One thing I’ve come to recognize is that I tend to run into a wall at a certain point in almost all of my books. I’ve been given to understand that marathon runners experience this sort of exhaustion somewhere around the twenty-mile mark when their glycogen stores run out. They keep going anyway and generally finish the race on their feet.
Most of my suspense novels run a shade over two hundred pages in manuscript, which probably comes to something like sixty thousand words. More often than not, these books hit the wall somewhere around page 120. It’s around that point that I find myself losing confidence in the book — or, more precisely, in my ability to make it work. The plot seems to be either too simple and straightforward to hold the reader’s interest or too complicated to be neatly resolved. I find myself worrying that there’s not enough action, that the lead’s situation is not sufficiently desperate, that the book has been struck boring while my attention was directed elsewhere.
I have come to realize that this conviction is largely illusory. I don’t know what causes this misperception of mine, but I would suspect it reflects attitudes of my own that have nothing much to do with the book. In any event, I know from experience that there’s very likely nothing wrong with the book, and that if I push on and get over the hump I’ll probably have a relatively easy time with the final third of the manuscript, and that the book itself will be fine.
If I put it aside, however, and wait for something wonderful to happen, I’ll very likely never get back to it.
It may not work this way for everyone, but I’ve learned to my cost that it works this way for me. The temptation to take a break from a novel when it runs out of gas is overwhelming. It seems so logical that such a break will have a favorable effect; phrases like “recharging one’s batteries” come readily to mind. The wish, I’m afraid, is father to the thought; struggling with a difficult book is unpleasant, and one very naturally wishes to be doing something else — anything else! — instead. But such a move is generally undertaken at the cost of completing the book.
I hardly ever go back to the books I abandon. Maybe that’s as well, maybe they’re better off rusting out on the side of the road, but I don’t think so. It seems to me that some of the ones I let go of had just run into that wall around page 120; if I’d stayed with them they’d have worked out fine. By taking a break from them I sacrificed all the momentum I’d built up. In addition, I let my grasp of the characters and settings loosen up. The book drew away from my consciousness and from my unconscious as well.
Understand, please, that I’m not referring to an occasional break of a day or two. That may be useful for me when I’ve been working too hard for too long and I need to relax. But when I put a book aside for a week or a month, when I deliberately elect to shelve it while I work on something else, I’m really laying it aside forever.
This said, the fact remains that many books do hit snags, run into dead ends, or wander off down false trails. Having established that the thing to do is press on with them, the question arises as to how best to manage this.
Frequently the trouble is plot. If you outline as I generally do, with a more comprehensive picture of the early portion of the book and blind faith that the latter chapters will take care of themselves, the problem is often one of planning what will occur next. In mysteries, where the unfolding of action occurs simultaneously with the gradual discovery of what’s really been happening, this business of figuring out what’s going on is doubly problematic.
But people who outline carefully can have the same sort of plot trouble. For them — or for me, with those books in which I use a detailed outline — the problem comes when the book grows apart from its outline. Perhaps a certain character has taken shape in such a way as to make what’s scheduled to happen no longer viable. We spoke earlier of the need for flexibility, stressing that you have to be willing to adapt your outline to allow for the organic growth of your novel. When this happens, you’re in the same place as the person writing without an outline to start with. You have to figure out what happens next.
The image that comes to mind when I think of this sort of snag is that of a log jam. I’ve generally got enough ideas in my mind but they’re snarled up like floating timber in a river, pinning each other down, getting in each other’s way. If I could just shake things loose the book would flow downstream with no trouble at all.
The best way I’ve found to jar thoughts loose is to talk to myself at the typewriter, babbling away at myself without regard to style or sense, producing something that’s a combination of stream-of-consciousness, letter to self, and outline of the remainder of the book. I usually throw these things away when they’ve ceased to be useful — I’ve never seen the point in saving remnants for posterity, figuring it’s unlikely enough that posterity will be interested in my books, let alone my literary fingernail clippings. With my most recent book, however, I ran headlong into what looked at the time to be a serious plotting problem. I resolved it by chattering to myself at the typewriter, and I haven’t yet discarded the gibberish I produced, having realized at the time that it might come in handy to illustrate a point in this present volume. Here, then, is how I talked to myself during a difficult stage of The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling:
All right, where’s the book going? Bernie stole the book from Arkwright on Whelkin’s orders. Then went to meet Whelkin at Porlock’s apartment. She drugged him, and when he woke he was framed for her murder. Meanwhile, a Sikh tried to get the book from Bernie and went off with the wrong book.
Okay. Say the Sikh worked for the Maharajah of Jaipur. Madeleine Porlock was being kept by somebody, stole the book and sold it to Arkwright. Suppose Porlock was sleeping with Arkwright, kept by him. Bernie could know this from fur labels in her closet. She and Whelkin knew each other — that’s why she wore the wig to the bookstore — and she managed to learn that Whelkin was going to try to steal the book via Bernie.
Suppose Arkwright wanted the book to swing an import-export deal with a Saudi Arabian big shot who collects anti-Semitic material. The book would be a sweetener. Arkwright’s enough of a collector to have gotten into a book discussion with the Saudi.
Suppose there were a couple of dozens of these books. Whelkin got hold of the cache in England and faked the Haggard inscription on all of them, selling them one at a time to rich book collectors with the proviso that they keep it a secret. He’s sold a copy to Arkwright. Then he finds out Arkwright is going to show his copy to the Saudi. He has to get the Arkwright copy back or the Saudi will know there’s been fraud committed.
Who killed Porlock?
Could be Whelkin. Say Whelkin worked through Porlock to get Arkwright to buy the book. Porlock was trying to recover the book herself to sell it elsewhere. Whelkin entered the apartment after she drugged Bernie and killed her, framing Bernie for it.