Or suppose it was Arkwright? When he found the book missing he suspected Porlock engineered the theft. He figured she played him for a sucker and shot her and left the gun in Bernie’s hand to get rid of the disloyal mistress and the actual burglar in one swoop. Bernie could half-recognize the gun from having seen it in Arkwright’s den.
What about the Sikh? He works for somebody, the Saudi or the Maharajah, who cares? and he learned that Bernie had stolen the book....
This process of talking out loud goes on for another couple of hundred words, with more possibilities brought up and discussed and set out for inspection. Then I wrote an outline of the next three chapters to be written, and then, unblocked and a little bit clearer, I sat down and wrote them.
That wasn’t the end of my problems with The Burglar Who Liked To Quote Kipling. The plot was a complicated affair and it continued to work itself out as it went along, and twice more I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and did some thinking on the keys. Both times I managed in this fashion to shake something loose and I was able to continue plotting and writing the book, carrying it through to completion. I not only finished a book that at one point looked unworkable, but I wound up producing a novel I’m pleased with.
If instead I had put it on the shelf to sort itself out, I’m certain it would still be there, gathering dust and serving as the source of monumental guilt. Snags and dead ends don’t sort themselves out, I’ve come to believe. They get sorted out, and it takes work, and you have to do it yourself.
You don’t have to do this sort of thing on paper. Some writers find it useful to talk this sort of a problem into a tape recorder. Later they play back the tape and find out what they’ve got in mind. Others work things out by discussing things with a friend. Not every friend will do for this process, and you have to experiment to determine which of your acquaintances serves you best as a sounding board. Some people — well-meaning, certainly, and often creative themselves — serve only to stifle your imagination. Others prove enormously helpful, perhaps because they’re capable of listening so attentively. The person you select may be an agent or an editor. It may as easily be someone unconnected with the business, someone who doesn’t even read much. You can try different people to see who does you some good, bearing in mind the distinct possibility that this is a process you can only handle on your own.
Sometimes my difficulty in writing Chapter Eleven is directly attributable to the way I wrote Chapter Ten. If I take a wrong turn in a book, that can fence me in further down the line.
The answer’s clear enough. You drop back fifteen yards and punt. In other words, I go back to where things took that wrong turn and start rewriting at that point.
The problem lies in knowing when that’s what’s hanging you up. Happily enough, the solution sometimes works even when this isn’t the real problem. Maybe you’re blocked because of atmospheric conditions, or phases of the moon, or what you had for dinner last night. Even so, redoing a chapter you’ve already written may start the juices flowing and unblock you all the same.
When John D. MacDonald goes stale, he props open somebody else’s book and starts copy typing. After a few paragraphs or pages, he finds himself changing a word here and a phrase there, improving what he’s copying. Pretty soon he’s ready to get back to work on something of his own.
Perhaps you’ll find this approach useful should you go stale in the course of writing your novel. There are a few other suggestions that may or may not prove helpful.
Read what you’ve written. Suppose you’ve had to spend a week or two away from the manuscript, not because you’ve been avoiding it but because something else came up. The danger here is not just loss of momentum but that the book slips out of mind. Take your time and read it over before plunging back into it. You may even want to read it more than once. Remember that, important as it is for us to stay in the now while we write a book, a portion of our mind deals with the past and the future — i.e., what we’ve already written and what we’ll be writing next. Reading the manuscript recharges those batteries.
Retype the last few pages. This is a good way to get back into the rhythm of your writing, whether you’ve been away from it for a short or long period of time. I’ve heard of writers who make it a practice to begin each day’s work by retyping the last page they wrote the day before. The habit may have started when they left off in the middle of the page and wanted to start in on a clean page; it endured when they found it helped them recapture the flow of the previous day’s writing.
Break in the middle of a sentence. I’ve read this advice in various forms over the years. Some people advocate stopping at the bottom of the fifth page of the day, say, even if it’s smack in the middle of a hyphenated word. Others are less compulsive about where you stop but merely suggest that it be at a point where you know precisely what sentence you’re going to write next.
The theory here is that you’ll have an easier time picking the book up the next day because you already know what your first sentence or two will be. I offer this suggestion because it evidently works for some people, but I’m not going to tout it too strongly because I’ve really made some grim mornings for myself this way.
Imagine, for instance, sitting down to the typewriter and seeing this looking back at you. “She looked up at me, bright-eyed, and her smile was like....”
Like what, for the love of God? I obviously had a simile in mind when I wrote what I wrote, and I’ll never come up with a new simile and believe it to be as good as the lost one, and in the meantime I may spend half an hour scratching my head and trying to recall what I was thinking of. If I’ve got a good sentence in mind, the best thing I can do with it is commit it to paper before I lose it. So my own advice would be more along the lines of this:
Find a logical place to break off. At the end of a chapter, or the end of a scene, or the end of a paragraph, or at the very least at the end of a sentence. Not only does this avoid the sort of minor aggravation described above, but I believe it helps focus the attention of the subconscious mind upon the new chapter or scene or whatever to be tackled next.
You’ve abandoned books — quite a few of them, from the sound of it. And you’ve already said there’s a strong possibility that my first novel won’t prove publishable, that its main function may be as a learning experience. Suppose I reach a point where I’m sure it’s not going to succeed. Wouldn’t I be justified in abandoning it?
No.
Oh, you can abandon the book. For that matter, you don’t have to start writing it in the first place.
But if you do undertake to write a first novel, I strongly urge you to finish it. Whether or not you lose faith in it along the way. Whether or not you’re convinced it stinks. No matter what, stay with it a day at a time and see it through to completion. If its chief function is to be educational, rest assured that you’ll learn infinitely more by finishing a first novel than by casting it aside.
I’d suggest further that you complete a first draft from beginning to end before getting involved with substantial revision. There’s one exception — if you want to go back and start over after you’ve done forty or fifty pages, feel free to do so. But after you’ve passed the fifty-page mark, I would recommend that you push onward to the end before giving any thought to rewriting.
I have a reason for this stance. I’ve observed that most of the people who start first novels never finish them, and I’ve come to believe that actually seeing a book through to the finish line is the most important thing you can do in your first essay at the novel. This to my mind is what separates the sheep from the goats and the ribbon from the clerks: the determination to stay with a book until it’s done, for better or for worse.