After considerable soul-searching, I shrugged heroically and wrote the scene from the point of view of the young man used as a pawn by Dorn. I felt this was a jarring inconsistency but couldn’t think of a better way to deal with it.
As far as I know, no one was ever bothered by this inconsistency, or even aware of it. No editor or writer who read the book mentioned it. Rereading the section preparatory to writing this chapter, it seemed to me unlikely that I would have noticed it myself — had I not been the book’s author. We who write these books are inevitably more aware of their essential structure than are the people who read them.
Don Westlake employs an interesting original framework for his Richard Stark novels about Parker, and I wonder if many of his faithful readers are aware of it. In almost every Parker novel, the first two quarters of the book are told exclusively from Parker’s point of view. The third quarter is told from the individual points of view of all of the other principal characters. Then, in the fourth section, once again Parker is the viewpoint character throughout.
I think this serves Westlake superbly. But I doubt that very many Parker fans pay much mind to the almost symphonic structure of these books. I suspect they’re interested in the plot and the characters, and they want to find out how the heist turns out and who winds up alive and dead when it’s over. I don’t think they care how the author does it.
It’s useful for us as writers to care, and to pay attention. But an excessive preoccupation may be more liability than asset. The main thing is always the story.
Transitions
When I first started writing, I had a certain amount of difficulty getting from one scene to the next. I also had trouble getting my characters on and off stage, or in and out of the room.
This difficulty was most pronounced in first-person novels. If I had a character in conversation at a bar one night, and then I had something for him to do the next morning, I wasn’t sure how to get him through the intervening hours. I figured I had to explain where he went and what he did at all times.
I found out that’s not necessary. I could let the bar conversation run its course. Then I could skip an extra space, and then I could write, “At ten the next morning I showed up at Waldron’s office. I was wearing my blue pinstripe and his secretary seemed to like the looks of it.”
They learned some years ago in the film business that the best transitions are nice clean abrupt ones. Remember the slow dissolves you used to see in movies? Remember how they would indicate the passage of time by showing different shots of a clock, or pages flipping on some dumb calendar? They don’t do that any more, and that’s largely because they realized that they don’t have to. Contemporary audiences are hip enough to put two and two together.
So can readers. I learned a lot about transitions by reading Mickey Spillane. In the early Mike Hammer books, he hardly ever explained how Hammer got from one place to another, or wasted time setting scenes up elaborately. There were no slow dissolves in those books. They were all fast cuts, with each scene beginning right on the heels of the one before it. Since the books had enormous appeal to a generally unsophisticated audience, I would assume few readers had trouble following the action line, for all the abruptness of the transitions.
Temporal transitions — jumps back and forth in time — can be handled most expeditiously simply by crediting the reader with the intelligence to figure out what you’re doing without over-explaining yourself. In this area, too, I suspect the techniques of the visual media, including not only the cinema but especially television commercials with their intricate crosscut-ting in a thirty- or sixty-second span, have contributed greatly to the sophistication of the public.
I can recall seeing Two For The Road, a film with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, sometime in the late sixties. Director Stanley Donen salted the film with flashbacks, providing no special indication of the temporal changes, simply cutting from one present-time sequence to one in past time. I was as interested in the audience as in the film. Some older viewers, I noticed, were utterly confounded; their frame of reference was too rigidly linear for them to know what the hell was going on. But the majority of the audience, including all of its younger members, seemed perfectly at ease.
For a particularly well-crafted example of a novel in which several temporal phases of a story are simultaneously related, you might have a look at Some Unknown Person, by Sandra Scoppettone. The book is based on the life and death of Starr Faithfull, the star-crossed girl-about-town who served as a model for Gloria Wandrous in John O‘Hara’s Butterfield Eight. Scoppettone interweaves her lead character’s early years, the life story of a man instrumental in her death, the events leading up to her death, the last days years later of the aforementioned man, and several other aspects of the story, cutting back and forth through time in a most instructive fashion.
Chapter 12
Length
How long is long enough? Length as a market consideration. Writing the right length for your particular book
In Threesome, one of Jill Emerson’s characters wants to know how long a chapter ought to be. As long as Abraham Lincoln’s legs, another character assures her. (Lincoln, you may recall, informed a heckler that a man’s legs ought to be long enough to extend from his body to the ground.)
A chapter, then, should be long enough to reach from the one before it to the one that follows it. In other words, there is no fit and proper length for a chapter.
When I wrote sex novels, I tended to be compulsive about chapter length. Originally my books were two hundred pages long, and were written in the form often twenty-page chapters. Then, when my publisher complained that they were running a wee bit short, I upped the length to 205 pages, alternating twenty-one page chapters with twenty-page chapters and stopping when I had written five of each. In retrospect, I can see readily enough that this rigidity was pointless insofar as the reader was concerned. I’m positive my average fan, busy turning the pages with one hand and panting over the lurid innuendo, barely realized that the book was divided into chapters in the first place. In his mind, it was more conveniently divided into hot parts and dull stretches.
Now that the books I write no longer contain hot parts, I’m a good deal more flexible in dividing the dull stretches into chapters. In a series of four novels written about (and ostensibly by) Chip Harrison, I furnished each book with one chapter a single sentence in length. “The gun jammed,” for instance, was an entire chapter in No Score; “Chip, I’m Pregnant” was a similarly complete chapter in Chip Harrison Scores Again. The two other books each contained an equally terse chapter. I did this sort of thing for the fun of it, not for any particular effect.
If I’m less compulsive about chapter length nowadays, I still tend to keep the chapters of a particular book roughly the same length. An occasional chapter shorter than its fellows provides a sort of staccato effect that is not without dramatic value. When you break for a chapter you’re slamming a door on the action. The reader has to pause and think for a moment, if only for the length of time it takes him to turn the page.
Some books aren’t divided into chapters at all. The author just skips an extra space between scenes and lets it go at that. An advantage of chapter breaks — that they provide a convenient place for the reader to stop — is also their disadvantage, in that the reader may elect not to pick the book up again. Some writers avoid chapter breaks because they don’t want to encourage the reader to pause in the course of their heart-pounding narrative. One might argue in reply that a story that’s all that gripping will hold its readers through a chapter break. In my own reading, I’ve found that chapterization tends to keep me reading. I tell myself I can stop in a few minutes, at the end of the next chapter, and I keep telling myself that until I’ve finished the book.