LAST MONTH WE DISCUSSED PIPING THE
READER ABOARD THE “SHIP” THAT IS YOUR
STORY. NOW THE CRUISE BEGINS.
August 1989
Good morning, boys and girls.
Good morning, sir.
Our lesson this lovely morning is a continuation of what we were talking about last month. Now I certainly hope you all remember where we left off. Who would like to summarize what we discussed? Rachel?
Sir, you began by quoting some writer named Donald E. Westlake. You said that he said that a writer’s job is like that of some sort of homicidal cruise director. First you have to get them on the ship, he said, and then you have to keep them on board, and then you have to kill them at the end.
Very good, Rachel. It seemed to me that Mr. Westlake’s observation provided us with a convenient framework for considering the three parts of a story or novel, which are, as I’m sure you recall—yes, Arnold?
The pitch, the deal, and the sub rights?
Not exactly. Mimi?
The beginning, the middle, and the ending, sir.
Quite right. Last month we began at the beginning, curiously enough, and talked about just what the writer must do to open his story in a manner that will get the reader caught up in the story. In short: What can he do to pipe those potential travelers aboard his frail vessel?
Today we’ll talk about the middle. Once you’ve got them on board, how do you keep them there?
Of our three lessons, this has been the most difficult for me to prepare. And that seems appropriate, because for a great many writers, the middle of a story presents the greatest problem. This is less noticeably the case with short fiction, where there’s simply less ground to be covered between the start and the finish. (The shortest of stories may be said to have no middle; the beginning leads almost directly to the ending.) In the novel, however, most of the book is middle. A chapter or two gets the book underway, and a chapter or two later on will finish it off, but between the two stretches an endless tunnel, a bottomless abyss, a vastness beyond measure. Page after page of innocent paper has to be filled with words, all of them well-chosen and placed in some presumably agreeable order.
The most self-assured of writers is apt to suffer a crisis of confidence during a book’s lengthy midsection. His nightmare tends to be two-fold. First, there’s the mounting concern that the book will never be done, that the middle will extend forever, that each new page he writes will bring him farther from the beginning but not a whit closer to the end.
(There is, incidentally, an alternative to this concern. The writer becomes anxious that the middle will be too short, that he cannot possibly pad it out long enough to fulfill either the general requirements of the fiction market or the specific ones of his own contract. I have on occasion had both of these worries at the same time, and have sat at the typewriter simultaneously alarmed that my book was going to be too long and that it would wind up too short. It is, let me assure you, a curious matter to write scene after scene not knowing whether you should be padding them or cutting them short. If you induce a comparable neurotic state in a lab rat, he sits down in the middle of the maze and chews off his own feet.)
Besides worrying over the long and short of it, the writer is typically concerned that what he’s shouting is going to fall on deaf ears, or on no ears at all. The reader, cunningly hooked by the book’s beginning, will dislodge that hook and swim off into the sunset.
And, indeed, this happens. I don’t finish every book I start reading, and I somehow doubt I’m unique in this regard. While I once felt some sort of moral obligation to wade through every book I picked up, somewhere around age 35 I outgrew this foolishness. In this world, one of many books and little time, I feel comfortable occasionally leaving another writer’s book unfinished.
But the thought that someone—anyone!—would abandon one of my books . . . well, that’s another matter entirely.
Some of my concern in this regard may derive from my own literary apprenticeship. I started off writing soft-core sex novels, and the experience left me imprinted with the notion that, if I ever let a whole chapter go by without someone either making love or getting killed, I was waving a beige flag at the reader’s attention span.
While this left me with some bad habits that I had to learn to break, I think I was probably luckier than some writers who emerge from an academic background and start off writing thoughtful, introspective novels in which there is not a great deal of dramatic incident. All things considered, I would rather give too much than too little attention to holding the reader’s interest.
How do you keep the reader aboard? How do you keep him reading?
The first thing to remember is that he wants to keep on reading. He picked up the book in the hope that it would engross him utterly. The most compelling blurbs in ads and on book jackets are those which assure you that the book, once begun, cannot possibly be set aside. I know any number of people who read books in order to get to sleep at night, yet no one would try to sell a book by hailing its soporific properties. “This book kept me up all night” is a far more effective promotional claim than “This book lulled me right into a coma.”
More than he wants insight or laughter or tears, and far more than he wants his life changed, the reader wants something that will keep him reading. Once hooked by your opening, he has an investment of time along with his investment of money in your book. Every additional page he reads increases his investment and commits him more deeply to finish what he has started.
So you have a lot going for you. The reader would prefer to stay with you, to see the book through to the end, to have a good time on the way.
All you have to do is keep him amused.
And how do you do that? Here are a few ways:
• Have interesting things happen. Most of the books I’ve written in recent years have been detective stories. While the category is broad enough to embrace a wide range of novels, a common denominator exists in that a lead character is almost invariably called upon to do a certain amount of detecting. This very often involves going around and talking to people.
When my detective hero, Matthew Scudder, goes around knocking on doors and asking questions, he’s acquiring information that serves to advance the plot. But if these scenes did no more than provide him with data, they would make very tedious reading indeed. It is not enough that they be functional in terms of the book’s plot. It is also essential that they be interesting.
In Eight Million Ways to Die, for example, Scudder is hired by a pimp to investigate the murder of one of the pimp’s girls. He pursues the investigation by interviewing each of his client’s surviving girls. Writing these scenes, I took pains to make each interesting in and of itself. I did this by letting the women emerge as individuals, with their own separate histories, personalities and current lifestyles. Their different perceptions of the pimp enlarged the reader’s understanding of that enigmatic character, too.
Every scene you write can be more or less interesting depending on how you write it. Not every scene deserves full treatment, and there will be times when you’ll hurry things along by summarizing a scene in a couple of sentences. But the more space you give to a scene and the more importance you assign to it, the greater is your obligation to make that scene pull its weight by commanding the reader’s attention and keeping him interested and entertained.
• Keep the story moving. The reader will accept a lot of diverse scenes, if they’re diverting enough. But you don’t want to do such a good job on this that he forgets the point of the whole thing.
In the broadest sense, fiction is about the solution (successful or not) of a problem. If the reader loses sight of that problem during the book’s vast middle, he ceases to care. He may keep reading out of inertia if you provide enough entertainment along the way, but if anything comes along to break his attention, he may not get around to picking the book up again. Even if he does keep reading, you may lose your hold on his emotions.
Several times in recent books I’ve stopped along the way to rewrite a chapter, cutting scenes down or chopping them out entirely. They were entertaining enough as written, and I had to chop out and throw away some nice snappy dialogue that I felt rather proud of—because it was slowing the book’s narrative flow. I feel the need to do this as I go along because I’m not comfortable otherwise, but many writers find it works better if they let their scenes run on and do their cutting after the first draft is finished. In either case, the same considerations operate.
• Pile on the miseries. One thing you want to do in the book’s middle is turn up the gain on your narrative. You do this by making the problem more of a headache. This makes its solution more essential.
In suspense fiction, a standard way to do this is to toss another corpse on the floor. The reader is already committed to the idea that the initial murder must be solved and the murderer apprehended. When someone else dies, such a resolution becomes even more imperative. Furthermore, you’ve introduced an element of urgency; the hero must act not only to restore balance to the universe, but also to prevent the death of other characters, including some who may by now have become important to the reader.
Similarly, you can raise the stakes for the reader by making the problem’s solution more difficult. In A Ticket to the Boneyard, a just-completed novel about Scudder, he is trying to apprehend a particularly vicious killer. While he is struggling to track the man down, several things happen to heighten the tension and raise the stakes. There are additional murders. Scudder gets severely beaten. And his closest friend on the police force turns on him, denying him support he’d come to take for granted.
• Enjoy the trip. Some people enjoy writing. Others hate it. As far as I can tell, there’s no real correlation between the pleasure the author takes in a book’s composition and the pleasure a reader will take later on.
Even so, I suspect we’re well advised to have as much fun with all of this as we possibly can. And it’s the middle of the book that is most apt to appear burdensome when we’re bogged down in it. If writing a book is driving across America, the book’s middle is an endless highway across Kansas, and there are days when every sentence is as flat as the unvarying landscape.
There are, to be sure, a lot of interesting things in Kansas. But you won’t enjoy them much if you spend every moment telling yourself you can’t wait to get to California, and if you’re twitching with anxiety that the book will be too long or too short or just plain lousy.
Forget all that. Stay in the now. Enjoy the trip.
Are you still with me? Have you read this far?
Good. But if you’re waiting for a big finish, I’m afraid you’ll have to keep on waiting.
Until next month.