YOUR NOVEL GRINDS TO AN ABRUPT HALT.
WHAT’S THE DIAGNOSIS?
May 1990
It’s the most mysterious thing. You’re working on a book, plugging away at it like The Little Engine That Could, turning out a page a day or five pages a day or ten pages a day, watching those finished pages pile up and beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You don’t want to get too cocky, don’t want to get the Big Editor in the Sky mad at you, but, by George, it certainly looks as though you’ve breezed past the halfway mark and are closing fast on the three-quarter pole. All you have to do is keep showing up for work every day, keep putting your behind on the chair and your fingers on the keys, and it’s just a matter of time, and not too much time at that, before the book will be finished.
Oh, you may still have work to do. Some light revision at the very least. Maybe a formal second draft. No matter, that’s the easy part, what the military would call a mopping-up operation. When your first draft is done your book is written, and you can jump up and down and call people and celebrate and even take that shower you’ve been promising yourself for so long. And the first draft’s almost done, it’ll be done any minute, all you have to do is keep at it and—
And, all of a sudden, kablooey.
You’re stuck. The book’s going nowhere. It’s dead in the water, finished, kaput.
Now what?
The conventional wisdom holds that what I’ve just described is a disaster, and it’s not terribly hard to guess how it became the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom goes further to suggest that the thing to do when a book gets stuck is to lower your metaphorical head and charge forward. (It helps, I suppose, if you’re wearing a metaphorical helmet.) By pushing on, by damning the torpedoes and going full speed ahead, you can go right through whatever’s impeding you and get the book finished as planned. You can turn a deaf ear to the voice that keeps telling you there’s something wrong. You can brush all those doubts and anxieties right out of your mind. Casting them as the road and yourself as the chicken, you can Get To The Other Side.
Well, sure. And sometimes that’s exactly what you ought to do.
And sometimes it’s not.
When a book grinds to a halt, it may have done so for a reason. To avoid looking for the reason is a little like overlooking the trouble lights on a car’s dashboard. You can run the car when those lights go on, and you can even do as the previous owner of my car seems to have done, disconnecting a wire so that the lights won’t bug you like some sort of mechanical conscience. Maybe you’ll wind up all right, but there’s a good chance that sooner or later they’ll come for you with a tow truck.
A couple of examples. Several years ago, I was writing the fifth volume in a series of mysteries about Bernie Rhodenbarr, a burglar and bookseller by profession, a solver of homicides by circumstance. I was 180 pages into what looked likely to be a 300-page manuscript, when Something Went Wrong. I spent a day staring at the typewriter without getting anything done. I took a day off, and another day off. By the end of the week I realized that I was in trouble. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I knew something was wrong.
Now I could have barreled through it and forced the book over the finish line. I knew who the killer was, and how and why the crime had taken place. I had not painted myself into any impossible plot corners. But there was something wrong, and I couldn’t see how to fix it, not least of all because I wasn’t altogether sure what it was.
I still don’t know exactly what was wrong. I think there was something gone off-stroke in the book’s timing. I can’t tell you how or why I screwed it up in the first place, or just what enabled me to fix it I know what happened—I moped around for a few weeks, in despair that the book would join the great body of manuscripts I’ve abandoned forever over the years. While this was happening, I suspect a portion of my unconscious mind was playing with the problem and looking for a solution. One felt labored, the dialogue seemed flat, and I wisely stopped work on them and said the hell with it.
Well, I read both of those chunks of manuscript, and I was amazed. I don’t have a clue what I thought was wrong with them at the time I stopped work on them. My writing seemed as spritely as it ever gets, my dialogue was as crisp and lively as I could have wanted it, and all either manuscript lacked to be perfectly publishable was another 270 pages in the same vein. Looking back, it strikes me as highly probable that I would have been incapable of providing those 270 pages back then, and an unconscious recognition of this fact soured me on what I was writing. Not really wanting to go on, I decided that the grapes I’d already reached were sour.
The point, though, is that in neither case did I feel I’d hit a snag. Instead I just figured I’d had a false start, and one that represented the work of only a couple of days. I have tossed off and subsequently tossed out a chapter of a book or a few pages of a short story on more occasions than I can remember, and so have most writers I know, and so what? You can’t expect the world to salute every time you run one up the flagpole. Often the only way to find out if something is going to work is to try writing it, and to drop it if it fizzles out.
You can avoid this sort of false start if you never write anything without having it clear in your mind, but you might miss out on a lot of stories that way. Donald Westlake wrote an opening chapter once because he had this image of a guy crossing the George Washington Bridge on foot. He didn’t know who the guy was or why he was walking across the bridge, but decided that he (like the guy) could cross that bridge when he came to it. The book turned out to be The Hunter, and it turned out to be the first of 16 books about a professional criminal named Parker, who the guy on the bridge turned out to be.
And if it hadn’t worked out that way, if Parker, upon crossing the bridge, had turned into a drugstore instead of turning into a terrific series character, well, so what? Don would have wasted a day’s work, and we all do that often enough, don’t we?
You might think that outlining could make a difference, especially in avoiding snags late in the game, where the book is two-thirds written and you can’t think of a thing to have happen on the next page. If you’ve got a detailed outline, all of those problems are presumably worked out in advance. The book can’t hit a real snag because you always know what’s going to happen next.
Sure you do.
I’ve used outlines on many occasions over the years, some of them sketchy, others more elaborate. And it’s unarguably true that a writer working from an outline always knows what he originally intended to have happen next.
But there’s no guarantee it’ll work. Sometimes the novel proves to have a will of its own and veers away from the outline. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you have nothing but your imagination and your vocabulary to help you figure out what happens next.
And, even when the plot hews close to what you’ve outlined, there’s no guarantee that what worked in outline will work in manuscript. Sometimes, indeed, a novel will stall out around the two-thirds or three-quarters mark because the outlined plot just isn’t working and the writer’s unable to loosen up and make the necessary departures from it.
So what’s the answer?
Beats me. Every book is a case unto itself, and every time we sit down to write one we take a plunge into uncharted waters. It is a hazardous business, this novel-writing dodge, and it doesn’t cease to be so after long years in the game. Novelists who have been at it since Everest was a molehill still find themselves leaving a book unfinished, or finishing an unpublishable one. (Sometimes a good writer gets away with a bad book, and publishes it, and sometimes it sells as well as his good books, but only one’s accountant is gladdened when that sort of thing happens. The object is not to sneak by with a bad book, it’s to write a good one.)
So, when a book hits a snag and the sun goes out and the moon turns black, do you—
Keep right on going and finish it?
or
Figure out where you went wrong and make it right?
or
c) Decide that it doesn’t say Purina, and bury it in the yard?
The answer, I guess, is d) Any or all of the above, depending. All you have to do is figure out which, and you have to figure it out anew each time it happens.
Look, I never said this was going to be easy.