THE MORE THINGS REMAIN THE SAME,
THE MORE YOU SHOULD CONSIDER A CHANGE.
January 1988
Long ago and far away, when I was trying to become a professional writer of fiction, I braced myself with the thought that this was something I was going to have to do only once. After all, once you become a professional, all that remained was for you to practice your newfound profession. Once you had written a book successfully, you had only to produce variations on that theme forever.
In the mystery and suspense field, which I chose (or which chose me) early on, doing the same thing over and over made eminent sense, and the simplest way to do that seemed to lie in the development of a series character. While plots and settings and subordinate characters would vary from one book to the next, the same lead character would appear in each book, providing a measure of continuity and allowing the books to develop an increasing following among the reading public. Find a character, write about him forever, and you’ve got it made.
You’ve got it made. Non-writers frequently think in those terms. “I guess you’ve got the formula now,” people will tell me, “and all you’ve got to do is crank ’em out.” Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve never got it made, and there’s no such thing as a formula, and you’ve got to do a lot more than crank ’em out.
This idea—that you can have a formula, that you can become successful by repeating yourself endlessly—seems to me to grow out of a desire to demystify the writing process and to turn it into a left brain rational mechanistic affair. Non-writers want to do this in order to have the sense that they understand what writers do, and we writers tend to buy into the same notion because we would like our work to make sense, to be logical, and to become easier with time.
If you stop to think about it, the idea of a formula becomes pretty silly. If I have a formula for my books, it can’t be much of a secret; it’s hidden in plain sight in the books themselves. If you want to see how I did it, all you have to do is look at what I did. There’s no hidden agenda in a novel. It’s all out in the open.
In Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (WD Books), I discuss a method of outlining another writer’s novel, boiling it down to a bare-bones plot synopsis, in order to learn how novels are put together. You can indeed learn a good deal this way, but you can’t learn enough to make the business of writing your own novel a simple matter of painting by numbers. Everything you write is written for the first time, and that’s true even if you do have a series character you follow from book to book, and even if you tend to mine the same vein over and over in your fiction.
Consider Gerald Browne, if you will. Mr. Browne has written any number of bestsellers, and several of his most successful works have dealt with the world of precious stones. He knows this background thoroughly and renders it wonderfully accessible to the reader. Two of his books, 11 Harrowhouse and Green Ice, are startlingly similar in plot and construction. The first concerns diamonds, the second emeralds, and they are so much alike that they should not be read within several months of one another. I should not be surprised to learn that, having succeeded to such an extent with 11 Harrowhouse, Mr. Browne made a conscious decision to do the same thing in green. Even so, they are not identical, and the second book was not necessarily a cinch to write. Mr. Browne’s latest book, Stone 588, is again the story of the jewelry trade, and it bears some similarity in plot structure and characterization to its fellows, but it is also very different from them, and shows the way a writer can grow and change while presumably repeating himself.
All right, so it never gets easy. You never really write by numbers. Even in series fiction, when you write the same kind of book over and over about the same character, you are in certain respects doing it each time for the first time. No formula provides an Open, sesame! to literary success, and you’ve never got it made.
That said, the fact remains that some writers grow and change more than others. There are pressures—self-imposed and external—to write the same book over and over, however impossible it may be to do precisely that. And there are pressures, too, to write a completely different book each time—however impossible it may be to do precisely that, either.
The most seductive thing about doing the same thing over and over (in fiction as in life itself) is that it looks safe. I have at this point written five books about Bernie Rhodenbarr, a nice-guy burglar who solves murders, and each has sold a significant number of copies more than its predecessor. At the same time, each has drawn a little more critical attention, and the reviews throughout have been overwhelmingly favorable. While there are no sure things in this highly chancy universe we inhabit, it is more than probable that a sixth Bernie Rhodenbarr would find a welcome in the marketplace, that the critics would receive it warmly, and that it would outperform the earlier volumes in the series. It might not be a bestseller (although you never know; series fiction sometimes reaches critical mass in audience appeal and leaps spontaneously onto the list) but it would almost certainly sell well.
Writing another book about Bernie looks safe in other respects as well. First off, I know I can do it. I’ve done it five times, and it does not seem wildly presumptuous to believe that I could do it again. The writing of any novel requires a leap of faith as great as that shown by those divers in Acapulco, the kids who plunge off the cliffs confident that the wave will be there when they hit. It’s easier to take that kind of leap if you’ve taken it before, and lived to tell the tale.
If the writer’s self-imposed pressures to repeat himself are considerable, they’re nothing compared to the external pressures. With the occasional exception of the creative artist himself, virtually everyone engaged in the marketing and consumption of art wants to see the same thing again and again. The last thing the average publisher wants is for a proven writer to strike out in a new direction. Even if the new work is good, even if it’s appealing, even if it’s demonstrably better than what the writer has done before, this innovation makes life infinitely more difficult for those people whose job it is to sell what the writer has written.
A friend of mine, a graphic artist, was telling me a few weeks ago how exciting the past five years have been for her. “My work has gone through four major changes,” she said, “and I’m painting completely different now. I love what I’m doing, it represents enormous growth, and it’s all terribly exciting for me.” She sighed. “Of course,” she said, “I can’t keep a gallery. Each time I go through a metamorphosis, the owner doesn’t know what to make of it or how to sell it, and I have to go find somebody else.”
This does not mean that publishers or gallery owners or anyone else in the creativity biz are mossback sticks-in-the-mud. What it does mean is that, having established an artist in a certain way and for a certain audience, and having once figured out how to merchandise that artist’s work effectively, it’s a rare merchandiser indeed who welcomes the opportunity to tear up the game plan and come up with a whole new approach.
If publishers are conservative in this respect, it’s because readers are even more conservative; once they like a writer, they want him to do more of what made them like him in the first place. Each book doesn’t have to be identical with its predecessors—we’d like them to be sufficiently different so that we can tell them apart—but we don’t want any major departures. We’d prefer the writer to stay within what we imagine his parameters to be.
Consider John Le Carré. After breaking through to bestsellerdom with The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, his third novel of Cold War espionage, Mr. Le Carré wrote a couple more books in the same vein. Then he wrote something completely different, a romance entitled The Naive and Sentimental Lover. The book disappointed almost everyone who read it. Those of Mr. Le Carré’s fans who bought the book were disappointed because it was not what they expected from the author. Readers who might conceivably have liked the book never picked it up in the first place because they knew of the author as a suspense and espionage writer and were accordingly not interested. I didn’t like the book and never felt it worked on its own terms or anyone else’s, but it might have had a better chance in the marketplace had it been issued under a pen name. While the Le Carré name did guarantee a certain sales level, it also prevented the book from having a chance of reaching the real audience that may have existed for it.
Similarly, when Robert Ludlum departed from his usual mode to write a comic novel about a plot to kidnap the Pope, he was advised to publish it under a pen name. The book, The Road to Gandolfo, has since been reissued in paperback under the author’s own name, but at that time it was agreed that readers would be confused and alienated if it were to appear under the author’s real name. After some time had passed, and with Mr. Ludlum’s position in the book world unassailable, a change in byline could help sales of Gandolfo without hurting the other books.
As a reader, I’m as guilty of this conservatism as anyone. Once I’ve found someone I like to read, I want him to keep on writing what I know I’ll like. Why change anything? If it’s not broke, why fix it?
Except you have to fix it. If you don’t, it’ll rust.
We become writers for any number of reasons, some of them out in the open, others covert. To validate ourselves, surely. To show our inner selves to the world while maintaining a discreet distance. To win respect. To touch people’s lives.
Underlying all of this is a purely artistic motive that generally impels us. We seek the sheer joy that comes of doing that which has not been done before. And once we’ve done it, and done it to our satisfaction, it’s time to do something else new.
Similarly, we write fiction as a way of holding a sort of Fun House mirror to our own inner selves. When that self grows and changes, the reflection had better change as well if the image is to possess its fictive truth.
There are some writers who do not change much over a career or a lifetime. Evidently they reached a particular level of maturity before they started writing and remained frozen at it, in their work if not in their life. There are other writers who have managed to grow considerably within the context of a cohesive body of work. For an example, you might look at the Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald. Written over a 30-year span, the books are all about the same character and are all similar in structure and style—and yet the later books are to the early ones as Beethoven’s late string quartets are to his early work.
And there are others of us who have to ring out the old in order to ring in the new, and who have to take commercial and artistic risks in the process. All the arguments for writing a sixth book about Bernie Rhodenbarr or a seventh about Matthew Scudder pale against the realization that I cannot just now write about either of those characters, that I have said what I have to say about them, that if I force myself into another repeat performance I will either lapse into immobility after 50 pages or, even worse, produce a book devoid of the life force that made the earlier volumes successful.
And so my own next book is Random Walk, and it is not about any of the characters I have written about in the past. It is not a mystery. Although there is considerable violence in it, it cannot properly be called a novel of suspense. I have never had a more exciting time writing anything, or a greater feeling of satisfaction afterward; at the same time, I can just about take it for granted that many readers who have come to like my work over the years will not like what I’ve done.
Why, Stephen King was asked, do you write the books you write? And why, he replied, do you assume I have any choice?
I do assume choices. I could have chosen not to write Random Walk; I probably could have chosen to write a burglar book in its stead. But one makes such a choice at one’s peril; doing so, one lowers the flame of one’s talent, and risks blowing it out altogether. And for what?
The writing of Random Walk was, as I’ve intimated, an extraordinary experience. I suspect it’s an instructive one as well, with something to say regarding the nature of inspiration and the creative process. Tune in next month and I’ll tell you all about it.