Writing the Novel Read Online Free

learned to deal with any number of technical matters—viewpoint shifts, flashbacks, internal monologues, etc.
    You can earn while you learn. It’s curious how many writers tend to expect instant gratification. We’ve barely rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter than we expect to see our efforts on the best seller list.
    It seems to me that other artists are rather less impatient of tangible success. What painter expects to sell the first canvas he covers? More often than not he plans to paint over it once it’s dried. What singer counts on being booked into Carnegie Hall the first day he hits a high note? Every other artistic career is assumed to have an extended and arduous period of study and apprenticeship, yet all too many writers think they ought to be able to write professionally on their first attempt, and mail off their first stories before the ink is dry.
    There must be reasons for this. I suppose the whole idea of communication is so intrinsic a part of what we do that a piece of writing which goes unread by others is like Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling where no human ear can hear it. If nobody reads it, it’s as if we hadn’t even written it.
    Then too, unpublished writing strikes us as unfinished writing. An artist can hang a canvas on his own wall. A singer can croon in the shower. A manuscript, though, is not complete until it is in print.
    At first glance this desire to receive money and recognition for early work would look like the height of egotistic arrogance. It seems to me, however, that what it best illustrates is the profound insecurity of the new writer. We yearn to be in print because without this recognition we have no way of establishing to our own satisfaction that our work is of any value.
    I would not for a moment advise a new writer to expect to get any recognition or financial gain out of a first novel. Unless you are fully prepared to spend months writing a book with no greater reward than the doing of it, you would very likely be better off getting rid of your typewriter and taking up some leisure pastime which places less of a premium on achievement.
    This notwithstanding, there is no gainsaying the fact that any number of first novels are published every year. Publishers typically bitch about the difficulty of breaking even on a first novel, conveniently ignoring the several first novels per season to achieve best seller status. True, most first novels are not published. True too, most that are sell very poorly. The wonder is that any are published at all.
    Thus it is possible to make certain gains, in money and in recognition, while acquiring those skills which can only be acquired through experience. And this sort of paid apprenticeship is far more readily accessible to the novelist than the short story writer.
    It wasn’t always this way. When the newsstands teemed with pulp magazines, the pulps were precisely where the new writer earned a living—albeit a precarious one—while developing his skills and refining his technique. A similar kind of magazine apprenticeship is standard procedure to this day in the field of nonfiction; article writers earn while they learn by writing for house organs and trade journals before they are ready to write either nonfiction books or articles for more prestigious magazines.
    Some of the surviving fiction magazines are certainly open to new writers— Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, for example, makes a special point of publishing first stories, having printed over five hundred maiden efforts to date. But ever since the decline of the pulps in the 1950s, there has not been sufficient depth to the magazine fiction market for a writer to serve out his apprenticeship there.
    In contrast, the market for original paperback fiction continues to be quite strong, and quite receptive to the work of beginners. The relative viability of the various categories of category fiction—suspense, adventure, western, science fiction, gothic, light