Writing the Novel Read Online Free Page B

possible way. The sex books put bread on the table and gave me the satisfaction of regular production and regular publication at a stage when I was incapable of writing anything much more ambitious. I can hardly regret the time I devoted to them.
    Is the sex novel field a good starting place for a beginner today? I’m afraid not. Their equivalent in today’s market is the mechanical, plotless, hard-core porn novel, written with neither imagination nor craft and composed of one overblown sex scene after another. The books I wrote were quite devoid of merit—let there be no mistake about that—but by some sort of Gresham’s Law of Obscenity they’ve been driven off the market by a product that is indisputably worse. Any dolt with a typewriter and a properly dirty mind could write them; accordingly, the payment is too low to make the task worth performing. Finally, the books are published by the sort of men who own massage parlors and peep shows. You meet a better class of people on the subway.
    There’s no need, though, to be nostalgic for the old days, be they the old days of pulp magazines or the old days of soft-core sex novels. There always seems to be an area in which to serve out a writer’s apprenticeship. We’ll see how to choose your own particular area in the next chapter; meanwhile, let it be said that for the foreseeable future it’s almost certain to be a novel of some sort.
    The suggestion that a beginner ought to begin as a novelist is a radical one. The natural response is to offer some immediate objections. Let’s consider some of the most obvious ones.
    Isn’t it harder to write a novel than a short story?
    No. Novels aren’t harder. What they are is longer.
    That may be a very obvious answer, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It’s the sheer length of a novel that the beginning writer is apt to find intimidating.
    As a matter of fact, you don’t have to be a beginner to be intimidated in this fashion. My suspense novels generally stop at two hundred pages or thereabouts. On the several occasions when I’ve begun books I knew would run two or three times that length, I had a lot of trouble getting started. The very vastness of the projects put me off.
    What’s required, I think, is a change in attitude. To write a novel you have to resign yourself to the fact that you simply can’t prime yourself and knock it all out in a single extended session at the typewriter. The process of writing the book is going to occupy you for weeks or months—perhaps for years.
    But each day’s stint at the typewriter is simply that—one day’s work. And that’s every bit as true whether you’re writing short stories or an epic trilogy. If you’re writing three or six or ten pages a day, you’ll get a certain amount of work accomplished in a certain span of time—whatever it is you’re working on.
    I remember the first really long book I wrote. When I sat down to begin it I knew I was starting something that had to run at least five hundred pages in manuscript. I got a good day’s work down and wound up knocking out fourteen pages. I got up from the typewriter and said, “Well, just 486 pages to go”—and went directly into nervous prostration at the thought.
    The thing to remember is that a novel’s not going to take forever. All the old clichés actually apply—a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and slow and steady honestly does win the race.
    Consider this: If you write one page a day, you will produce a substantial novel in a year’s time. The writer who turns out one book a year, year in and year out, is generally acknowledged to be quite prolific. And don’t you figure you could produce one measly little page, even on a bad day? Even on a rotten day?
    When I write a short story I can hold the whole thing in my head when I sit down at my desk. I know exactly where I’m going and it’s just a matter of writing it down. I don’t have that kind of grasp on a