Makes no difference. Either way, you have fresh reading to do. You have to read not as a normally perceptive reader, but with the special insight of a writer.
My first venture into this sort of reading came when I first began writing stories for the crime fiction magazines, but the process is pretty much the same for both short stories and novels. What I did, having made my first short story sale to Manhunt, was to study that magazine and every other crime fiction magazine far more intensively than I have ever studied anything before or since. I bought every magazine in the field the instant it appeared on the stands. In addition, I made regular visits to back-magazine shops, where I picked up every back issue of the leading magazines that I could find. I carried check lists of these publications in my wallet to avoid buying the same issue twice, and I carted the magazines home and arranged them in orderly fashion on my shelves. At night when I got home from the office I read magazine after magazine, going through every last one of them from cover to cover.
Understand, please, that I did not learn any formulae. I don’t know that such things exist. What I did learn, in a manner I cannot entirely explain, is a sense of the possible variations that could be worked upon the crime story, a sense of what worked and what didn’t.
Does this mean I have to read hundreds and hundreds of novels? I’ll be spending eternity in the library.
You won’t have to read as many novels as I read short stories. You’ll probably read hundreds of them over the years — I think it’s vital to continue reading in one’s field, even when one’s established oneself as a writer in the field. Remember, though, a distinction we observed earlier between the short story and the novel. The short-story writer has to come up with a constant supply of ideas. The novelist, on the other hand, deals with a smaller number of ideas but must be far more concerned with their extensive development.
So you won’t have to read so many novels. Eight or ten or a dozen should give you a sufficient reading background for your own first attempt. But you’ll have to read them far more exhaustively than the beginning short-story writer has to read examples in his field. It’s not enough simply to read these books. You’ll have to take them apart and see what makes them work.
How do you go about that?
Well, let’s say you’ve decided to take aim at the gothic novel. Chances are you’ve read more than a few of them in reaching this decision, but maybe not; perhaps you read one and knew in a flash it was your kind of thing. Whatever the case, you’ll want to have half a dozen books on hand in order to launch this project of analyzing the gothic novel. You may elect to use your favorites among the books you’ve already read or make a trip to the newsstand for some new material. I’d suggest that you pick books by six different writers, choosing a mixture of established names in the field and neophytes, but that’s not necessary. I’ve heard tell of a writer, for example, who sat down and pored over the gothic novels of Dorothy Daniels as if they were holy writ. Then he turned out a book that was described by the editor who bought it as an absolutely perfect example of second-rate Dorothy Daniels. Second-rate Dorothy Daniels is still good enough to sell, and sell it did.
I wouldn’t recommend so limited an approach. While it may not be the worst way in the world to break into print, it can’t do much to bring out the writer within oneself. What we’re trying to achieve by this market analysis is not slavish imitation but synthesis. By digesting a genre and absorbing its parameters into one’s system, one prepares oneself to write one’s own books within the particular confines of that genre.
That’s theoretical. Let’s get down to practical matters. Having bought a half-dozen suitable gothics, what do I do?
Read them, for openers. Read them one after the other, without reading anything else in between. And don’t rush this reading process. Forget any speedreading courses you may have taken. If you’ve gotten in the habit of skimming, break it. Slow yourself down. You want to find out more than what happens and who’s the bad guy and whether or not the girl gets to keep the house at the end. You want to find out what the author’s doing and how he’s doing it, and you can only manage that feat by spending plenty of time with the book.
Reading slowly and deliberately is something that’s come on me over the years, and I can relate it directly to my own development as a writer. Before I got into this business, and during my early years in it, I raced through books. The more I have come to read like a writer, the more deliberate the pace of my reading.
Once you’ve read all of the books at a thoughtful pace, it’s time to take them apart and see how they work. First, try summing up each book in a couple of sentences, like so:
A young widow is hired to catalogue the antique furniture in a house on the moors in Devon. The chauffeur-handyman tries to warn her off and she knows he’s up to something. She’s drawn to the son and heir, whose wife is coughing her lungs out in an attic bedchamber. Turns out the son has been selling off the good furniture, replacing it with reproductions and junk, and slowly poisoning his wife. He tries to kill our heroine when she uncovers the truth but she’s saved by the handyman, who’s actually the disguised second son of the Earl of Dorset, and...
Well, you get the idea. I don’t write gothics myself, and I see no reason why I should squander my creativity plotting this one just as an example of what a summary is. Boil each of the six novels into a paragraph. The length doesn’t matter terribly much. No one else is going to read these things. The object is to reduce the sprawl of a novel to something you can grasp in a hundred words or so.
This method is useful in analyzing short fiction, too. A short-story writer would do well to write out brief summaries of dozens of short stories, paring away the writer’s facility with prose and dialogue and characterization and reducing each story to its basic plot. The novelist-to-be works with a smaller number of examples and winds up studying them rather more intensively.
By this I don’t mean you have to examine the plot summaries you’ve prepared like a paleontologist studying old dinosaur bones. Instead, you’ll return to the books you’ve summarized and go through them again, this time outlining them chapter by chapter. For each chapter you’ll write down what happens in a couple of sentences. To return to our mythical gothic, we might see something like this:
Chapter One — Ellen arrives at Greystokes. Liam meets her at the train and tells her the legend of the ghost in the potting shed. She is interviewed by Mrs. Hallburton who explains her duties and shows her to her room. She lies down on her bed and hears a woman coughing and sobbing on the floor above.
Chapter Two — Flashback. The cough triggers her recollection of her husband’s death. She remembers their meeting, tender moments in their courtship, the discovery of his illness, and his final days. She recalls her determination to resume her life and the circumstances that brought her to Greystokes.
Chapter Three — Dinner the first night. She meets Tirrell Hallburton, whose wife is coughing in the room above her own. After dinner she goes to the attic to look in on Glacia, the invalid. Glacia tells her that Death is on his way to Greystokes. “Someone will die soon — take care it isn’t you!” Ellen leaves, certain Glacia has a premonition of her own death...