I wouldn’t be so sure, though, that outlining is purposeless work, or a waste of time. On the contrary, I’d be inclined to guess it saves time for most of the people who do it — time spent repairing mistakes and reworking false starts that might not have occurred had they laid the groundwork properly before starting their own novels.
But pick the approach that feels right for you as a writer. That, ultimately, is the most important thing you can do.
Chapter 4
Developing Plot Ideas
How to encourage ideas to bubble up from the unconscious. How ideas come together to create plot. Ways to sharpen up a plot
“Where do you get your ideas?” is one of the questions writers get asked all the time. What’s galling about it, in addition to its banality, is the questioner’s implicit assumption that coming up with a clever idea is all there really is to the business of being a writer. Turning that idea into a book — well, that’s just a matter of typing, isn’t it?
But of course not. Were that the case, I’d run books through my typewriter at seventy or eighty words per minute, not four or five agonizing pages per day.
While ideas are not the sine qua non in the novel that they often are in the short story, they are nevertheless essential.
A handful of writers can produce books that are not specifically about something and make them work. It scarcely matters what Finnegan’s Wake is about, for example. For the rest of us, a strong central idea is basic to our novels. How we are to get these ideas, and how we can best develop them into strong plots, is something with which we might well concern ourselves.
It’s my own conviction that we do not get our ideas. They are given to us, bubbling up out of our own subconscious minds as if from some dark and murky ferment. When the conditions are right, it is neither more nor less than the natural condition of things for a writer’s imagination to produce those ideas which constitute the raw material of his fiction.
I don’t know that I have much control over this process of generating ideas. This is not to say that I don’t want to control the process, or even that I don’t try to control it. But I’ve gradually come to see that I can’t stimulate ideas by hitting myself in the forehead with a two-by-four.
This does not mean that there’s nothing the writer can do to foster the development of novelistic ideas. Note, please, my argument that the process occurs of its own accord when the conditions are right.
My job, when I want ideas to bubble up, is to make sure the conditions are right. Then I can let go of the controls and pick ideas like plums when they come along.
That’s a little hazy. Can’t we get a bit more specific? How do I adjust the conditions?
We can get a whole lot more specific. And as far as adjusting the conditions is concerned, you’ve already been doing that. The reading and studying and analysis we talked about in the preceding chapter has as one of its functions the development of fictional ideas. By immersing ourselves in these books and turning them inside out, we come to know them on a gut level, so that our imaginations are encouraged to toy with the kinds of plot material which will be useful to us.
There are other things we can do as well. For instance:
Pay attention. The little atoms of fact and attitude which can link up into the molecules of an idea are all over the damn place. Each of us sees and hears and reads a dozen things a day that we could feed into the idea hopper — if we were paying attention.
Back in the early sixties I was reading one of the newsmagazines when I happened on an article on sleep. I learned no end of things, all of which I promptly forgot except for one delicious nugget of information — there seems to be a certain number of cases in medical literature of human beings who do not sleep at all. They get along somehow, leading lives of permanent insomnia, but otherwise not demonstrably the worse for wear.
Fortunately, I wasn’t sleeping when I read that item. I rolled it around in my brain, filed it for cocktail-party conversation, and never dreamed I’d wind up writing seven books about a character named Evan Tanner, a free-lance secret agent whose sleep center had been destroyed during the Korean War.
A few million people probably read that article without writing a book about an insomniac. Conversely, I’ve undoubtedly come up against a few million facts which might have sparked a character or a setting or a plot, but didn’t. What made the difference, I think, is that I happened to find this particular fact oddly provocative. My unconscious mind was eager to play with it, to add it to the murky ferment we talked about earlier. That my mind ultimately made Tanner the particular character he is is very likely attributable to the particular character I am — as we’ll observe when we look at the process of character development more closely in another chapter. That the plot in which I put Tanner took the shape it did is attributable to two things. First, I’d schooled myself and/or had been inclined by nature to develop plots that lent themselves to suspense fiction. Second, another key principle operated, to wit:
Two and two makes five. Which is to say that synergy is very much at work in the process of plot development. The whole is ever so much greater than its parts. The writer, in possession of one fact or anecdote or notion or concept or whatever, suddenly gifted with another apparently unrelated fact or anecdote or et cetera, takes one in each hand and automatically turns them this way and that, playing with the purposefulness of a child, trying to see if they’ll fit together.
Let’s get back to Tanner. A full three years after that newsmagazine item, I spent an evening with a numismatic journalist just back from Turkey, where he’d spent a couple of years earning a very precarious living smuggling ancient coins and Roman glass out of the country. Among the stories on which he was dining out was one about a rumor he’d heard of a cache of gold coins secreted in the front stoop of a house in Balekisir, where the Armenian community had presumably hidden its wealth at the time of the Smyrna massacres. He and some associates actually located the house as described by a survivor, broke into the stoop in the dead of night, established that the gold had been there, but also established, alas, that someone had beat them to it by a couple of decades.
Now I hadn’t consciously been carrying my insomniac character around in the forefront of my mind, waiting for a plot to materialize for him. But I must have been carrying him around subconsciously, because shortly after my evening with the journalist I began a book about a young man, his sleep center destroyed by shrapnel, who goes to Turkey and finds that elusive Armenian gold.
Fawcett published that book as The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. For my part, I decided to write more books about Tanner, and there was a point when I could barely pick up a newspaper without running across something that would turn into plot material. Tanner was a devotee of political lost causes and national irredentist movements, and it seemed as though every other story in the first section of the daily New York Times was grist for my mill. By perceiving news stories this way, picking them up and seeing what I could do with them, I was following yet another principle:
Remember what you’re looking for. Here’s an example that happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was with a group of people, and one woman complained about a problem she was having with her upstairs neighbor. He was evidently a drunk, and was given periodically to turning his radio on at top volume and then either leaving the apartment or passing out cold on the floor. Efforts to reach him invariably failed, and the radio blared all night, keeping the woman awake and doing very little for her peace of mind.