I’ve enjoyed a good many historical novels over the years, and I’ve been deeply interested in history for as long as I can remember. There was a period of several years during which a fair percentage of my leisure-time reading consisted of works of English and Irish history. One might think I’d do well to combine business and pleasure and turn my sights on the historical novel, trying my hand at a novel the theme and background of which might suggest itself from my reading.
I wouldn’t dream of it. One of the innumerable unpleasant facts I have to face about myself is that I’m a sluggard when it comes to research. I don’t enjoy it and I don’t do a very good job of it. I force myself when I have to, and I’ve become better about this in recent years, less given to slipshod fakery, but the idea of deliberately setting out to write a book which requires a vast amount of academic research is anathema to me.
Beyond that, I’m not comfortable with the idea of writing something set in a time other than my own. I wasn’t around then, so how could I presume to know how people talked? How could I expect to get their dialogue right, or to have the faintest idea what it felt like to be around in eighteenth-century Ireland, say, or Renaissance Italy? The fact that no one else knows how people talked or felt back then does nothing to put my mind at rest. I have to be able to believe in the fictive reality of what I’m doing in order to make it work.
This is not to say that I’m comfortable only when I write out of my own experience. I probably know as much about eighteenth-century Ireland as I do about contemporary Yugoslavia, yet I’ve blithely set several books in that country without doing more than cursory research. I’ve never killed anyone — yet — but I’ve written a great deal about murderers. I wrote a book from the point of view of a professional burglar and found the voice so natural that the book became the first of a series. I’ve written several books from a woman’s point of view. It’s a matter of identification, I suppose, of one’s ability to project oneself into certain environments and situations and not into others.
More simply, it’s a matter of identifying with an author. One of the things that makes fiction work is one’s identification with the characters. And one of the things that makes it writable, if you will, is identification with the person who wrote it.
I can remember the first time I felt it. It was the summer after my first year at college. I picked up a paperback anthology of short stories entitled The Jungle Kids. The author was Evan Hunter, who had recently made a name for himself with The Blackboard Jungle — hence the book’s title, not to mention the fact of its publication. The dozen or so stories in the book all dealt with juvenile delinquents and virtually all of them had been originally published in Manhunt. I identified, not so much with the characters in these stories, but with Evan Hunter himself.
I was genuinely excited when I reached the end of the book. Here was someone writing and publishing well-written stories that I could respect and enjoy — and, most important, I could see myself doing what he had done. I felt it was within my abilities, and I felt plots and characters of this sort could engage and stimulate my creative imagination. And I also felt that the whole thing was eminently worth doing.
I ultimately did make my first short story sale to Manhunt, but that’s another story. More to the point, my first novel grew directly out of a similar case of identification with the author.
I had at the time been writing and publishing crime stories for a year and felt it was time to write a novel. A senior colleague at the literary agency where I was working had suggested I try a light romance of the type Avalon was then publishing; because the rate of payment was awful, this was an easy market for the beginner to hit. I read one, and it was confessions all over again. I couldn’t get through the thing and knew I’d be incapable of coming up with an idea for one, let alone writing it.
What I really wanted to do was a detective novel. I’d read hundreds, liked the form very much, and made a couple of stabs at knocking out one of my own. But for one reason or another I couldn’t get a handle on a suspense novel.
During this time I had read perhaps a dozen lesbian novels. The sensitive novel of female homosexuality constituted a small but quite popular category in the fifties. I probably read the books more for information and titillation than anything else. I wasn’t personally acquainted with any lesbians at the time, nor did my knowledge of their lives go beyond what I read in those novels or witnessed on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.
For whatever reason, I did find the books compulsively readable, and one day I finished one and realized that I could have written it myself. Or one quite like it. Possibly, by Georgia, one a shade better than what I’d just read.
In the name of research, I promptly read every lesbian novel I could get my hands on. Elements of a novel of my own began percolating in my mind — fragments of a character, a scene, a setting. Then one morning I awakened with the plot ready to happen, and I sat down and typed up a two or three page outline. After a gestation period of perhaps another month I sat down and wrote the thing in two weeks flat.
It sold first time out to Fawcett, then the leading market for that sort of book, and I was a published novelist just like that. I was not an overnight success, nor did I find an immediate identity for myself as a writer of lesbian novels; curiously enough, it was years before I wrote another. But I learned a tremendous amount writing the book, as one does writing any first novel, and it was that jolting realization of I-could-do-this that got me going.
This sort of identification with the writer, this recognition of one’s own capacity to write a certain type of book, is not limited to category fiction. Whatever makes you want to become a novelist, whatever sort of novelist you want to become, the process I’ve described is a basic starting point for finding your own first novel.
If you’ve decided that money is the spur that goads you and that you want to reach for the brass ring right away rather than work your way up to it, you would do well to have a broad acquaintance with the sorts of books that have made their authors rich. By regularly reading best-selling novels, and especially by concentrating on the works of those authors who consistently hit the best seller list, you’ll develop a sense of the sorts of books which tend to earn big money.
Some books make the best seller lists by happy accident. Perhaps they are category novels which have acquired a greater than usual readership because of increasingly widespread recognition of the author’s particular excellences. John D. MacDonald and Ross Macdonald are two cases in point; both continue to write the excellent hard-boiled suspense novels they’ve been writing for years, but their audience has swelled to the point where the books they write are best sellers.
Other books on the list are novels of considerable literary merit which have enough breadth of appeal to make them best sellers. E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is a good example of this phenomenon, as are The World According to Garp, by John Irving, and Final Payments, by Mary Gordon. Similarly, a few highly esteemed authors hit the best seller list routinely, not because of the type of books they write but because of the prominence they have achieved and the size of their personal following among readers. John Updike’s an example. So are Gore Vidal and John Cheever.