Writing the Novel Read Free Page A

that particular traveler.
    With the understanding, then, that all roads lead to Rome, here are some of the reasons why I believe a writer is best advised to begin with a novel.
    Skill is less at a premium. This may seem paradoxical—why should a novel require less skill than a short story? You’d think it would be the other way around.
    Don’t you have to be a better craftsman to manage a novel? I don’t think so. Often a novelist can get away with stylistic crudity that would cripple a shorter piece of fiction.
    Remember, what a novel affords you as a writer is room. You have space to move around in, space to let your characters develop and come to life, space for your story line to get itself in motion and carry the day. While a way with words never hurts, it’s of less overwhelming importance to the novelist than the sheer ability to grab ahold of the reader and make him care what happens next.
    The best seller list abounds with the work of writers whom no one would want to call polished stylists. While I wouldn’t care to name them, I can think offhand of half a dozen writers whose first chapters are very hard going for me. I’m perhaps overly conscious of style—writing does radically change one’s perceptions as a reader—and I find their dialogue mechanical, their transitions awkward, their scene construction clumsy, their descriptions imprecise. But if I can make myself hang on for the first twenty or thirty or forty pages, I’ll lose my excessive awareness of the trees and start to perceive the forest. The author’s pure storytelling ability grips me and I no longer notice the defects of his style.
    In shorter fiction, the storyline wouldn’t have this chance to take over. The story would have run its course before I ceased to notice the author’s style.
    Similarly, some novels triumph over the style in which they are written because of the grandeur of their themes or the fascination of their subject matter. The epic novel, presenting in fictional form the whole history of a nation, catches the reader up because of the sheer power of its scope. Leon Uris’s Exodus is a good example of this type of book. And Arthur Hailey’s books exemplify the novel that conveys an enormous amount of information to the reader, telling him almost more than he cares to know about a particular industry. This is not to say that these novels, or others of their ilk, are stylistically clumsy, but merely to point out that style becomes a considerably less vital consideration than it must be in short fiction.
    The idea is less important. I’ve known any number of writers who have postponed writing a novel because they felt they lacked a sufficiently strong or fresh or provocative idea for one. I can understand this, because similar feelings delayed my own first novel. Logic would seem to suggest that a novel, by virtue of its length, would require more in the way of an idea than a short story.
    If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, you may well be better off with a novel than with short stories. Because each short story absolutely demands either a new idea or a new slant on an old one. Often the short story amounts to very little more than an idea fleshed out and polished into a piece of fiction. This is particularly likely to be the case with the short-short, which is typically not much more than a fifteen-hundred-word preamble leading up to a surprise ending, an idea thinly cloaked in the fabric of fiction.
    Novels, on the other hand, are time and again written with no original central idea to be found. Every month sees the publication of new gothic novels, for example, and the overwhelming majority of them hew quite closely to a single plotline—a young woman is in peril in a forbidding house, probably on the moors; she is drawn to two men, one of whom turns out to be a hero, the other a villain. Another category, the historical romance of the Love’s Tender Fury variety, has an initially innocent heroine