portrayal of Jackie owed a lot to my impression of her, and the story about her Scarsdale Galahad found its way almost word for word into print.
Some years later I wrote a pseudonymous novel in the manner of Peyton Place —sensational doings in a small town, that sort of thing. I very deliberately set the book in a particular town with which I was personally familiar, and several of the characters owed something to real people who lived in the town. For one character, I borrowed the physical description of a local actor, not intending to ape him too closely; only to find that the character I’d created had a will of his own and insisted upon speaking and behaving precisely as his real-life prototype spoke and behaved. I couldn’t write the character’s dialogue without hearing my friend’s voice booming in my ears. Now I suppose it’s possible to fight that sort of thing, but what writer in his right mind would presume to do so? The best possible thing had happened. A character had come to life. I might be inviting a lawsuit or a public thrashing by allowing him to play out his part, but I’d have been false to my art to do otherwise.
For me, the most exhilarating moment at the typewriter is when a character takes on a life of his own. It’s not an easy thing to describe. But it happens. One can scarcely avoid playing God when writing a novel, creating one’s own imaginary universe and arranging the destinies of the characters as one sees fit. When the magic happens, however, and a character speaks and breathes and sweats and sighs apparently of his own accord, one feels for a moment that one has created life.
It’s a heady experience, and so satisfying that you’d want it to happen all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t—at least not for me. Some of my characters live for me as I’ve described. Others walk around like empty suits, doing what’s required of them but never coming to life. They may work well enough for the reader—craft can disguise the fact that certain characters are just walking through their roles—but not for me.
This was the case with the war novel I talked about in the last chapter. The lead character in my first draft had a lot of interesting things about him. He was a former stunt pilot, the survivor of an unhappy love affair, an American of Irish and Jewish heritage who had enlisted in the RAF. Who could fail to make such a man interesting?
Who indeed? I could, and did. I carried the poor clown through five hundred pages of tedious manuscript and never had the feeling that he could stand up without my support. He remained a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, mouthing the lines required to fit a situation, going places and doing things, acting and reacting and doing it all like a brainwashed zombie.
Why didn’t he come to life? I don’t know. It wasn’t because there was anything fundamentally unsympathetic about the sort of person he was or the acts he performed. A few minor characters in the same novel did verge on animation, including a few whom I found distinctly unpleasant, but my lead remained dead and hollow at the core. Perhaps my inability to breathe life into him owed something to my own negative feelings about the novel itself. Perhaps I couldn’t get past seeing him as an instrument rather than a person.
In contrast, Bernie Rhodenbarr came to life on the very first page of the first draft of the first novel in which he made an appearance.
Previously, I’d written a couple of chapters of a Scudder novel in which a burglar’s suspected of murder because he knocks off an apartment with a dead body in it. That particular burglar was a sort of gentle oaf, and Scudder was going to come to his rescue, but the book never got off the ground.
Later I decided to revive that plot notion, eliminate the detective, change the tone entirely from downbeat to sprightly, and let the burglar himself solve the crime and go on to tell the tale.
I decided to open with the initial
Some years later I wrote a pseudonymous novel in the manner of Peyton Place —sensational doings in a small town, that sort of thing. I very deliberately set the book in a particular town with which I was personally familiar, and several of the characters owed something to real people who lived in the town. For one character, I borrowed the physical description of a local actor, not intending to ape him too closely; only to find that the character I’d created had a will of his own and insisted upon speaking and behaving precisely as his real-life prototype spoke and behaved. I couldn’t write the character’s dialogue without hearing my friend’s voice booming in my ears. Now I suppose it’s possible to fight that sort of thing, but what writer in his right mind would presume to do so? The best possible thing had happened. A character had come to life. I might be inviting a lawsuit or a public thrashing by allowing him to play out his part, but I’d have been false to my art to do otherwise.
For me, the most exhilarating moment at the typewriter is when a character takes on a life of his own. It’s not an easy thing to describe. But it happens. One can scarcely avoid playing God when writing a novel, creating one’s own imaginary universe and arranging the destinies of the characters as one sees fit. When the magic happens, however, and a character speaks and breathes and sweats and sighs apparently of his own accord, one feels for a moment that one has created life.
It’s a heady experience, and so satisfying that you’d want it to happen all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t—at least not for me. Some of my characters live for me as I’ve described. Others walk around like empty suits, doing what’s required of them but never coming to life. They may work well enough for the reader—craft can disguise the fact that certain characters are just walking through their roles—but not for me.
This was the case with the war novel I talked about in the last chapter. The lead character in my first draft had a lot of interesting things about him. He was a former stunt pilot, the survivor of an unhappy love affair, an American of Irish and Jewish heritage who had enlisted in the RAF. Who could fail to make such a man interesting?
Who indeed? I could, and did. I carried the poor clown through five hundred pages of tedious manuscript and never had the feeling that he could stand up without my support. He remained a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, mouthing the lines required to fit a situation, going places and doing things, acting and reacting and doing it all like a brainwashed zombie.
Why didn’t he come to life? I don’t know. It wasn’t because there was anything fundamentally unsympathetic about the sort of person he was or the acts he performed. A few minor characters in the same novel did verge on animation, including a few whom I found distinctly unpleasant, but my lead remained dead and hollow at the core. Perhaps my inability to breathe life into him owed something to my own negative feelings about the novel itself. Perhaps I couldn’t get past seeing him as an instrument rather than a person.
In contrast, Bernie Rhodenbarr came to life on the very first page of the first draft of the first novel in which he made an appearance.
Previously, I’d written a couple of chapters of a Scudder novel in which a burglar’s suspected of murder because he knocks off an apartment with a dead body in it. That particular burglar was a sort of gentle oaf, and Scudder was going to come to his rescue, but the book never got off the ground.
Later I decided to revive that plot notion, eliminate the detective, change the tone entirely from downbeat to sprightly, and let the burglar himself solve the crime and go on to tell the tale.
I decided to open with the initial
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