Wally Lamb, On Creating Plot and Character in Fiction

00:08 [Wally Lamb] I always am envious -- I read a lot and I know a lot of writers, and I read a lot of interviews with writers -- and I'm always envious of writers who can plot it all out and who can outline and then write the story fairly short amount of time. It doesn't work that way for me. I remember when I Know This Much Is True, which was my really big boy, my 900-page

00:30 novel, I remember when that came out, it was right about the time that John Irving had published a novel of his called A Widow For One Year. I was traveling on my book tour, and in city after city people would say, "Do you outline your story? Do you know how it's going to end right from the start?" And I would say, "No it's all

01:00 exploration for me, and I don't necessarily love to write, but I get so worried about these characters that I have to keep writing to find out if they're going to be okay." And in city after city, people looked at each other and looked a little uncomfortable with that answer, and finally I said, "Why does that answer displease you?" And it's funny that every place I went John Irving

01:30 seemed to have been there a week before, and finally somebody said to me, "Well, we asked that question of John Irving, and he said, 'Well, of course you have to have the ending before you start the novel or else you don't have anything to write toward.'" I guess probably the moral of that story is that it's different for different writers. It takes me a long time to write a novel. I don't stop and do a lot of research but I'm researching as I'm writing. I'm spinning my wheels a lot and I'm

02:00 slamming against walls. And then all of a sudden something will jump forward or something will occur to me in the middle of the night, and then I get unstuck. So it's a long process, not always a fun process, sometimes a very exciting process, by which a novel sort of gets told. But they expand so widely that often it's intimidating for me. With my new novel, The Hour I First Believed,

02:30 when the canvas started to be wider and wider, I didn't know if I had it in me to pull it all together. So I did a form of outlining, but it wasn't before I had written. I've got three corkboards in a row and they're filled with index cards, and it's my outlining of the story as I was writing the story so that I could see visually, almost like a storyboard that screenwriters will use.

03:00 I could sort of walk my way through the plot visually up to that point, and often that would give me the direction that I needed to go next. And also when you outline sort of after the fact of creating a draft, you can see the flaws, you can see where you've sort of gone off the rails a little bit, and then you can fix that, amend that.

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03:24 I do teach my students and try to do the same, calling on as many of the five senses as possible. I think if you can get your reader not only to see a scene and hear a scene, but also to experience it in other visceral ways, then it becomes alive in the head of the reader. I remember a scene that I was writing for She's Come Undone, where Dolores Price, she's sort of reached her emotional end, and gets in a

04:00 cab and is driven to Cape Cod. She's read in the newspaper that whales are beaching themselves inexplicably on a Cape Cod beach. So she goes up there with the intention of committing suicide but also sort of being one with these beached whales. She's an obese character at this point. My preparation for this scene was that my wife and my kids and I had been

04:30 renting a cottage at the Cape for several summers in a row, so I sort of knew the lay of the land. There were newspaper articles about the beaching of whales at the time, so that sort of gave me the context. I actually wrote that scene in the library at the University of Connecticut, which I love that setting for writing in the summertime when there's just a couple of sleepy students and me up there

05:00 on the fourth floor. What I did was I got all kinds of books on the whaling industry and some of them were big huge books, and I sort of spread them around me, these very vivid pictures of whale slaughters and whale beachings and that kind of thing. And that's how that scene came to me. There's something sort of -- I don't mean to sound like I've just arrived from the Twilight Zone or anything -- but there's something that's sort of

05:30 inexplicable when a scene is really working for me, I lose track of time, and my reality becomes -- and remember, I'm writing from the point of view of the character so I am that person in that place at that time, so it's easier for me to have these sort of sensory cues, to smell the whale and so forth. I remember another scene in She's Come Undone, where an upstairs neighbor -

06:00 Dolores is 13 years old, and she has a crush on an upstairs neighbor in her grandmother's house. He's a disc jockey and he's kind of this cool guy who's older than she, and she's kind of flirting with him, and she goes up on the upstairs porch. And he's going to do something malevolent in that scene, and I didn't know if he was going to or not as I'm writing it.

06:30 So I'm sort of living that scene, and I remember in terms of time, I'm writing away, looseleaf paper, Bic pen, and several pages sort of go flying by. And I looked up at the clock, and I was aghast because actually three hours had gone by. I had no idea that I had been in this sort of surreal zone and in the novel, in the scene

07:00 for as long as I had. I do remember when I was writing that scene, Dolores, when she arrives at the beach, this huge beached whale has become almost kind of a tourist attraction because there's been news coverage, so there are a number of people sort of on the beach. And she's up on a dune kind of looking down, again, isolated, alienated from the sort of give and take of

07:30 human interconnection, and very much the observer, as opposed to the participant. And one of the things that she sees is a guy and his girlfriend, they're cutting slices from the whale, almost like souvenirs, and then the boyfriend sort of gets up onto the back of the whale and he's walking the back. I remember when I was writing that scene, I'm Dolores,

08:00 up there on the dune, but I'm also feeling the whale's skin under my feet. I'm the boyfriend as well, sort of doing that. I'm not consciously saying, okay, now I have to do something with the sense of smell, or now I'll put some tactile detail in there. I don't strategize that way. I put myself, I submerge myself into the

08:30 scene, and then I can see it and feel it and touch it. I think probably, again, it comes from the fact that I drew all the time when I was a kid, so in a sense I'm still creating those pictures, those moving pictures, but I'm doing it in a different way. I'm doing it with words. When I was a little kid I used to have these rubber figurines and blocks. I was always building these houses, and I almost always —

09:00 I'd build a house and then sort of imagine a tornado coming. I had conflict right from the beginning. Or a tidal wave comes, the people have to scramble for higher ground, that kind of thing.  So there was something tactile to that, the building of blocks, the causing of disasters and that kind of thing. I think that was sort of jumping jacks and warm-ups for somebody who later in life would pick up a pen and start to write fiction.