The Writing of One Novel

Book excerpt: In The Writing of One Novel, Irving Wallace shows how the basic idea of a novel about the Nobel Prize awards took form over sixteen years, tells of the false starts, the persistent detective work, the many drafts, the elation, the despair, the work inseparable from the writer’s craft. His book has been widely hailed as a unique portrait of a writer’s work. John Barkham, Saturday review syndicate: “How do novelists create works of fiction? The answer—better than any critic could hope to give it—is provided in this literary autopsy by Irving Wallace, one of the most widely read novelists of the day I cannot recall ever having read a laboratory report of this type before. No one interested in writing, editing, or just reading fiction should miss this professional postmortem. It ought to be made a standard text in writing schools.” NATIONAL OBSERVER: “Mr. Wallace, who kept journals and diaries at every stage of progress (in writing The Prize), has managed to make it all come alive for us, permitting us a sense of sharing in the making of the book.” CLEVELAND PRESS: “Wallace’s anatomy of a best seller is a fantastic record of almost total recall.” SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER: “The Writing of One Novel is an extremely valuable book for writers, and because its author is the eminently successful Irving Wallace it can be read avidly by a much wider circle of enthusiasts. Wallace is a best seller extraordinary and this present book is a comprehensive survey of how he came to write, how he wrote and how he was affected by the reception of The Prize The book seems utterly honest.” ST. ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH: “Never before have I seen a successful writer tell so much about the ways of his work.” LOS ANGELES TIMES: “Irving Wallace’s candid and searching account of the conception, gestation and birth of The Prize... I found it a fascinating and revealing book... an excellent case study of what went into and came out in a single novel.”