Free Writing the Novel by Lawrence Block, Block

hand and automatically turns them this way and that, playing with the purposefulness of a child, trying to see if they’ll fit together.
    Let’s get back to Tanner. A full three years after that newsmagazine item, I spent an evening with a numismatic journalist just back from Turkey, where he’d spent a couple of years earning a very precarious living smuggling ancient coins and Roman glass out of the country. Among the stories on which he was dining out was one about a rumor he’d heard of a cache of gold coins secreted in the front stoop of a house in Balekisir, where the Armenian community had presumably hidden its wealth at the time of the Smyrna massacres. He and some associates actually located the house as described by a survivor, broke into the stoop in the dead of night, established that the gold had been there, but also established, alas, that someone had beat them to it by a couple of decades.
    Now I hadn’t consciously been carrying my insomniac character around in the forefront of my mind, waiting for a plot to materialize for him. But I must have been carrying him around subconsciously, because shortly after my evening with the journalist I began a book about a young man, his sleep center destroyed by shrapnel, who goes to Turkey and finds that elusive Armenian gold.
    Fawcett published that book as The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. For my part, I decided to write more books about Tanner, and there was a point when I could barely pick up a newspaper without running across something that would turn into plot material. Tanner was a devotee of political lost causes and national irredentist movements, and it seemed as though every other story in the first section of the daily New York Times was grist for my mill. By perceiving news stories this way, picking them up and seeing what I could do with them, I was following yet another principle:
    Remember what you’re looking for. Here’s an example that happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was with a group of people, and one woman complained about a problem she was having with her upstairs neighbor. He was evidently a drunk, and was given periodically to turning his radio on at top volume and then either leaving the apartment or passing out cold on the floor. Efforts to reach him invariably failed, and the radio blared all night, keeping the woman awake and doing very little for her peace of mind.
    People suggested a variety of things—that she call the police, kick the door in, report him to the landlord, and so on. “Get a flashlight,” I told her, “and go down to the basement and find the fuse box and remove the fuse for his apartment. Just turn him off altogether. Pull the plug on the clown.”
    I don’t know if she did this. That’s her problem, not mine. But after the conversation shifted, I was left to think about the basic problem and let my mind wander with it. That I’d thought of the fuse box ploy was not inconsistent with my choosing burglars and such types as viewpoint characters; I’m blessed or cursed, as you prefer, with that type of mind. I thought of that, and I thought that my burglar hero, Bernie Rhodenbarr, would certainly offer the same suggestion if a friend called him in the middle of the night with that particular problem.
    And then, because I’ve learned not to walk away from thoughts along these lines, I asked myself what Bernie would do if, for some reason or other, his friend couldn’t pull the fuse, or get access to the fuse box, or whatever. Some fuse boxes in New York apartments are located within the individual apartment, for instance. Suppose Bernie’s sidekick Carolyn Kaiser called him because of this blaring radio, and suppose Bernie was obliging enough to trot over with his burglar’s tools, and suppose he did what he does best, letting himself into the offending apartment just to turn off the radio, and suppose there was a dead body spread out on the living room rug, and suppose ….
    I may or may not use it. But a