“Camino Island” by John Grisham: Are novelists lying who say they depend on their characters to help write the story?

I am two-thirds through this novel, one of whose main characters is a novelist. Mercer Mann has published a respectable first novel, but for the last five years, she has had writer’s block.

The narrator says that “Writers are generally split into two camps: those who carefully outline their stories and know the ending before they begin, and those who refuse to do so upon the theory that once a character is created he or she will do something interesting” (1, p. 135).

The narrator implies that Mercer has been taking the second approach, and that is the reason she has been getting nowhere for the last five years.

In an interview on this novel, the interviewer poses the above dichotomy of the fiction-writing process, and Grisham says of authors who don’t outline and who say they depend on their characters, “I think they’re lying” (2).

Is Grisham being sensitive about his being a commercial, bestselling novelist, and expressing defensive anger toward the literary elite, or does he really think the idea that character and narrative personalities seem to have minds of their own, and contribute to the story, is a lie? Does he really think that his fellow novelists who claim it are lying? I don’t think so, for three reasons.

First, his character, Mercer Mann, had evidently used the non-outlining, character-dependent approach to write her moderately successful first novel.

Second, in his video interview, Grisham says that the reason he started to create detailed outlines before writing a novel was not that he had been unable to fill blank pages otherwise, but that he had produced too many manuscript pages. He says he had had to discard hundreds of pages, once wasting a year of his life that way. So it’s possible that narrative and character personalities had actually contributed to his writing process, but that their contributions had been undisciplined.

Third, one of Grisham’s friends in real life, someone he greatly admires, is his fellow novelist, Stephen King. Indeed, he is envious of King for being even more prolific than he is. And in past posts, I have quoted King as acknowledging his own debt to his character and muse, alternate personalities, for the writing of his stories.

However, one thing that King emphasizes is that he has to “prune” the stories that his characters provide. And I suspect that Grisham accomplishes the same thing with his outlines.

1. John Grisham. Camino Island. New York, Doubleday, 2017.

2. NC Bookwatch, PBS Video, August 3, 2017. https://www.pbs.org/video/john-grisham-camino-island-vtsdet/