Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  For example:

  Two brothers are on their way to commit a big-time robbery when they run low on gas in the middle of nowhere. The service-station operator keeps telling them their car needs additional work and they sense they're being conned, yet they don't want to take chances. They let the man make more repairs than they have cash to pay for, finally robbing the station at the end because there's no other way out.

  Or:

  Narrator and his wife come home from vacation to find their house torn inside-out by burglars. Narrator goes off to work with his partner, complaining about what happened, the damage the burglars had done, the mess they made, etc. Turns out the two men are professional burglars on their way to knock off a warehouse themselves.

  This method of outlining, of writing out plot summaries of what you have read, serves to pare away the writer's facility with prose and dialogue and characterization and reduce each story to its basic plot. In this fashion you can see after the fact just what it was that you've read. I don't know that there's any specific value in studying these plot summaries after you've written them, as a paleontologist studies dinosaur bones, but I do think that the simple act of stripping the stories to the bones will give you an intuitive understanding of what holds them together that you could not readily obtain just by reading them.

  Outlines are an even more effective tool in learning how longer fiction works. When you take an outline you have read and reduce it to a chapter-by-chapter summary of its plot, you are in effect reversing the process the author followed in writing the book in the first place. Although they're often easier to write, novels are generally more difficult to grasp than short stories. So much more happens in them that it's harder to see their structure. Stripped down to outline form, the novel is like a forest in winter; with their branches bare, the individual trees become visible where once the eyes saw only a mass of green leaves.

  If you plan to prepare an outline for a novel of your own some day, there's yet another advantage in outlining. Quite simply, you learn in this fashion what outlines look like. In order to feel comfortable in any form of writing, I have to know what it looks like on paper. Before I could write a screenplay, for example, it was not enough for me to go to the movies and see how films worked on the screen. I had to get a sense of how they worked on the page?because I was going to be writing a screenplay, not a film. When an outline, too, becomes something you can look at in typescript instead of merely sensing it as the invisible skeleton of a bound book, it becomes a good deal easier to outline your own as-yet unwritten novel.

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  Question?with all this reading and analyzing and outlining, all this mechanical crap, aren't we stifling creativity? I have a feeling I'll be trying to duplicate what's been written rather than writing my own stories.

  Ê

  That's not how it works. If anything, a bone-deep knowledge of your field helps you avoid unwittingly writing those stories that have been written already.

  What every editor wants?and every reader, for that matter?can be summed up in four paradoxical words: the same only different. Your story must be the same as innumerable other stories so that it may provide a similar kind of satisfaction to the reader. Yet it must simultaneously differ sufficiently from all of those other stories so that the reader will not feel it's something he's read over and over in the past.

  We achieve this same-only-different quality not by borrowing bits and pieces from a variety of other stories, not by synthesizing and amalgamating what we've read, but by so imbuing ourselves in our chosen field that the requirements of the field soak into our subconsious minds.

  I don't believe anyone knows enough about the mind to say just how story ideas are produced. It may not be necessary to know this, any more than you have to understand electricity to turn the light on. I do know that a basic understanding of how a particular kind of story works, acquired by the process described above, seems to make things a good deal easier for the mind.

  I don't know about you, but my mind needs all the help it can get.

  CHAPTER 3

  Decisions, Decisions

  COUPLE OF months ago I was chatting with a fellow at some sort of symposium on suspense fiction. He was writing his first novel, or getting ready to write his first novel, or thinking about getting ready, or whatever, and he had a lot of questions. And, since he'd artfully positioned himself between me and the cheese and crackers, I had little choice but to answer him.

  Did editors, he wanted to know, prefer novels in the first or third person? Did editors prefer books where a murder occurs right away? Did editors prefer books with an urban or a rural setting? Did editors prefer multiple viewpoint or single viewpoint? Did editors prefer?

  Look, I said, that's now how I write. I don't try to imagine just what sort of book some editor is going to fall in love with and then set out to produce it. For one thing, editors are individuals. They don't share a single set of preferences. For another, what any editor prefers most is a book that turns him on, and that he has reason to believe people will buy, and his judgment ultimately hasn't got too much to do with questions of first or third person, single or multiple viewpoint, or urban or rural setting.

  Anyway, I went on, I myself am pretty much of an intuitive writer. I try to write the sort of book I would want to read if I hadn't happened to have written it myself. The more I write to please myself, the more likelihood there is that I'll please other people in the process. But when I deliberately set out to please other readers, I usually turn out an inferior book. So I'd advise you to write the book your own way. Give it your best shot and then when you've finished worry about finding somebody who likes it enough to publish it.

  I wheeled about and made my way to the refreshment table at this point lest I find myself in the middle of Polonius's little spiel to Laertes, advising the poor man neither to borrow nor to lend. I hadn't actually said To thine own self be true, but that was certainly the thrust of my comments.

  Afterward, through the medium of what one might call sober reflection, I wondered if I hadn't overstated the case. I hadn't said anything I didn't believe, but perhaps I had glossed over the fact that writing for certain markets demands a familiarity with the requirements of those markets.

  This is especially true for the neophyte writer who is aiming at one of the more accessible markets?gothics, let us say, or light romances, or confession stories. I devoted considerable space in Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print to a discussion of how to analyze the requirements of a particular fictional genre and how to write one's own story within such a framework. Wasn't I being inconsistent, saying this in print and then loftily advising this chap to go follow his own star?

  Years ago, when I worked for a literary agent, I had dealings with a would-be writer who was possessed of enormous energy, a serviceable way with prose and dialogue, and the survival instincts of a lemming. All he ostensibly wanted was to see his work in print, yet all he did was sabotage himself at every turn. Advised that confessions constituted a particularly receptive market for newcomers, he produced several, but insisted upon writing them from a male viewpoint. At the time, a confession magazine might publish one male-viewpoint story an issue, if they happened to run across one they really liked. By writing his confessions from a male point of view, the man was deliberately making things harder for himself.

  I had occasion to remember all of this just a few days ago when I began work on a new novel. The basic plot notion was one that had suggested itself to me some months ago?a girl's mother dies, her father remarries, and the girl becomes convinced that her stepmother is trying to kill her. I hadn't given the idea any conscious thought in months, but evidently my subconscious had been playing with it while I was at work on something else, and I found bits and pieces of the plot coming to me rapidly.

  I also found myself with decisions to make. Did I want an urban or a rural setting? Would I write the book in the first or the third person? Single or multiple viewpoint?


  I don't always have to make decisions of this sort. Quite a few of the novels I've written over the years have recounted the continuing adventures of series characters, and in such a case a lot of these questions are predetermined. When I write a mystery about burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, for example, I know I'm going to use the first person. I know, too, who the character is and how he operates, where he lives, who his friends are, and so on. A series involves turning out books that are the same only different, and while that requirement presents problems of its own, it does eliminate certain decisions.

  A year ago I spent a week in Savannah, where I scouted locations with the intention of using the city in a novel sooner or later. When I first got the idea for The Stepmother, I felt it would fit quite neatly into that charming Georgia seaport.

  Two factors changed my mind. First off, I recognized that there were already elements of plot and character in The Stepmother that were evocative of Ariel, a recent novel of mine. Ariel was set in an old house in Charleston, and while Charleston and Savannah are by no means indistinguishable one from the other, they do have points of similarity. This might not have kept me from setting the book in Savannah if I had been convinced it would work best there, but it did predispose me to look for another setting.

  As I thought further about the book, a second reason for getting away from Savannah came to mind. I decided I wanted to make the girl a New Yorker out of her element. I saw her as a child who has grown up in Greenwich Village, not so much precocious as sophisticated. Suppose the family moved to the country? Someplace fairly isolated, say. Delaware County, Schoharie County, one of those forgotten areas of upstate New York a few hours from the city and hence out of commuting range.

  With the choice of location, more of the plot immediately began to take form. Why would the family move from the Village out into the middle of nowhere? Maybe the father's a writer who just made a lot of money and wants to play landed gentleman for a change. I began to get a sense of the house and grounds. I decided there would be an old overgrown cemetery on the property, and I saw a few ways this would fit into the plot.

  At this point I wrote out a few hundred words of notes, talking to myself at the typewriter, and a couple of days later I started actually writing the book. I wrote half a dozen pages and stopped, because I had another decision to make.

  First person or third person? I had automatically begun the book in the third person, writing the opening scene, in which the family first visits the country house, from Naomi's point of view. (I had by this time selected a name for her).

  But was that the best choice?

  I stayed away from the typewriter for several days weighing the pros and cons. First-person narration comes very naturally to me, and I found the prospect seductive in this instance. I'm much better able to get inside the skin of my lead character when I write in the first person. It has always seemed to me the most natural voice for fiction, and I thought it might be particularly useful in The Stepmother for a couple of reasons.

  For one, I had a very good sense of Naomi and felt she would be a terrific character. The more effectively and compellingly I could present her to the reader, the more gripping and engaging the book would be. For another, I felt it might be difficult to get inside Naomi as well in the third person.

  Ariel was written in the third person, but there were two elements present which facilitated my getting inside the character and making her come alive. I used lengthy extracts from a diary she was keeping, which in effect constituted first-person sections within a third-person narrative. I also had quite a few scenes in which she conversed intimately with Erskine, a classmate of hers, and the relationship between the two kids was one of the more interesting elements of the book.

  I didn't want to have Naomi keep a diary, partly because I didn't want to write Ariel all over again, partly because I did not envision her as a diarist. Nor did I expect her to develop a close relationship with a classmate at the new school in the country; on the contrary, I saw her as essentially isolated, contemptuous of her new schoolmates and rejected by them in turn.

  So why not switch to first person? Well, that presented problems of another sort. For openers, I'd be limited to scenes in which Naomi was present. The reader couldn't be privy to any information that she didn't know. It seemed to me that the sort of suspense novel I was writing worked best if the reader occasionally knew things the lead character did not know.

  It also seemed to me that the book would be more effective if the reader was never entirely certain whether the peril Naomi fancied herself to be in was real or imaginary. The use of first-person narration didn't automatically rule out this ambivalence, but it made it more difficult to bring it off.

  One other thing. Suspense would be further heightened, I felt, if the reader didn't know everything that Naomi knew, and if he wasn't aware of everything she did. Perhaps there might be a point where suspicion was raised about Naomi's having been responsible for her own mother's death, say. While it's possible for a narrator to withhold certain information from the reader?I've done that sort of thing in detective stories, certainly?I didn't think it would work well here.

  So I decided to go with my original impulse and write the book in the third person. And, in the course of making the decision, I thought up bits of plot business that would enable Naomi to reveal herself to the reader through interaction with other characters. I decided there could be an old man who walks along that particular road every day, a rustic who's a source of information on the area, and he and Naomi could develop some sort of friendship. I had already thought she might run off to New York and be brought back by a private detective, and I now saw how she could have further dealings with the detective. An occasional letter to her best friend in New York might serve a function similar to that of Ariel's diary.

  And, in considering and rejecting the first person, I became increasingly aware of the need for writing the book from multiple viewpoint, and got a sense of some of the scenes that would have to be written, and of some of the characters from whose points of view they would be shown.

  One consideration, I must admit, was that novels of the sort I was writing are most commonly written in the third person. But I did not regard this fact as evidence of a requirement, or elect to go along with the majority out of a desire to make my publisher happy. Instead, I learned in the course of making my decision why third-person narration predominates, and found that it does so for very sound reasons.

  I thought it might be interesting to share the factors involved in making this sort of literary decision, and to show how the decision-making process itself sparks the invention of plot and character elements. I still think Polonius was quite right, and that To thine own self be true ought to be every writer's first principle, but any number of decisions nevertheless need to be made in order to be true to one's own vision, whether they are arrived at intuitively or through the sort of processes I've described.

  You'll excuse me, won't you? Now that I've made all these decisions, I've got to sit down and write the damned thing.

  CHAPTER 4

  Novel Approaches

  WHEN I first got started in this ridiculous profession, I wrote nothing but short stories. For a year after my first sale I hammered out crime fiction, a couple of thousand words at a clip. I peddled some of it for a cent a word, some for a cent and a half a word, and watched much of it go unsold.

  After a year of this, I finally got courageous enough to write a novel. It took me two or three weeks to write it, sold to the first publisher who saw it, and brought me a vast sense of accomplishment and an advance of two thousand dollars. It did not make me rich and famous, but I was a youth of nineteen summers at the time and as callow as they come, and fame and fortune would have spoiled me for sure.

  I've recounted all this because I think my initial approach was typical for most beginning writers. We start out writing short stories because it certainly looks like the easiest way to break in. The short story is a compa
ct and controllable form. One can grasp it all at once. It's short?that's how it got its name?and it won't take a year and a day to write. A person can do a few dozen of them, learning as he goes along, in less time than it might take him to write a novel.

  These arguments sound logical enough, but they overlook some basic facts. Foremost of these is that the short story is infinitely more difficult to sell than the novel. The market for short fiction was minuscule when I was starting out twenty years ago. Since then it has consistently shrunk to the point of invisibility. Every year there are fewer magazines buying short stories and still more hopeful writers submitting manuscripts to them.

  The economics of the short-story business are discouraging at best. Hitchcock and Queen, my markets for short fiction, pay the same nickel a word they doled out twenty years ago. The confession mags pay a shade less than they did then, and are less eager to buy than they used to be. And each year it seems as though a few more of the top magazines have (a) gone out of business, (b) discontinued fiction, or (c) stopped reading unsolicited manuscripts.

  I don't mean to talk anyone out of writing short stories. I wouldn't go on writing them myself if I didn't find them a great source of satisfaction. It's more my intention to suggest that the novel is a much better place for the beginner to get started.

  But wait a moment. My vaunted writer's imagination sees a lot of you waving your hands in the air. Ask your questions, then, and perhaps I can answer them.

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  Isn't it harder to write a novel than a short story?

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  No. Novels aren't harder. What they are is longer.

  That may be a very obvious answer, but that doesn't make it any less true. It's the sheer length of a novel that the beginning writer is apt to find intimidating. Matter of fact, you don't have to be a beginner to be intimidated in this fashion. I'm writing this chapter during a momentary respite from a World War II novel which will ultimately run to five or six hundred pages. My suspense novels generally stop at two hundred pages or thereabouts, and I had a lot of trouble starting this book because its vastness scared the adverbs out of me.