Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  Poets have an edge here. The prospect of making a living from poetry is so remote as to be nonexistent, and that's very liberating. Since every poet's a financial failure, no odium attaches to such failure. Only a minuscule proportion of skilled poets ever have their works published in book form, and they make no more than a pittance from such publication. So the poet who circulates his verses privately, or pays to have them printed, is less likely to feel qualms about it than the fiction writer who does the same thing. When all poets are essentially amateurs, one's not ashamed to be less than professional. One's friends and neighbors probably don't know the names or work of many widely published poets. They're not forever reading in the gossip columns of staggering sums paid for film rights to a sonnet sequence. Poetry, like virtue, is its own reward.

  Where's the reward in unpublished fiction?

  As far as I've been able to determine, it does not lie in the sheer joy of the act of writing.

  Because writing's not much fun.

  I really wonder why that is. Again, comparison with other art forms is instructive. It's been my observation that painters, both professional and amateur, love to paint. They get genuine enjoyment out of the physical act of smearing paint on canvas. Sometimes they're blocked, sometimes they're frustrated, but when they're painting the very process of creation is a joy to them.

  Same thing certainly holds true for musicians. They only seem to feel alive when they're performing. The jazz musicians I've known spend their afternoons practicing scales and such, work all night performing, then jam for free at an after-hours joint until dawn, just for the sheer pleasure of it.

  In sharp contrast, almost every writer I know will go to great lengths to avoid being in the same room with his typewriter. Those of us who are driven to produce great quantities of manuscript don't necessarily get any real pleasure out of the act; it's just that we feel worse when we don't write. It's not the carrot but the stick that gets most of us moving.

  I don't mean to suggest that there's no positive pleasure connected with writing. I enjoy getting ideas, for example?both the initial plot germs and the ideas that develop in the course of extended work on a novel. And I very much enjoy having written; the satisfaction of having completed a taxing piece of work can be monumental.

  This latter pleasure, come to think of it, is a negative one, isn't it? When I'm delirious with joy over having finished something, my joy stems in large part from the fact that I do not have to work on it any more, that the dratted thing is over and done with.

  So it's nice being about to write, and it's nice to have written. But is there no way to enjoy writing while it's going on?

  One thing that impedes enjoyment, I would think, is that writing's hard work. Painters and musicians work hard, too, but there's a difference. You can't really relax and go with the flow while you're writing?at least I can't, and if anyone can show me how, I'll be delighted to learn. Writing demands all of my attention and focuses me entirely in the present. I can't let my mind wander, and if my mind wanders in spite of itself I find I can't write, and when I want to write and can't write I find myself possessed of murderous rage.

  When a painting doesn't go well the artist can keep on painting and cover it up. When a musician's not at his best, the notes he plays float off on the air and he can forget about them.

  When I'm off my form, the garbage I've written just sits there on the page and thumbs its nose at me. And when it gets into print that way, it's there for all the world to see, forever.

  There are some writers who enjoy writing. Isaac Asimov, for one, seems to enjoy every minute of it, and there may be others similarly blessed. And everybody enjoys it now and then, when the words flow effortlessly and you feel plugged into the Universal Mind and the stuff on the page is worlds better than what you had in mind when you sat down. That doesn't happen very often, but I'll tell you it's a kick when it does.

  Sometimes I think the Sunday writer enjoys a great advantage over those of us who have to do this stuff to put bread on the table. What constantly mitigates his enjoyment is his desire to give up his amateur standing and turn professional. I don't know that every foot soldier carries in his knapsack the baton of a marshal of France. I do know that, when it comes to writing, everybody wants to get into the act, and every Sunday writer thinks his typewriter ought to be able to turn out a bestseller.

  Maybe it just has to be that way. Maybe we can't put up with the hard work of writing in the first place unless we're goaded by the urge to publish.

  I would certainly hope, though, that Sunday writers can avoid equating failure to publish with failure as a writer. If you are gaining satisfaction from writing, if you are exercising and improving your talent, if you are committing to paper your special feelings and perceptions, then you can damn well call yourself a success. Whether you wind up in print, whether you ever see money for your efforts, is and ought to be incidental.

  No, I don't feel guilty for writing my column each month. It may well be that many of my readers will never publish anything, but so what? Perhaps some of you will write a little better for having read one of my efforts.

  Ê

  You're just encouraging them in their folly.

  Ê

  Am I indeed? That presupposes that writing stories which will not ultimately be published is folly, and that's an assumption I'm unwilling to grant. And the very word folly calls to mind a line of William Blake's?If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

  I don't know that persistence on the part of the Sunday writer leads to wisdom. I don't even know that it will lead to publication. But it can definitely lead to satisfaction, and I'd regard that as no small reward.

  CHAPTER 7

  Dear Joy

  Dear Joy,

  By now I suppose you're pretty well settled in at college. When I talked to your dad recently he did some pardonable boasting about your scholarship, and I'd like to offer my congratulations.

  He also said you were thinking about becoming a writer. On that score I don't know whether congratulations or condolences are in order. As an alternative, let me furnish you with a little unsolicited advice.

  The first point that comes to mind is the question of what a future writer ought to study in college. When I went to school I automatically majored in English Literature; since I intended to write the stuff, it seemed fitting and proper to find out first what other people had done in that area.

  I don't suppose this did me any discernible harm, but neither am I sure it did me much good. I don't think there's any question that writers ought to be readers, and I've never known a professional writer who wasn't a virtually compulsive reader, but studying literature and reading are not the same thing. As in most academic disciplines, the student of literature undergoes a course of study which most prepares him to become a teacher of literature. This is not a bad thing to be, nor are teaching and writing mutually exclusive; a lot of writers who don't make the grade, or are emotionally unsuited to life as a free-lancer, find teaching a comfortable occupation.

  The only reason not to major in English is that it might keep you from studying something else that you're more interested in. The most important single thing you can do at college is pursue your own interests, whatever they might turn out to be and however remotely they might appear to relate to a career in writing. I don't honestly think it makes a bit of difference what you study?just so long as it's what you want to study. Humanities or hard sciences, history or botany or philosophy or calculus, whatever excites you intellectually at the time is the most useful thing for you as a student and, ultimately, as a writer.

  As a corollary to the principle of following your own interests, you would do well to find out who the most provocative professors are at your school. Then contrive to take at least one course from each of them, whatever the hell they're teaching. The specific facts learned in a classroom, the content of the required reading, rarely lingers in the mind too long after graduation. But the sti
mulation of intellectual interchange with an exciting and exceptional mind is something which will be with you forever.

  Nobody can teach you to write, not on a college campus or anywhere else. But this doesn't mean that writing courses are a waste of time.

  On the contrary, they're a source of time?and this may very well be their most important function. They provide you with time and academic credit for your own experimentation at the typewriter. You might be doing this writing anyway, stealing the time from other courses. When you take a writing course you're expected to devote a certain amount of time to writing, and that's often useful, just as the need to produce assignments on demand is an inordinately valuable discipline.

  Most writing courses involve the submission of manuscripts which are read aloud to the class, by the instructor or the individual authors, after which they are subjected to group criticism. I hope someone improves on this format soon. Prose is not written to be read aloud, and the effect of a short story so presented has little to do with its effect in print. Even with these limitations, writing courses can be very valuable for you, less for the criticism you'll receive from others than for the opportunity you'll have to observe what doesn't work in other people's writing.

  This is an important point. The best and easiest way to learn writing by reading consists of exposing yourself to large doses of inferior amateur work. It's easier to spot a flaw than comprehend the reasons an unblemished piece is flawless. Nothing helped my own writing like a few months of work reading unsolicited manuscripts at a literary agency. Every day I worked my way through mountains of swill; at night I sat at home writing, and I knew what mistakes to avoid in my own work.

  Try to read your classmates' efforts in manuscript. Seeing beats hearing when it comes to teaching yourself how prose and dialogue work on the page. And take criticisms of your own work, from fellow students or instructors, with a generous splash of soy sauce. Shrugging off their sass will prepare you for the task of ignoring the carping of editors and publishers in years to come.

  Whether you take many writing courses or not, I hope you'll do as much writing as possible during your college years. As far as what you ought to write, well, that depends on you.

  Prospective writers, in and out of school, approach the profession from different circumstances and with different goals. Some have a particular perspective which they want to be able to render in fiction. Others want first and foremost to establish themselves as writers; just what they wind up writing is a secondary consideration.

  If you're of the first sort, the best advice I can give you is to avoid listening to any advice, mine included. You already know, on some intuitive level, what it is that you want to do. Go ahead and do it, at your own pace and in your own way. Take all the time you need for your writing and let its form and content be whatever proves most suitable and natural to you.

  As far as commercial considerations are concerned, don't be concerned with them. It is exceedingly rare that anything produced by a college writer has any objective value, either commercially or artistically. While you may prove a happy exception, it's not terribly likely that anything you turn out in the next four years will make you rich and famous. This is a very good thing for you. It means you ought to consider yourself completely free from commercial requirements, at least for the time being.

  But maybe your main interest lies in satisfying commercial requirements. Maybe you want chiefly to become a writer, a professional wordsmith. This needn't mean that what you write will be of less artistic value. It's more a question of where you're coming from as a writer.

  When I was your age?and you can't imagine how I hate the sound of that phrase?all I wanted to do was get published. I wanted to see my name in print and on checks. I already knew that a writer was the only thing worth being and I was impatient to go ahead and officially become one.

  If you find yourself similarly obsessed, perhaps some advice might not be amiss. First of all, write as much as possible. The more active you are the quicker you'll get into the habit of developing ideas and encouraging them to hatch into stories.

  Study the markets. I think it's possible to become market-oriented without cheapening yourself as a writer. I don't think you should try to teach yourself to write confessions or juveniles or whatever because you know there's a market for them. Instead, read a lot of different kinds of magazines until you find some that contain the kind of stories that you think you might enjoy producing, and might be proud of at the same time. You'll never do good work in a field you can't enjoy as a reader and respect as a writer.

  Act like a pro. Learn the proper format for your manuscripts and use it when you type them. Submit things. Send out the pieces you write, send them out over and over again. I literally papered a wall with rejection slips my first two years in college, and if nothing else it established my own self-image as a writer, albeit not a terribly successful one. I suppose it also helped me get used to rejection. And then one wonderful day an editor asked me to revise a story, and he subsequently bought it, and all that acting as if paid off. All of a sudden I was a professional writer.

  Most campuses offer a variety of literary and journalistic activities?the college newspaper, the literary magazine, that sort of thing. Students with an interest in writing commonly get involved in these areas. They can be very rewarding, but only if you're interested in them for their own sake. I'd recommend that you choose your extracurricular activities the same way you choose your courses, for their intrinsic interest to you.

  The time I put in editing the college paper was valuable to me in several ways. It helped me learn to write to space requirements, taught me to work against the pressure of a deadline, and assured me that I did not want to spend my life on a newspaper. But the most important extracurricular activity for me was hanging out. The college I attended, like the one you've chosen, was a small innovative liberal-arts college with a bizarre assortment of students and a comfortingly eccentric faculty. The personal growth and expansion I achieved through contact with all of these madmen and crazy ladies was far more useful to me over the years than anything I ever acquired in a classroom. And that's been the experience of every writer I've known?and most non-writers too, as far as that goes.

  It may occur to you that, while writing is certainly what you want to do eventually, it would be nice to be able to make a living after you graduate. You may think, and may be advised, that you ought to make specific preparations for a career so that you can support yourself while you're getting established as a writer.

  Don't waste your time. You may indeed wind up holding any number of jobs after college, but they'll take care of themselves when the time comes. Planning now for a non-writing career when you actually want to become a writer is no more than preparing for failure. Spend the present growing, and learning, and writing, and enjoying yourself. And let tomorrow take care of tomorrow.

  Have fun, Joy. I don't expect you to believe this, but there will come a time when these four years will be the good old days. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself?and thanks for providing me with this month's column.

  Love,Larry

  CHAPTER 8

  How to Read Like a Writer

  WHILE LEADING a writing seminar at Antioch College, I had a chance to renew my friendship with Nolan Miller, in whose writing workshop I made some of my first attempts at fiction right around the time Teddy Roosevelt led the lads up San Juan Hill.

  We talked of students, then and now. They all want to be told whether they have talent, Nolan said. Talent's no guarantee of success, of course. The most talented writer in the world won't get anyplace if he lacks the discipline to exploit his talent. But they always want to know if they have it or not, and I never tell a student he lacks talent.

  Why's that? I wondered.

  Because I simply can't tell. I may be able to detect talent on occasion but I can never be certain of its absence. I can't know that a man or woman lacks the capacity to grow, to develop, to improve. Besides, he a
dded, I don't think it does them any harm to try their hand at writing. If nothing else, it makes them much better readers.

  Years ago I heard the perhaps apocryphal story of the great violinist. I've recounted his approach in Chapter 12, It Takes More Than Talent. Nolan's is gentler, and I very much prefer it.

  But do we actually become better readers by virtue of our efforts at writing? That would certainly seem to be a logical assumption. Personal knowledge of how a thing is done ought to give one a finer appreciation of that same thing when it is done by someone else. I am well aware, certainly, that my musician friend hears music very differently than I do, that my mother has a fuller experience in an art gallery as a result of the years she's spent painting.

  This principle applies outside of the arts as well. There's a reason beyond their celebrity value for employing retired athletes as sports announcers. Having played the game, they know it better than you or I.

  When it comes to reading, I'd have to say that most of us are pretty good at it to begin with. The one common denominator I've observed among writers of my acquaintance is a longstanding appetite for the printed word. Most of us have been well-nigh compulsive readers all our lives. Don Westlake once admitted that if there's nothing else in the house, he'll go read the ingredients label on the bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Over the years I've met a couple of writers who are not like this, but their number's so few as to qualify them for the endangered species list.

  While I've always read voraciously, the nature of my reading has changed considerably over the years. In my college years I went through books like bluefish through a school of menhaden, chewing up and bolting down everything that came within my reach. In a sense, I read a great many books with the determination of a smoker breaking in a new pipe, as if each book I read would somehow season and improve me. When I didn't like a book I simply lowered my head and bulled my way through it anyway, as if setting it aside half-finished would be somehow immoral.