Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  At the present time, I'm a fairly strong believer in writing under one's own name. It has taken me over twenty years and the occasional use of at least that many pseudonyms to arrive at that conclusion. Before I explain my position, perhaps we can examine some of the reasons why a pen name can be useful.

  1. THE AUTHOR'S OWN NAME IS UNSUITABLE. A writer's name can be a liability for any of several reasons. It may be too similar to that of an established writer. Journalist Tom Wolfe is evidently willing to chance confusion with the late novelist Thomas Wolfe, and there are several John Gardners and Charles Williamses who write for a living, but why tempt fate?

  A pen name may be indicated if one's own name is unpronounceable or somehow ridiculous. Remember, though, that nomenclatural absurdity is largely subjective; consider the pop singer who rose to fame after changing his own inoffensive name to Engelbert Humperdinck.

  Sometimes a lackluster name clamors to be changed. Martin Smith published several mysteries under his own name, and while the books were excellent nobody could remember who he was. (The situation was compounded by the fact that his friends all call him Bill.) In the course of time, Smith's agent dubbed him Martin Cruz Smith, interposing the author's mother's maiden name, and his first book under that name, Nightwing, soared on to bestsellerdom. Perhaps it would have done so regardless, but the added Cruz certainly didn't hurt.

  2. THE AUTHOR HAS A SPECIFIC REASON TO AVOID RECOGNITION. I know at least one writer who uses a pen name solely to shield his identity from his ex-wife. If she knew he was publishing novels, she'd almost certainly petition for an increase in alimony, and she'd very likely get it. By using a pen name, this author gets to keep his literary earnings.

  Of course he still pays taxes on them, and lists them on his tax return. To do otherwise would be to risk a jail term for tax evasion.

  3. THE AUTHOR IS WRITING DIFFERENT TYPES OF BOOKS. This is a standard argument for employing a pen name. Suppose you're writing juveniles for one publisher, shoot-'em-up thrillers for another. Won't your readers be upset to learn that the same person's writing gory stuff on one typewriter and sweet verses about bunny rabbits on the other? Won't you be better off doing the juveniles as Hillary Everbright, the rough stuff as Studd Bludgeon?

  I'm not sure it matters. Most readers won't even notice what you're doing in fields they themselves don't read, and won't hold it against you if they do. But this maintenance of different literary identities for different kinds of writing is a time-honored principle.

  4. THE AUTHOR IS TOO PROLIFIC. Some writers use several names because they publish several books a year. They feel that neither the bookselling industry nor the reading public will take them seriously if all these books are identifiable as the produce of a single writer.

  I don't know how valid this is. On the one hand, I've seen reviewers take a shot at this latest potboiler cranked out in nothing flat by Writer X. On the other, over the long run your books help each other. Fans want to read everything you've written, and have an easier time of it if they know what to look for. I don't think Isaac Asimov is hurt by having published so many books of so many different sorts, all under his own name. Yet I could name other writers who have lost credibility with critics in this fashion.

  5. THE AUTHOR WANTS TO LOOK LIKE AN EXPERT. Years ago, I wrote a series of books that purported to be case histories of various anonymous souls. The subjects of these case histories were indeed rather more than anonymous. They were fictional, made up out of the whole cloth, with their sexual histories displayed for the reader's education and/or titillation. I used a pen name on these books?you bet your bippy I used a pen name?and the pen name had an M.D. (In this particular instance, the publisher knew the name was a phony but thought the author was a legitimate physician operating under an alias. Ah, what a tangled web-)

  It is quite lawful, I was told, to use a doctor's pen name so long as one does not usurp the prerogatives of a doctor. Since I neither diagnosed nor prescribed, I was presumably within my rights. As far as the ethics of all of this may have been concerned, I'm not sure there's any good sense in imposing questions of ethics upon a profession which has muddled along for centuries without any.

  More recently, I used a female pen name on a novel written from a woman's point of view, thinking that the book would be better received for my doing so. I don't think I would take this particular position now.

  6. THE AUTHOR IS NOT PROUD OF WHAT HE HAS WRITTEN. Here, finally, is the strongest single reason for using a false name. When one is well aware that one is publishing trash, one can salvage at least a modicum of self-respect by refraining from publishing it under one's own name.

  An objection comes quickly to mind. If it's tripe, why publish it at all? Why not limit oneself to the publication of work one is proud to see printed under one's own name?

  This is a good argument, logically unassailable, but I don't know that it is too closely grounded in reality. This is no easy business for the neophyte, and to publish anything, trash or treasure, is very much an accomplishment. The beginning writer must make it his first priority simply to write and get paid for it. In the greater majority of cases, he cannot expect to be doing so at the top of his form. Someday he may write first-rate work for first-rate markets, but that may take a while.

  In the meantime, he may write and publish a lot of lesser work. He may not be actively ashamed of this work, may indeed take a professional's pride in it, but may still recognize it as unworthy. Why shouldn't he reserve his own name for work of which he is altogether unashamed?

  There's a thin line here. A person's reach does exceed his grasp, after all, and if you wait for perfection you'll wait forever, publishing your entire life's work under one pseudonym or another. Similarly, there are books I liked well enough when I wrote them but regard as inferior work now; ought I to regret having published them under my own name? I do not regret having done so, any more than I regret being a better writer now than I was twenty years ago.

  As I started to say earlier, I've come grudgingly to the position that a pen name ought not to be used unless it seems necessary. I am able to see now that I used pen names as a way to avoid taking responsibility for my own work, not in the eyes of others as much as in my own.

  By the same token, I got a kick out of the element of deception that is inherent in pseudonymous writing. Pen names provided me with a vehicle for escaping the prison of self. The lure of a false identity always appealed to me, and there was a time when I traveled around the country under a pen name, acting out in a rather bizarre fashion. I had two of my pen names carrying on an affair, dedicating books to one another. It was all a touch schizoid, now that I think back on it.

  I don't know that I would go so far as to say I regret it. Pen names hurt me professionally in two ways that I can think of. They diluted my efforts and thus kept me from building a following as quickly as I might have, and they allowed me to spend more time writing recognizably inferior work than I might otherwise have done. All the same, the freedom of a pen name may have constituted a liberating influence at the time; perhaps, knowing I intended to publish everything under my own name, I'd have tightened up and written nothing at all.

  Should you use a pen name? I wouldn't presume to advise you. Your own circumstances, like everyone else's, are special. The choice must be entirely your own.

  CHAPTER 11

  Writing With Two Heads

  COLLABORATION ALWAYS seems like such a good idea. Two heads, after all, are purported to be superior to one, especially if they're attached to two different bodies. Why shouldn't a piece of writing go faster and more smoothly if two minds conceive it and two pairs of hands commit it to paper? Nobody's perfect, and if one combines one's talents with another writer, perhaps the match will be complementary, with each making up for the other's deficiencies. With luck, the union may even prove synergistic, with the collaborative persona of two writers yoked in harness greater than the sum of their separate abilities. Where, after all, would Bea
umont be without Fletcher? Gilbert without Sullivan? Abbott without Costello? Jekyll without Hyde? Leopold without Loeb?

  Ahem. By collaboration I mean those joint ventures wherein two writers work together. This might well seem obvious, but for the fact that the opportunity for collaboration most frequently presented to us is something rather different. Typically, we are offered this sort of chance by a bore at a cocktail party.

  You know, we ought to get together, a chap will say upon learning my occupation. I got some stories you wouldn't believe. My problem is I have tons of ideas but I'm not a writer; I can't put them on paper. So what we'll do is I'll give you the ideas and you'll do the writing and we'll split the money. How's that?

  Suppose we switch roles? I'm apt to say, particularly in the party's later stages. Suppose I give you my ideas, and you do the writing. And then we'll split the money.

  Whoever's ideas we use, I'm not inclined to call this sort of literary partnership collaboration. It's a good deal closer to what the non-fictioneer calls ghostwriting. And on occasion it's exactly that.

  I know of one instance, for example, in which it was decided that what this country most needed was a novel of political intrigue by a muckraking Washington columnist, since deceased. Unfortunately the man in question was either unequipped or disinclined to write such a novel. He was, however, quite willing to see his name below the title, so a competent novelist was quickly found to handle the actual chore of hatching a plot, dreaming up characters, and tapping out a few hundred pages of unexceptional prose and dialogue. The columnist's contribution, in addition to the use of his name, consisted presumably in his sharing some inside poop with the writer and reading the final manuscript to make sure its reflection of the Washington scene contained no obvious clinkers.

  In this case the book sold reasonably well, so none of the parties concerned had reason to complain of the financial result. Still, the process was substantially less collaborative than the ghosting of a movie star's autobiography, in which case the star at least provides the story and a working version of the facts. It was certainly not a matter of the work being shared by the two principals of the arrangement.

  Such genuine collaboration seems to work out much more often for play-wrights than it does for prose writers. I'm not certain why this should be true, but it may well be that theatrical writing, even when one man does all of it, is apt to have a collective aspect to it. One takes it almost for granted that rewriting will play a substantial role in the process of readying the play for production, and that any number of persons will offer input in this direction. Producers and directors will suggest changes. Actors will propose improved versions of their lines. Finally, the process of actually performing the play, first in a bare theater and then before an audience, will indicate where changes must be made if the play is to succeed.

  Thus there's a long record of theatrical collaboration. This seems to be particularly true with comedy, and there are some comedic playwrights who can't seem to work effectively by themselves, George S. Kaufman having been perhaps the most obvious example.

  Bill Hoffman, a playwright friend of mine, spent three years collaborating with another playwright and found the process quite successful. One of us would sit at the typewriter and we batted each line around before it got written. The process seems to stimulate both of us. Our abilities complemented one another to a certain extent; he was a little better at storyline development and I was probably a little better at actual dialogue, but by the time something was actually written down it was impossible to say who had contributed what. Everything amounted to a joint effort.

  I know two women who write novels in this fashion, Barbara Miller and Valerie Greco. One of them sits at the typewriter, the other stands alongside, and they discuss and come to agreement on every sentence before it gets typed. Curiously, I find this perfectly comprehensible as a means of producing work for stage or screen, and the image of a pair of sitcom writers swigging coffee and tossing gags back and forth strikes me as quite the way that sort of thing ought to be done. Yet I simply cannot imagine writing a short story?or, God help us, a whole novel?in this fashion.

  There are, however, any number of other ways for fiction writers to share the work. A few years back Donald E. Westlake and Brian Garfield decided to collaborate on a book called Gangway!, a comic thriller (Westlake's forte) set in the Old West (Garfield's milieu).

  Here's Westlake's description of the process: First we sat down and discussed the whole thing at length. Then I wrote a fifteen-page outline of what we had discussed. I gave this to Brian, and he expanded it to forty pages, putting in all the historical context and everything. Then he gave it back to me and I cut it back down to twenty-five pages. At this point we were thinking screenplay, and this version was shown around as a treatment. When it didn't fly, we decided to do it as a novel first.

  I wrote the first draft, limiting myself to action and dialogue?not where they were or what they were wearing, just what they did and said. My draft ran about thirty thousand words. I gave it to Brian and he doubled it, turning each of my pages into two pages, putting in all the background and such. Then he gave me his sixty-thousand-word version and I edited it, and I gave it back to him and he edited it, and then we gave the whole mess to an editor.

  It sounds, I ventured, like five times as much work as sitting down and writing a book.

  Yes, he agreed, and about a quarter as much fun, and for half the money.

  Two writers I know collaborate frequently on short stories, discussing a plot at length before one of them sits down and writes it. Since they live three thousand miles apart, one or the other of them does the actual writing unassisted. Even so, the leading profitmaker on many of their joint ventures is Ma Bell.

  Years ago, I wrote some novels in collaboration, including three with Don Westlake and one with Hal Dresner, who has since gone on to write screenplays. At that time we were all earning a curious living writing softcore sex novels, a medium that lent itself tolerably well to the collaborative process.

  These collaborations could hardly have been simpler. There was no prior discussion of plot, no careful development of outline. One of us sat down and wrote a first chapter and gave it to the other, who wrote a second chapter and gave it back. The book loped along in this fashion until ten chapters had been written and it had come, as all things do, to an end.

  It was all great fun. Don and I tended to leave one another with impossible cliff-hangers, killing off one another's chief characters at will. Hal and I devised a La Ronde form that made sex-novel collaboration almost effortless?i.e., the viewpoint character in the first chapter had, uh, a carnal connection with someone, who went on to become the viewpoint character in the second chapter, wherein he or she got it on with the person destined to star in Chapter 3. And so on.

  These collaborative experiments led in due course to the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, the Great Sex Novel Poker Game. This ill-advised venture consisted of half a dozen of us, all writers of this sort of trash and all fond at the time of nightlong poker sessions. Operating on the premise that any of us could produce a chapter in an hour or so, we met for a night of poker during which five of us sat around the table while one of us at a time went upstairs and wrote fifteen or twenty pages of The Book. By the time the night was done?or the following day, or whatever?we would each have contributed two chapters, the book would be finished, and a division of the spoils would make us all winners, even those of us who had proved unlucky at cards.

  This well-laid plan went speedily agley. After five more or less successful chapters, one of our number, his brain an object-lesson in the folly of amphetamine abuse, wrote his two chapters back to back and went home. Unfortunately, his contribution turned out to be absolute gibberish, and the writer who followed him, instead of proclaiming as much, spent hours trying to write a sensible sequel to it all. The book, in short, did not turn out well. I don't remember how I did at the card table.

  Since then, I've use
d collaboration?or the prospect of collaboration?largely as a means of avoiding work. If there's something. I really want to write, I'll probably sooner or later sit down and write it. If, on the other hand, there's something I recognize as a good idea but don't really want to mess with, I can propose it as a subject for collaboration, secure in the knowledge that I'll never have to have anything further to do with it.

  We ought to collaborate on this, a friend and I will agree, and then we'll spend a jolly hour tossing ideas to and fro, and that'll be the end of it. Because we'll each keep having other things to do, yet neither of us will feel at all guilty, because it's something we can always get around to eventually, whenever we both happen to be between books at the same time, and in the mood to collaborate, and like that.

  A case in point occurred a few years ago, when I came up with an excellent if incompletely formed idea for a book involving global intrigue during World War II. It wasn't really my kind of book, yet there was a lot of strength in the basic idea, so I talked about it with Brian Garfield and proposed it as a subject for collaboration. Brian happily agreed, and we discussed it some, and that was the end of that.

  Except, of course, that it wasn't. Some years later I got a handle on another element of the plot, which made it an even stronger notion, though still not really my kind of thing. I talked it over with Brian and decided to go ahead with it alone, since as a collaboration it would never have gotten written. This way it did get written, but it turned out that it really and truly was not my kind of book, and what I wrote wasn't terribly good.

  At which point it turned back into a collaboration, in this case with yet another writer, Harold King. This was his kind of book, and he liked a lot of what he saw in my first draft and had excellent ideas of his own to bring to bear upon it, so we talked it over and he went to work on the book. And it should finally make its appearance in the stores sometime during the fall or winter.