Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  Finally, another project in which I'm currently engaged was done collaboratively not as a way of avoiding work but to avoid avoiding it. I'd been entertaining the idea of a guidebook to vegetarian and natural food restaurants for a while, but I doubt I'd have got anywhere with it if Cheryl Morrison and I had not entered into collaboration upon it. The problem with this book was that it would require little bits of work here and there over the course of a great many months. Because I would always have a primary project on the table, the guidebook would have been lost in the shuffle. And the same thing would have happened if Cheryl had undertaken the whole project herself.

  As it stands, each of us feels an obligation to the other. Thus the work gets shared, and, a little at a time, it's getting done, largely because neither of us is prepared to let the other down.

  I haven't tried to tell you how to collaborate. Indeed, on balance I'd probably advise you against trying it altogether, unless you really and truly feel you'll write more effectively as someone's partner. There have been any number of viable partnerships?Fern Michaels, Wade Miller, Manning Coles, Ellery Queen, Burdick and Lederer?but most of the time the desire to collaborate stems from the hope of making the process of fictional creation less lonely, and most of the time that just doesn't seem to be possible. The Concerto for Four Hands and Two Typewriters has its appeal, but for most of us writing is probably destined to remain a solitary occupation. Like dying, it seems to be something we have to do on our own.

  CHAPTER 12

  It Takes More Than Talent

  IT CONTINUES to astonish me what a widespread and enduring fantasy Being a Writer is for the population at large. It's a rare day when I don't encounter some misguided chap who expresses the desire to trade places with me. And it's on those not-so-rare days when everything goes wrong, when the words won't come but the rejections fly thick and fast, when the bank account's gone dry again and editors don't even bother lying about the check's being in the mail, that otherwise sane folks tell me how much they envy me.

  I wish I had your self-discipline, they'll say, generally saying so on a day when I've got the backbone of a threadworm. I envy you the imagination to keep coming up with ideas. Or they may envy me my education, which was an unremarkable one, or they'll say they wish they knew my formula for writing success, as though I had somehow unearthed an alchemist's secret for transmuting the dross of nouns and verbs into the shimmering gold of fiction.

  Nobody ever says, I wish I had your talent.

  And I find that fascinating. I don't think artists in other media get the same response. I doubt somehow that people kept grabbing. Picasso by the shoulder and telling him how they envied his self-discipline, standing in front of the easel day after day. I don't suppose Caruso had to listen to that kind of crap, either. Actors and singers in particular seem to be plagued by people who think talent is all there is to it, that they've been given a gift which allows them to stand up there in front of the microphone and show their stuff. The hours of training and practice, the essential will and tenacity, are somehow discounted.

  With writing, it's the talent that's apt to be discounted. There are times when I tend to resent this. The unspoken premise in I wish I had your self-discipline is that anyone with my self-discipline could do what I do, that a persistent chimpanzee could match me book for book if he could just sit still long enough and work the space bar with his non-opposable thumb. My ego doesn't much like to hear this sort of thing.

  And yet I have to admit that there are times when I think these people are onto something. It strikes me now and then that talent may be one of the least important variables in the writing business. People without a super-abundance of talent succeed anyhow. People with tons of talent never get anywhere. It happens all the time.

  And it happens, I guess, in every field of creative endeavor. For years I subscribed to the popular myth that talent will out sooner or later, that all people with genuine ability in a particular field will ultimately achieve success in that field. I'll tell you, you'd be better off believing in the tooth fairy. All over America there are singers and actors and painters and composers and sculptors and, yes, writers, blessed with a sufficiency of talent but born, as Thomas G. would put it, to blush unseen, and waste their sweetness on the desert air.

  If talent's not the answer, what else does it take? Why do some of us succeed while others do not? Is it just a matter of luck?

  I'll tell you this much. Luck doesn't hurt. And simple luck has a great deal to do with the fate of an individual submission. When you mail off a story to a magazine, elements that have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of that story will play a part in determining whether or not it sells. The editor's mood when he reads it is a factor, and one you have no way of controlling. The state of the magazine's inventory is another. Competition being what it is, I'd go so far as to say that every time you manage to sell an unsolicited submission to a magazine, you've been lucky.

  But I also think that luck tends to average out over a period of time. The writer who sells his first story to the first editor who sees it is a lucky writer indeed, but that first sale provides no guarantee of a second sale. Luck runs hot and cold, and nobody's lucky all the time.

  Ê

  What does it take, then, to be successful at free-lance writing? What, besides talent and luck, helps determine who makes it and who doesn't?

  It seems to me that will is enormously important. There are any number of jobs a person can pretty much fall into, but I don't believe writing is one of them. Every once in a while somebody does become a writer apparently by accident, but such persons rarely remain writers for very long. In order to get into this business and in order to stay in it, you generally have to desire it with a passion bordering on desperation.

  And the intensity of that desire doesn't seem to have anything to do with talent. A couple of summers ago I taught a seven-day seminar at Antioch College. One of my students was head and shoulders above the others. She was a middle-aged woman who had spent all her life on a farm, raising children and helping her husband with the farmwork, and she had as good an eye and ear for rural settings as I've yet encountered. Her prose was clear and clean, her dialogue was excellent, and her stories and sketches absolutely sparkled. It was immediately evident to me that she was the one person in the seminar who had more than enough ability to succeed as a professional writer.

  She also had something to write about. She knew that she wanted to write fiction that derived from what she knew?life in the rural midwest. Some of us know that we want to be writers without having the faintest idea what we shall write about?I was certainly in that category?but this woman had no problems on that score.

  What she did want was reassurance. Could I assure her that her prospects were good? Could I tell her it was not unrealistic to hope to make sales writing the sort of stories she had in mind? Because if such expectations were unwarranted, she explained, then she didn't want to go on wasting her time writing.

  I spent quite a bit of time telling her how good she was, but even as I did so I wondered if perhaps I was wasting my time. Oh, she had the talent, all right. And there were any number of ways in which she could ultimately exploit her background and turn it into successful and commercially viable fiction. But her question suggested to me that she would never achieve her goal because she didn't want it badly enough.

  Because for almost everyone the road to writing success goes through some very rocky territory indeed. If she was that worried in advance that the time she spent writing might turn out to have been wasted, how could one expect her to rise above the inevitable rejections and disappointments that just plain come with the territory?

  Perhaps I should not even have encouraged her. There's an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote his life to music. But if his talent was not equal to his calling, he wanted to know ahead of time so he c
ould avoid wasting his life. He played, and the great violinist shook his head. You lack the fire, he said.

  Decades later the two met again, and the would-be violinist, now a prosperous businessman, recalled their previous meeting. You changed my entire life, he explained. It was a bitter disappointment, giving up music, but I forced myself to accept your judgment. Thus, instead of becoming a fourth-rate musician, I've had a good life in the world of commerce. But tell me, how could you tell so readily that I lacked the fire?

  Oh, I hardly listened when you played, the old master said. That's what I tell everyone who plays for me?that they lack the fire.

  But that's unforgivable! the businessman cried. How could you do that? You altered the entire course of my life. Perhaps I could have been another Kreisler, another Heifetz?

  The old man shook his head again. You don't understand, he said. If you had had the fire, you would have paid no attention to me.

  Perhaps my student had the fire. I've had no contact with her since that seminar, so I can't say whether or not she has continued to write, or if she's had any success with it. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that she's given up. Not everyone has the will. Not everyone cares that much about writing stories and getting them published.

  Will is every bit as important for those of us who have a taste of success. Several years ago a woman of my acquaintance decided to try her hand at writing. She showed me a couple of chapters of an erotic novel she'd written and I was immediately impressed by her ability. She was a natural stylist, readily able to assume the general style of any literary genre. While she tended to minimize this talent, insisting it was simple mimicry, that's what stylistic ability generally consists of at the outset of one's career.

  She abandoned the erotic novel, finding it an uncomfortable genre, and took the time to read half a dozen gothics. Then, in rather rapid succession, she wrote and sold two gothics. After that she wrote a hundred or so pages of an unsuccessful mystery novel, and after that she didn't write a thing.

  She had the talent, and she had enough success to make it clear that a career as a free-lance writer was available to her. She had, too, enough drive and self-discipline to produce those two books and get them published. But, ultimately, being a writer was just not that important to her. She had drifted into it largely as a result of association with other writers, and she drifted out of it when it proved insufficiently rewarding.

  I suspect my friend has something in common with the phenomenon of one-book authors. The common wisdom holds that such writers have only one book in them, that having gotten it out of their systems they have nothing further to say. I think it might be more accurate to say that they have a very strong desire to write a particular book but no real desire to become a writer per se. Having written that book, they have slaked their hunger.

  Fair enough. Some people climb one mountain and complete one marathon and let it go at that. Others define themselves as mountain climbers or marathoners and go on climbing or running as long as they have breath in their bodies.

  And some of us go on writing.

  I have a feeling that the tendency to perceive onself as a writer is a somewhat different matter from simple will. I think, too, that it plays a big part in determining who makes it as a writer and who does not. In my own case, I decided (or recognized; it may have been more a matter of recognition than decision) that I was going to be a writer when I was in the eleventh grade. A teacher's offhand remark put the idea in my head, but once planted it grew like a weed. I had no idea how I would go about becoming a writer or what I would write about, but I somehow knew it was what I was going to do.

  I am quite certain that this self-definition had a lot to do with the development of my career. I submitted my earliest efforts to magazines, and while they came back like bad pennies, and with better cause, I took this in stride. The day came when an editor suggested a rewrite, and then another day came when he bought the story.

  That was not the end of rejection and disappointment. Sometimes it seems more like the beginning, and the end is not yet in sight. But throughout it all I have never been able to shake that perception of myself as a writer. It has kept me chained to this bloody desk for more years than I care to number, and it has made it impossible for me seriously to entertain the idea of doing anything else for very long.

  That recognition of self as a writer can happen at any age. Consider another friend of mine, who awoke eight or nine years ago to the idea of becoming a writer. He was at the time editing a scientific trade journal for little money and less glory, and he had lately become friendly with several of us who wrote fiction for a living. One weekend he realized two things?that he wanted the sort of life we were leading, and that such a life was attainable.

  Monday morning he called in sick and rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter. By the time his wife got home from her job he had eight or ten pages of a novel written. He called in sick Tuesday and did another chunk of the book. Same thing Wednesday.

  Thursday he got up bright and early, ate as hearty a breakfast as the next condemned man, and went to his office. A couple of hours later my phone rang. I just quit my job, he said. The book's coming along nicely and I want to stay with it.

  I don't remember what I said. Probably something along the lines of yeah-but-how-are-you-gonna-make-a-living?

  No problem, he said. I'm a writer now.

  I wasn't convinced of the truth of either of those sentences, but even so I figured his downside risk was limited. After all, his wife was working, they didn't have any kids, their basic overhead was low and the job he'd quit hadn't been such a much. After a little token breastbeating at having encouraged him to persist in his folly, I gave a shrug that would have gladdened a Frenchman's heart and went on about my business, such as it was.

  Couple of weeks later he presented me with something like two hundred fifty pages of manuscript. Would I be so kind? Ahem. I took it home. I sat down with it. I started to read.

  Page for page and line for line, his book was as bad a piece of writing as I've ever been confronted with, and that covers a lot of ground. It was not publishable, but that's the least of it. It was not rewritable, either, nor was it readable. Nor, alas, could it have been described as promising. There was nothing promising about it. No one could in good conscience read that manuscript and encourage its author to try writing anything more ambitious than a laundry list.

  I was aghast. My friend had quit a job to produce this? Well, he'd better get another in a hurry. Assuming he could find someone fool enough to hire him.

  I didn't have the guts to say any of this. Instead I passed the buck?and the manuscript with it?to my agent. When his judgment echoed mine we tried to figure out what to tell the author. We decided to stall, and while we did so my friend told me he was halfway through Novel Number Two.

  The second book was much better. It was still nothing you'd be tempted to call good, but it was written in a language readily identifiable as English. My friend finished it, gave it to me and then to my agent, and went on to the third book.

  The second book didn't sell. The third did, though, and the fourth and fifth. They were not wildly successful. They were published as hardcover mysteries, had reasonably positive reviews and mediocre sales, and did not go into paperback. One got nominated for an award but failed to win.

  The story could stop right there and it wouldn't be the worst story ever told, either. But there's more. My friend went on to write several more mysteries, and these did not sell. There was a market slump about that time, and hardcover mysteries were suddenly about as much in demand as legionnaire's disease. My friend wrote three or four in a row and couldn't get arrested.

  By this time he was single again, and broke. He took a job tending bar and wrote days. After a while he quit writing mysteries that nobody wanted and began doing the preliminary research for a large-scale adventure novel that would capitalize on his interests and areas of expertise. He spent a lot of time on research a
nd more on plot development, and then he went on to spend a great deal more time writing and rewriting. Then the book came out, had a six-figure paperback sale and a six-figure movie sale, touched one or two of the bestseller lists briefly, and must have earned him something like?what? Half a million? I don't know, and it's not really important, because this chapter isn't about money. It's about writing, and the set of mind necessary to make a go of it.

  At first glance, the story's point seems obvious enough. My friend had the will to succeed, the drive to keep going in the face of discouragement and rejection. He had, too, a perception of himself as a writer that refused to fade. In addition, he had a single-mindedness of purpose that enabled him to take chances. Quitting his job on the basis of a few days' production was probably ill-advised, and I certainly would not recommend it to anyone in a similar situation, but perhaps it was essential for him. Suppose he'd worked nights and weekends on that first book, taking a year or so to produce an unsalable manuscript. Would he have been as quick to plunge in again and write books two and three?

  When, after having sold several books, he found himself incapable of supporting himself by writing, he might have tried to find a job rather like the one he had left. Instead he deliberately sought out a subsistence job, undemanding parttime work that let him pay the rent while he went on writing. Again, he was taking a chance instead of playing it safe.

  It's worth noting, though, that the chances he took were sane ones. If he was walking a tightrope, he was not doing so without a net. If he'd failed at the beginning, the worst thing that could have happened is that he'd have had to find another job. If his big adventure novel had failed, he'd have had to go on tending bar, or look for something with more long-range promise. But no one was going to starve to death because he wanted to be a writer.