Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  This is simply not true with the novel. Inspiration alone will not get the thing written, any more than sheer speed will carry anyone to the finish line in a marathon. To continue the analogy, a novelist, like a marathon runner, receives praise simply for having completed his task irrespective of how well he's performed it. No one (except perhaps the runner's mother) congratulates a last-place sprinter for having survived to the finish line of a hundred-meter dash. Nor do people hail one as some sort of conquering hero for having typed the last line of a poem or a short-short.

  All this notwithstanding, I submit that the short-story writer has every bit as great a need to apply the carrot and the stick in order to be either productive or commercially successful. While seeing one story through to completion may be a less than Herculean task, it takes no end of discipline to do the same thing repeatedly, coming up with idea after idea, grinding out story after story, and working throughout at the top of one's form.

  The novelist has the advantage of momentum; once into a book, he can give it its head and follow where it takes him. He knows, when he gets up in the morning, what he's going to be writing that day. The writer of short fiction, on the other hand, has to keep developing new projects and developing enthusiasm for them as he does so. And he has to do so while marketing previously completed efforts, shrugging off the inevitable rejections that are a part of that marketing process and refusing to allow them to interfere with his steady production of new stories.

  Are there tricks of self-discipline? Is there a particular distance to extend the carrot, a special way to apply the stick?

  I'm sure there must be, and I live in hope that one day I'll find the formula. Because I've been indefatigably productive over the years, turning out more books than anyone should reasonably have to read, people tend to assume me to be a model of self-discipline. Yet I frequently look at other more industrious writers and castigate myself for my dilatory nature. Doubtless they in turn berate themselves for falling short of their role models?the bee and the ant, I would imagine. And does the ant in turn worry that he's a closet wastrel? I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

  Here are a few tricks of the trade:

  1. GIVEN WRITING TOP PRIORITY. At executive training programs they like to tell the story of Charles Schwab, then president of U.S. Steel. He told an efficiency expert that he didn't have time to listen to him at length but wondered if the man had any quick suggestions for him. Every morning, the expert said, make a list of the things you have to do that day. List them in order of importance. Then concentrate on the first task until it's finished, without diverting your attention to anything else. Then go on to the second task, completing as much as you comfortably can in the course of the day. Schwab looked at him, shrugged, and asked what he wanted for the suggestion. Try it for a month, the man said, and then pay me what you think it's worth to you. Thirty days later, Schwab put a check in the mail for twenty-five thousand dollars.

  The expert's advice is as good as it ever was, and as much so for writers as for steel company presidents. I would suggest that you put writing at the head of each day's list. Make it the first thing you do. Give it priority, not letting yourself be sidetracked until the day's writing is done.

  2. SET GOALS FOR YOURSELF. I work mornings, generally putting in two or three hours a day; when I work more than three hours my concentration flags and the work suffers. My objective, however, is not to put in a certain number of hours but to produce a certain quantity of work. More often than not, the goal I set myself is five pages a day.

  If I get my five pages written in a flat hour?which does happen now and again?I'll generally call it quits then and there. I may do an extra page or two, if the words are flowing nicely and I want to leave off at a natural stopping point. But I'll feel under no obligation to put in all the hours allotted for purpose of writing.

  On the other hand, if I don't reach my five-page goal within three hours, I may stay at the typewriter a little longer and see if I can't fulfill my quota. I'm not absolutely compulsive about this, but I know I'll feel better during the rest of the day if I get my pages written, and I do so when possible.

  I can usually manage it?in part because I've had the foresight to set easily attainable goals for myself. I rarely find five pages a day to be a strain; if I did, I'd adjust the quota accordingly. I avoid the trap of raising the goal as I go along, like an assembly line speedup. The object's not to test myself. It's to get my work done.

  3. STAY IN THE NOW. The most important single element in enabling me to concentrate on today's work is the ability to make that the only thing I'm concentrating on. If I let myself worry about tomorrow's work and next Tuesday's work, I'm not going to do my best work today. If I'm writing a short story, I can't let myself get diverted into worrying about what story I'll write next, or where I'll send this one when I'm finished with it, or what I'll do if it's rejected, or what I'll buy for myself when it sells. I can only do today's work today, so why waste energy?

  4. JUST GET IT WRITTEN. Frequently I find myself convinced that all I'm doing is turning perfectly good bond paper into garbage. Sometimes I'm right. Sometimes it's an illusion. When I feel this way, it's impossible to tell which will prove to be the case.

  The answer, I've found, is simply to get it written, giving myself permission to throw it out later on if it turns out I've produced swill. This is occasionally easier said than done. It's hard to persevere when I'm convinced that the last sentence I typed is utterly wooden. But I frequently find afterward that what seemed horrible while I was writing it looks perfectly fine the next day?or at least no more horrible than the rest of my work. And, on those occasions when I do wind up tearing it up the next morning, at least I've done some work and the momentum of my writing is undisturbed.

  5. DON'T TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY. The work of any artist requires a certain degree of doublethink. In order to practice my craft day in and day out, I have to be very serious about it. But if I take it too seriously I'll clutch, rendering myself incapable of the relaxed approach necessary for optimum creativity.

  Here's a story for illustration. Two retired gentlemen meet, and one complains that he's going nuts. You need a hobby, the other one says. Something to give you an interest in life and a reason for living.

  The first is skeptical. You mean like pasting stamps in a book? Doing needlepoint? What kind of a hobby?

  I'll tell you, says the other, it doesn't even matter what the hobby is so long as you got one. My hobby, just as it happens, is bee-keeping.

  You keep bees? You, living in two and a half rooms on Pitkin Avenue? How many bees do you have, anyway?

  Oh, it's hard to say, but about twenty thousand.

  Where do you keep 'em?

  In a cigar box.

  But-but, don't they get all crushed and dead and everything?

  So? Listen, it's only a hobby.

  It's only a book, I've told myself time and time again. Sometimes it feels like the most important thing in your life, and it seems to be what you do to justify your own existence, but don't take it so seriously. It's just words on paper, it's just a pack of lies. Listen, it's only a book.

  That takes the pressure off. Knowing it's only a book, knowing empires won't rise and fall on the strength of it, I'm able to breathe in and breathe out and get the thing written.

  Ahem.

  Those are my professional secrets, and you're welcome to 'em. I can assure you they work for me. By applying them diligently, I've been able to get this written and in the mail?only two weeks after the due date.

  Listen, it's only a column.

  CHAPTER 15

  Creative Procrastination

  PROCRASTINATION'S HAD a bad name ever since 1742, when Edward Young called it the thief of time. (He'd have written that line back in 1739 but he just kept putting it off.) Lord Chesterfield inveighed against putting off until tomorrow what you can do today, lumping the pastime with idleness and laziness. And Thomas DeQuincey, tongue tucked firmly in cheek,
saw procratination as the end product of a chain of character deterioration that might begin with a simple act of murder.

  We free-lance writers, fixed with the responsibility of scheduling our own time and temperamentally prone to procrastinate, have every reason to agree. And surely this column, designed to send its readers scampering to their typewriters, will take a firm stand against the gentle art of keeping up with yesterday.

  Right?

  Wrong.

  On the contrary, I would submit that procrastination has its place. I'm not endorsing it out of hand, understand. In writing, as in the rest of life, the best way to get things done is to go ahead and do them. They rarely do themselves. And it has been my observation that those writers who sit down and write, day in and day out, are the very writers who get the most accomplished.

  So procrastination in general is a massive liability. Creative procrastination, however, can be a definite asset. The trick is to know just when to defer action and when to get busy.

  Let me give an example. When I first started writing, about the time the pterodactyl made it onto the endangered species list, I saw to it that as little time as possible elapsed between the onset of an idea and its tranformation into a piece of fiction. I was writing stories then for the surviving crime pulps, and I would typically get a story idea of an afternoon and deliver a finished manuscript to my agent the following morning. More often than not it sold. Not to a very good market, mind you, and not for much money, and the story itself would rarely be memorable in any way, but I was young and that was the best I could do.

  Nowadays I do things a little differently.

  A couple of months ago, for example, I got a Noteworthy Idea. I conceived of a mystery story in which the murder victim would function as the detective, solving his own murder after it had taken place. I had recently read Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., and his reports of after-death experiences triggered my story idea.

  In the old days, I'd have gone directly to my typewriter. And, most likely, I'd have gotten nowhere with the story, because this particular idea was not an easy one to turn into a piece of short fiction. Furthermore I had no plot, no theme, no characters, no conflict?nothing but the bare idea as I've described it to you. I could have tried contriving these other elements at the typewriter, but instead I procrastinated.

  I made a note to myself on the little memo pad I carry around. Man solves own murder, I scribbled, right between Pick up laundry and Water philodendron. Every now and then my eyes would hit those words and I'd tell myself I'd have to get around to doing the story one of these days.

  Each time this happened, my subconscious got a little nudge. Gradually, these little nudges made a collective impression.

  My original concept of the story, never fully formed and never committed to paper, called for the lead character to operate on some sort of spectral plane, perhaps spooking the killer into a confession, something eerie like that. After a spell of creative procrastination, I changed this. I decided the lead would die clinically in the operating room while they were removing the bullet or some such, would then have an after-death experience of the sort Moody described, in the course of which he'd be given to understand that he could not be permitted to die until he'd carried out the mission of finding out who had killed him. Whereupon he'd return to life and set about investigating the circumstances of his murder.

  Much better, I decided. The story was starting to have a shape to it. But I still didn't feel ready to write it, so I put it back in a warming oven and left it alone.

  A while later, I was reading poetry. I wasn't reading Robert Frost, but something reminded me of Frost, and I realized the title I wanted for my story was And Miles to Go Before I Sleep. I wrote that on my memo pad and crossed out Man solves own murder. (I'd already picked up the laundry by that point.)

  I like having a title before I write a story. I certainly don't insist on it but it helps. So I had the title now, and it was a good one, but I still didn't have the story.

  So I put it off again.

  A week or a month later, I started thinking about the lead, trying to figure out who he was. And who had killed him? And why? I wasn't sure, but I decided maybe he was a middle-aged businessman. I provided him with a wife and a business partner and a mistress and a son and a daughter, and I gave all five of them motives so they could be suspects. Vague motives, because they were still vague people, and because I had no idea which of them was the killer.

  Time for more procrastination.

  One day, you'll be pleased to hear, I decided I was ready to write the story. I don't know what told me this; most likely I was avoiding work on something else. At any rate, I sat down at the typewriter and got to work.

  Somewhere along the way I had decided to write the story in the first person. It was trickier to do it this way, describing those after-death experiences in the lead's voice, but all that time spent living with the story convinced me it was the way I wanted to do it. And it turned out to be easier than I'd thought, because the mood and tone came rather easily to me by now.

  Another interesting thing that happened is that the lead turned out to have more of a purpose than simply bringing his killer to justice. As he investigated each suspect, he found himself resolving his unfinished business with each in turn, putting his emotional affairs in order before dying for a second and final time. This change turned a simple gimmick story into something with substance.

  I was pleased with the way the story turned out. It didn't seem to need substantial rewriting, perhaps because it had received so much unconscious modification and restructuring before I sat down to write it. Eleanor Sullivan liked the story and bought it for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, where it appeared as Life After Life in the October '78 issue, should you care to see for yourself how it ends.

  My point, though, isn't that I produced a brilliant piece of work or won fame and fortune with it. It's not and I didn't, but it would surely never have reached its present form if I hadn't repeatedly put off until tomorrow work I was insufficiently prepared to do that day.

  Code of Arms is another example of creative procrastination in action?or inaction, come to think of it. I first got the germ of the book a full four years ago. I was reading something about World War II and wondering, not for the first time, why on earth Hitler had halted the German armor outside of Dunkirk. That two-day respite permitted Britain to withdraw a quarter of a million troops; otherwise she might have been unable to continue the war.

  Suppose some Englishman had penetrated the Wehrmacht High Command? Suppose that was the cause of the stop order?

  I decided that would make the premise of a hell of a novel, and I went off and occupied myself with other things. It wasn't until years later that I suddenly remembered that idea and hit on the precise identity of the person responsible for saving the British at Dunkirk. I now had not merely an idea for a book but a compelling and commercially viable one. I promptly devoted the next six months to research, which is not quite the same thing as procrastination, although they often look alike. Then I talked to a publisher and worked up an outline, and after more work than went into Chartres Cathedral and more perils than Pauline, Code of Arms was published in the spring of 1981.

  In this instance, I'm lucky I didn't lose the idea altogether. It's important, I think, to keep the idea visible?in a notebook, on a wall chart, whatever. That way you'll jog your memory from time to time, and when an idea or a piece of information comes along that you can use, you'll reach out and incorporate it in the story as it evolves.

  When does procrastination become other than creative? When it consists of avoiding work rather than postponing it, and when my alternative to working on Project A is not working at all. Since I'm inherently lazy, I force myself to work on Project B instead.

  Another thing?it was Don Marquis who called procrastination the art of keeping up with yesterday, and conscience compels me to give credit where it's due. And pretty soon I'll share with you
my thoughts on the subject of Creative Plagiarism.

  Perhaps we'll take up that topic next chapter. Perhaps I'll put it off for a while. Meanwhile, though, I've got to go water the philodendron.

  CHAPTER 16

  Time Out

  I'LL TELL you something. The more time I spend in this writing game, the clearer it becomes to me how little I know about it. It's a rare month that goes by without my wondering that I have the temerity to go on writing for a living, let alone offer you out there suggestions as to how you can go and do likewise.

  This humility attack is not the product of an insight gained from contemplation. Would that it were. On the contrary, it is the bitter fruit of experience.

  Consider if you will the pattern I have established for myself over the past several weeks. Each morning, as is my custom, I awaken around seven. I get out of bed, see my shadow, and dive back into bed, where I contrive to spend the ensuing four hours with the covers pulled over my head and my eyes clenched shut. Because I'm not really tired and have already had plenty of sleep, I have to be quite relentless about this, forcing myself to stay put each time I'm moved to awaken.

  Then, round about eleven, I roll out at last and put the teakettle on to boil. By that time it's safe to start the day. I'm a morning writer, and with the morning gone I can proceed directly to the non-writing portion of my day?a meal, a gym workout, a lunch date, a long walk, whatever pleasing prospect presents itself. I don't have to walk into my office, I don't have to look at my typewriter.

  I've avoided work for yet another day.

  I've won.

  I'm not going to dignify this curious behavior by calling it writer's block. I'm not altogether certain what writer's block is, but it seems to take the form of an inability to get anything written however hard one tries. It's painfully clear to me that I have not been trying, that I have indeed done everything in my power to avoid finding out if I am or am not capable of writing by giving my typewriter a wide berth.