Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  In this vein, do your first draft on decent paper, not second sheets. Set your margins, use carbon paper, the whole bit. This trick of acting as if is the best way I know of learning to clean up your act.

  2. REVISE AS YOU GO ALONG. This is handy in novels especially, but I also find it a useful practice in short stories. Often when I'm writing I'll get an idea somehwere along the way that sends the plot off on a previously unanticipated turn. This will frequently necessitate some changes in the material I've already written?a scene changed around, a bit of plot business planted earlier, whatever. The natural impulse is to go ahead with the book or story until it's finished, then backpedal and fix up the rough spot.

  You'll make things considerably easier for yourself if you return to do this back-and-fill work as soon as possible, before going on to complete the manuscript. You may not want to break off the forward progress of your work immediately, but as soon as you reach a convenient stopping place, and when the revision work is clear in your mind, go back and do it.

  There're a couple of reasons why this makes sense. First, you don't have the prospect of ultimately going back and revising constantly nagging at you. Once you've done the work, you can feel good about the portion that's written and devote your complete attention to what's coming up next. Second, the changes you make in the early part of the script may spark additional developments later on. This kind of revision is like fence mending; the sooner you see to it, the less elaborate a job it winds up being in the long run.

  3. KEEP YOUR MIND ON YOUR WORK. This is always good advice. While it may not be quite as crucial for a writer as for a demolitions expert, it's still good policy. As far as rewriting is concerned, or avoiding rewriting, it's very important. A lot of the sloppy habits that make comprehensive revision necessary result from paying insufficient attention to what you're doing and to what you have done. If what you've just written isn't fresh in your mind, you're apt to repeat phrases you've recently used, or contradict something you've previously established. The blond in Chapter 3 is suddenly a brunette in Chapter 7. Chapter 5's orphan is talking to his mother in Chapter 9. If you're lucky, this gets attended to in your second draft. If you're not so fortunate you never do spot it. Then an editor spots it, and that's embarrassing. Or no one spots it until it's published, whereupon five hundred readers write in and you really feel like the southern end of a northbound horse.

  The first remedy for this is concentration. Avoid writing when your mind is tired. Don't work behind any kind of mood-changers?alcohol, marijuana, ups, downs, tranquilizers.

  If you're doing a piece of work that takes more than a day to finish, start each day's stint by rereading the previous day's production. More to the point, don't just read what you wrote yesterday. Proofread it, making those minor pen-and-ink corrections that are required. This gets details fixed in your mind, and it also gets you into the flow of the narrative. If you're working on a book and you've been away from it for more than a few days, don't just read the last chapter. Read the whole thing?and, if you've been away from it for a long time, read it more than once.

  There's another advantage, incidentally, in proofreading as you go along.

  It increases your confidence in what you have produced while saving you from the eventual chore of proofing the entire manuscript all at once.

  Just as you look at what you've done yesterday before going to work today, you should get in the habit of looking at the preceding paragraph or two whenever something comes up that breaks your concentration. This will help keep you in the flow and avoid repeating words and phrases unwittingly. This factor alone will keep me away from dictaphones and tape recorders forever, incidentally. I want to be able to see what I've done, and if I can't immediately check out how it looks on the page I can't have any confidence in what I'm doing.

  4. DO YOUR FIRST DRAFT IN YOUR MIND. I've written a lot of things, from short stories to full-length novels, without knowing where the hell I was going. Sometimes I've begun a short story without knowing anything more about it than the first paragraph. This sometimes works out fairly well, but it's no way to produce finished copy.

  Lately I find that the time to rush to the typewriter is not at the moment of inspiration but the following morning, or perhaps the morning after that. In the meantime I'll play the story idea through my mind any number of times, and I'll have one or two nights to sleep on it. I may even dream about it, as a happy alternative to my usual dream about being naked at the Annual Bake Sale of the Jamestown (N.D.) Grange. By the time I actually get around to writing it, I'll know a whole lot more about it than I knew at the beginning, so that what comes out of my typewriter isn't really a first draft at all. It's a second or third draft and it's a lot less likely to need revision.

  5. DON'T GO OVERBOARD. This last point is a necessary counterbalance to the preceding four. Don't go crazy striving to avoid the need for revision. Don't be so intent on getting it right the first time that you never do get the first draft written. Don't back and fill so many times that the manuscript ceases to get longer and merely gets older. Don't be so intent on getting the story right in your mind that you never get around to writing it at all. Don't read your stuff over and over to the point where you're all bound up in what you've done and can't think about what you're going to do.

  In other words, moderation. Moderation in all things, including moderation.

  When Stanley Ellin was writing short stories almost exclusively, he was almost compulsive about rewriting. And he liked to do it as he went along. He couldn't move on to page two until page one was perfect. Once, he recalls, he rewrote page one upwards of forty times before moving on to page two. And so on, page by page, through the story.

  Now that's madness. But so are most of our approaches to rewriting?or, for that matter, to writing itself. If we weren't at least a little bit mad we'd probably have found our way into a saner line of work altogether. In the final analysis, my suggestions for avoiding revision are just suggestions, and I offer them only because they work for me, just as other approaches may prove more useful for other writers.

  One thing, though. I'd hate to have to tell you how many times I've washed the particular piece of garbage you've just finished-.

  CHAPTER 20

  On Being Read

  SOME YEARS ago, when we were both comfortably ensconced at a small midwestern college, he presumably teaching and I presumably studying, Judson Jerome declared that there were two varieties of undergraduate writers to be found upon a college campus. The first sort, he explained, grew a beard and cultivated an intense scowl and told everyone who asked (and almost everyone who didn't) that he was a writer?but never went so far as to write anything.

  The other sort, he went on, was apt to dash off any number of fitful little poems and rush about pressing them upon people like urine specimens, crying out, Look at this! It is a part of me!

  I had, as I recall, a foot in both camps. I did have a beard and a scowl, both of which were destined to endure for twenty years, and I certainly told the world that I intended to be a writer when I grew up. But at the same time I also wrote a great deal, fitful poems and feckless short stories and whatever else recommended itself to me, and I did indeed force these schoolboy efforts on my friends, my mentors, and indeed virtually anyone who had not yet learned to duck out of sight when he saw me coming.

  The beard's gone, and the scowl's a seldom thing. I don't write many short stories these days and I haven't perpetrated a poem in donkey's years.

  But some things don't change. I still want very much to be read. Not merely by the reading public, upon whose reception of my work my income and professional standing ultimately depend, but as well by that handful of close friends to whom I still scuttle like an Antioch sophomore, urging my work upon them and demanding that they read it and report to me as soon as possible.

  For a great many of us, I suspect the urge to be read is inherent in the urge to write. Some of us are exceptions, writing only for the inner sa
tisfaction of transforming our experience into an orderly and artistically successful entity; once we've done so, it matters not a whit whether anyone ever looks upon our work and says yea or nay. God alone knows just how many such private writers exist, keeping notebooks of poetry and fiction in locked drawers, telling no one of their efforts, and leaving instructions that their work be destroyed unread upon their demise. I rather doubt that many writers of this sort are regular readers of Writer's Digest; the magazine's concentration upon such matters as improving one's communicative ability and increasing one's chances of publication very likely strike such a writer as irrelevant.

  The rest of us want to be in print, and while the desire for publication embodies as well a desire for money and recognition, at its core is the pure and simple desire to be read. Bishop Berkeley posited that the tree falling where no human ear hears it fall makes no sound, that vibrations only constitute sound when they are heard. Similarly, most of us regard our works as silent screams unless someone somewhere hears us.

  Are there real advantages to having friends and associates read one's work? And whom can one best press into service in this capacity? And what attention ought one to pay to the response one receives?

  In my own case, I only rarely show unfinished work. More often I'll wait until I've completed a story or a novel before handing it around. I then tend to select as readers persons who have liked my work in the past, and who strike me as apt to like this present piece of writing in particular.

  I suspect I do this because what I really want is praise and adoration. Most of us claim that what we want is criticism, and most of us, I'm afraid, are terrible liars. While I may claim to want criticism, and while I may indeed be grudgingly grateful for advice on how to improve something I've written, I no more want criticism than does the proud parent holding up an infant for one's inspection. When I show you my child, the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, don't tell me the little bleeder's head's too big. Tell me rather that he's the most beautiful baby who ever drew breath, with the wisdom of Solomon shining in his unfocused eyes, and I'll love you and treasure you as a sage.

  The need for praise, or at least for enthusiastic acceptance of one's work, is quite real for many of us. Writers, after all, work very much in a vacuum. A nightclub comic knows how he's going over; his audience laughs or doesn't laugh, and he lives or dies, succeeds or fails, with every punch line. We don't have this kind of mechanism available to evaluate our work even as it is composed.

  Those of us who are established in our profession will have our work read in due course by our agents and editors, and their professional opinions are enormously valuable, but there is a special value, too, in the specifically less professional opinions of trusted friends. Those of us who submit our efforts over the transom can wait months for nothing more responsive than a form rejection slip or a stock letter explaining that Your present effort does not meet our needs.

  Most of us have big egos to begin with. We have to in order to sit down and make up stories in the expectation that other people will want to read them. But at the same time we are generally insecure about our work. We need to be reassured, and this need doesn't seem to wane in the presence of critical and commercial success.

  When I attempt something different from my usual work, I require someone's assurance that I haven't struck out in the wrong direction or bitten off beyond my masticatory capacity. Conversely, when I write a new volume in an established series, I need to be persuaded that I have not fallen off from my previous standards, that I have not merely repeated myself, that I have not lost the touch, and that the world will not gaze upon my work and yawn.

  The most useful readers of my work are those people who give me something beyond this praise and reassurance. They may call to my attention weaknesses which I can then attend to. They may spot errors of fact which, uncorrected, might damage my credibility in an editor's eyes. They can tell me whether a particular scene works as I'd hoped it would, whether they found a particular character sympathetic or noxious, whether a surprise development in my fiction struck them as insufficiently foreshadowed or altogether too obvious.

  In The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza there were three surprise elements at the end, two of them having to do with the discovery of the murderer. Of the book's several readers, almost everyone anticipated one or another of these developments, while no one saw all three of them coming. I found this reassuring.

  When an editor at Savvy found the ending of a short story of mine ambiguous, I went to a friend who had read the story. She had noted this ambiguity, although she'd not much objected to it; her perspective helped me see that the editor's objection was not unwarranted, and I was able to revise the ending accordingly.

  Some years ago, I dashed off an erotic novel with the intention of publishing it pseudonymously as a paperback original. There were things I liked about it, and I began urging it upon friends for a reading. They were all so enthusiastic about it that I withdrew it from the paperback house and submitted it to hardcover publishers, the second of whom elected to publish it as Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man. There's no whirlwind ending to this story?the publisher did not promote the book effectively, the critics did not pay it much attention, and it sold like ice in the winter, but the point is a simple one; but for the reactions of my friends, I would never have thought to publish it in hardcover under my own name in the first place.

  Other writers make the best audience, and most of the friends to whom I show my work are either writers themselves or at least peripherally involved with the business of writing. As such, they're better equipped to appreciate matters of technique, and I'm more inclined to value their reactions. I'm similarly concerned to have the reactions of non-writer friends, whose opinions are at least as important; after all, the mass of one's audience consists of non-writers. But I'm more likely to wait and let them read the work after it's published.

  Sometimes I think the main function of writer's clubs is to provide unestablished writers with a peer audience for their work. People commonly organize themselves into such groups with the expectation that the criticisms they receive from one another will have a salutary effect upon their writing, and sometimes this may be true. But I suspect it's more important to have a fellow writer read your work than that he say anything particularly incisive about it.

  Something even more useful, incidentally, is not what one learns from another's reaction so much as what one perceives by noting the strengths and weaknesses in the other's work. It is easier to detect the mote in a fellow's eye than the beam in one's own, as I am scarcely the first person to point out, and by observing what does and does not work in a friend's story, I have often been able to sharpen my own technical skills.

  A couple of suggestions:

  1. DON'T LEAD WITH YOUR CHIN. Some people are going to have a vested interest in tearing your work apart. For one reason or another, they are not going to like what you write and are going to delight in telling you so. That's their problem. If you persist in showing your work to them, you make it your problem.

  2. DON'T SHOW UNFINISHED WORK. If you can avoid it, don't make people read work in progress. Especially avoid doing this if the work is going along well. You merely give yourself an excuse to interrupt your progress on the work, and you risk throwing yourself off-stride.

  3. IF YOU DO SHOW UNFINISHED WORK, BE CAREFUL. Sometimes my insecurity about a novel is sufficient to make me break Rule # 2. If I'm paralyzed by self-doubt, a quick reading and a reassuring word can loosen me up and enable me to continue. When this is the case, I try not to take chances. I try to pick someone who's reasonably sure to like the thing and unlikely to express serious reservations even if he has them?unless there's something so inescapably wrong that it cannot be overlooked, in which case I'm probably better off knowing about it then and there.

  4. DON'T KILL THE MESSENGER. The genuinely useful reader supplies something beyond simple praise. He furnishes an honest response. While he is presuma
bly sympathetic, and favorably inclined toward your work generally, he is not going to be uniformly and unequivocally nuts about everything you write. Sometimes his reaction will be lukewarm. Sometimes it'll be downright chilly. And, because nobody's perfect, he may dislike something of yours not because of its intrinsic worthlessness but because it's just not his kind of thing, or because he read it on a bad day.

  Don't react by hating him, or deciding he wouldn't know a good story if it bit him, or suggesting an anatomically impossible course of action he might profitably pursue. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. If you don't want the peaches, leave off shaking the tree. And if you can't bear disapproval, keep the stuff in a locked drawer.

  CHAPTER 21

  Burning the Raft at Both Ends

  IMAGINE, IF you will, a chap adrift upon a huge wooden raft in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In order to keep from freezing to death, he periodically chops off chunks of the raft and burns them for warmth. As the days pass, the raft grows smaller.

  Sooner or later, this guy's gonna have a problem.

  I submit that we writers are in much the same situation. For each of us, the capacious raft is the background and life experience we bring to our writing, and we burn up pieces of it every time we roll a fresh sheet of paper under our typewriter platen. We consume our past in order to fuel our writing. Day by day, the raft shrinks.

  Sooner or later, we're treading water.

  This is a common problem, very nearly a universal one, for writers of fiction. Interestingly, its effect is particularly noticeable upon the most successful practitioners of our profession. It has been said for several generations now that success in America is frequently devastating, and devastation of one sort or another is commonplace for successful American writers. Even if one (to prolong the nautical metaphor) steers one's ship between the Scylla of alcoholism and the Charybdis of suicide, the successful author is left with the very real prospect of running out of things to write about, of writing more and more about less and less. Increasingly isolated by his success, both from his own past and the world around him, the writer has an audience hanging on every word and, sadly, nothing much to say to them.