Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  You don't have to be a great success to find yourself on the same raft, or up the same creek, or whatever. Some years ago I first became aware of the way this particular dynamic was operating in my own life. I had begun writing early, dropped out of college (albeit at the dean's suggestion) to practice my own profession, and but for a year's interval in the mid-sixties never did anything but write for a living. My pre-writing past hadn't amounted to much in the first place, and every year's passage made it that much more remote. As time went by, my circle of friends tended to be composed more and more of other writers, agents, publishers, and sundry persons in the industry. While one could not ask for a warmer, brighter or more interesting group of people, and while the shop talk of such a circle is something I have come to regard as indispensable, this represented yet another way in which the raft was shrinking.

  The effect of this shrinkage of the past was less dramatically evident in my own case because my work has never derived directly and obviously from my experience. Some writers, like Thomas Wolfe, produce their novels by fictionalizing their own lives. Others can do their best writing only when they concentrate on a particular subject; James Jones, who only wrote at the top of his form when dealing with World War II, comes quickest to mind.

  While most of my work, like all valid fiction, is in one way or another a distillate of my experience, I have rarely drawn directly from life. Still, I could see a pattern in the making. One way or another, I was running out of things to write about.

  I was throughout these years a highly productive writer?burning the raft at both ends, if you will?and I was a fulltime writer, unable to draw input from a job situation. Yet I suspect parttime writers and weekend writers face very much the same dilemma. The office worker, after all, goes every day to the same office, performs essentially the same tasks, interacts with the same people, and very likely travels to and from the office by the identical route day after day. Even if the job itself is interesting?even if it's fascinating?it can provide limited input at best for future writing.

  Looking back, I don't recall making any specific attempt to create additional input. As it happened, I wound up doing the right things?or some of them, anyway?for the wrong reasons.

  Like many people who wind up writing, I've always tended to be interested in a great many things. I'm given to intense if short-lived enthusiasms, taking up hobbies and areas of interest with a passion, reading everything I can get my hands on about them, pursuing them relentlessly for three months or so, then shelving them and moving on to something else. I used to regard this fickleness as a character defect, but have come instead to view it as a useful aspect of my personality in that it has enabled me to learn a fair amount about a curious mix of subjects.

  This tendency, combined with general dissatisfaction with my living situation at the time, led me to wander down various paths during the hours I spent away from my typewriter. One example should suffice. Nine years ago I had the temerity to open an art gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania. To say that it was less than a commercial success is vastly to understate the case. Mine was a veritable Titanic of art galleries. Nor was the business of running it the exhilarating experience I'd hoped it might be. On weekends it was so mobbed with tourists and their small destructive children that customers couldn't have bought anything if they'd wanted to?which none of them did. And on weekdays it was deserted; you could shoot deer in the place.

  All of this notwithstanding, owning and operating the art gallery was of enormous direct benefit to me as a writer. During the single year of its existence, I met innumerable people in New Hope. My circle of acquaintances included artists, tradespersons, tourists, hippies, freaks, druggies, and assorted area residents. I learned quite a bit about both the artistic and the commercial sides of painting. I learned a lot, too, about the manner in which potential customers responded to art. While I certainly can't say I learned to paint, I did turn out some geometrical abstracts, if only to have something to do on deer-shooting afternoons. In this fashion I learned something of what it's like to be a painter, and when some of my efforts actually sold, I learned again that anything's possible in this universe, and that Barnum was right.

  The most obvious result of my year as an art dealer manquŽ was a long novel set in New Hope and drawn almost entirely upon my experiences and observations. Understand please that I had no intention of writing such a book when I opened the gallery. I was not doing research. I was pursuing another end entirely, but my year's experience turned out after the fact to be input for a novel.

  But it amounted to much more than that. Long after the novel has vanished from print, my whole frame of reference remains changed and enriched by my experience. Aspects of the people I met during that year have taken shape as characters in any number of other books. In short, my experiences added new planks to that tedious metaphorical raft I sail on.

  Since then my life has taken innumerable curious twists and turns, and sometimes it has seemed to me that my circuits have been so overloaded with input that I might blow a fuse at any moment. For the past couple of year, however, I've lived in the same place and with the same person?and, I God willing, both my landlord and my consort will pick up my option for the foreseeable future.

  This stability has not diminished my writing input, perhaps because I've found a few ways to increase the flow. They work for me, and I suspect they'd work as well for anyone.

  Here are some of them:

  1. STAY OUT OF RUTS. Easy as it is to get into a rut, it's by no means inevitable, and I think it's worthwhile to make a deliberate effort to avoid ruts. There's a place eight blocks from my house that I walk to at least once a day, and I make it a point not to follow the same route every time. In fact, whenever I have to get from one place to another, I deliberately select an unfamiliar route, even if it takes me a slight distance out of my way.

  May I urge you to reread Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken? I always try, both literally and metaphorically, to take the road less traveled by?and have found it makes all the difference.

  2. LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING. Some routes are ruts because we stop paying attention; overfamiliarity keeps us from noticing even those things we haven't noticed before. I've found that if I keep myself open to new experience, if I use my senses, I walk every path as if for the first time and invariably see something I've never seen previously.

  3. DON'T STOP LEARNING. Recently I've noticed that I seem to respond to architecture in a way I never have in the past. I find myself paying attention to the shapes of buildings and various architectural details. I deliberately fueled this interest by picking up a copy of The City Observed, Paul Goldberger's enchanting guide to the architecture of Manhattan, and before long found myself looking around me with sharper and more knowledgeable eyes. The book has changed my way of seeing my surroundings, so much so that I've decided to continue the process by taking a course at the New School on New York architecture.

  And how will that course benefit my writing? Most importantly, by changing my way of seeing, by enlarging and enhancing my perspective. Perhaps my increased awareness will be reflected in what I write. Perhaps something I learn will lead directly to a plot or a scene or the development of a character. Perhaps, serendipity being what it is, I'll meet someone else taking the course, or at the water fountain in the corridor, who will tell me something which will serve to springboard a future novel. I don't know how the course will benefit my writing, and I don't have to know, because input is a different thing altogether from research. The latter looks for answers where the former isn't even aware of questions.

  4. HANG OUT. Art Spikol, Writer's Digest's non-fiction columnist, raised a few eyebrows a while back by telling housewives to try hanging out in bars as a means of augmenting input. For my own part, I found over the years that the time I spent in saloons tended to decrease input by shutting me off from the world around me, but I think Art's general point is well taken. I can't be certain that anything's going to come along to broaden
the base of my experience if I spend a few hours riding around in the squad car with my cop friend, or go sit on a bench in St. Vincent's emergency room, or rub elbows with the drug dealers and three-card-monte hustlers in Washington Square, or take in the scene at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. But I can be fairly sure nothing much is going to happen if I stay home and watch reruns of I Love Lucy.

  Travel's broadening. I try to keep the fresh-eyed awareness of the traveler, not only when I'm out of town but when I walk the familiar streets of my own neighborhood. The rafts we all float upon need never be consumed. We can burn their planks for fuel indefinitely, secure in the knowledge that new boards will replace them. The possibility for experiential input is infinite?as long as we remain open to it.

  CHAPTER 22

  Creative Plagiarism

  SOME MONTHS ago I got a call from a writer friend of mine, whom I'll call Brian Garfield. He mentioned that he'd recently read a novelette of mine in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and that he thought it was a nice piece of work. It will very likely not surprise you to learn that this news pleased me greatly.

  What he said next was faintly unsettling, however. I liked it so much, quoth he, that I managed to figure out a way to steal it.

  Steal it? said I. Steal it?

  Oh, it's a legitimate sort of theft, he assured me. You'll see what I mean when it comes out.

  I countered by quoting Oscar Levant. ÔImitation,' I pointed out, Ôis the sincerest form of plagiarism.'

  Couldn't agree with you more, said Brian, and rang off.

  My novelette, Like a Dog in the Street, concerned the capture of a daring international terrorist by Israeli security forces. His confederates counter by planting a bomb in the United Nations Building in New York and threatening to blow up half the eastern seaboard if the terrorist isn't released. The Israelis do release the man, but while processing him for release they give him an injection of rabies virus; the symptoms won't appear for about thirty days, and once they do appear death is inevitable.

  That little gambit with the rabies virus was one that I'd been carrying around for years before I found the right story to support it, and I was not entirely happy with the idea of Brian's having stolen it. In due course his story appeared and I read it and relaxed. In his yarn, a U.S. intelligence service has to release an enemy agent in response to a terrorist demand. They don't want to lose him, so before the ransom demand is met he's given poison which begins acting after he's in East Berlin, or wherever. Once the symptoms show up he gets in touch and is told the antidote is available?all he has to do is surrender himself again, which he does, only to learn he's been tricked, as the poison was non-lethal all along.

  Brian was absolutely right?what he'd practiced here was legitimate theft, or what I prefer to call creative plagiarism. His story derived directly from mine, but he had so adapted the idea as to create a completely different story.

  And, thinking about the way his story had grown out of mine, I remembered how my story had developed in the first place. Back in 1961 I saw a Ben Casey TV show, one of the first episodes, in which Vince Edwards gets scratched by a rabies victim and for some medical reason can't risk taking the series of Pasteur shots. He has to wait thirty days to see if symptoms develop, knowing that the disease will be fatal if they do. The fragment of medical information, and the idea of making dramatic use of it, hung around in my mind for a long time before it took fictive form. When I got around to using it, I wasn't stealing it from the producers of Ben Casey, any more than Brian was stealing anything from me.

  Most writers are readers, and I think it's natural enough that our reading should be the source of a substantial portion of our story ideas. There is a line to be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate theft, between simple and creative plagiarism. The acid test, it seems to me, is whether the plagiarist contributes something significant of his own devising to what he has borrowed.

  Milton made essentially this distinction three centuries ago in Iconoclastes. For such a kind of borrowing as this, he wrote, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiar�.

  Writers, good or otherwise, are often quick to suspect they've been plagiarized, and not creatively, either. I've had this experience myself a couple of times. For example, I wrote a book called The Canceled Czech in which my hero goes behind the Iron Curtain to liberate an imprisoned Czech who had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. He accomplishes this by putting the Czech into a cataleptic trance, smuggling him across borders in a coffin, and then indulging his own sense of justice by conveying the man, comatose in the coffin, to a crematorium.

  A couple years after the book came out, I ran across a novel called Mills, which opens with the hero smuggling a war criminal from East to West Berlin in a coffin, disguised as a corpse, and then indulging his own sense of justice by conveying the man, still in the coffin, to a crematorium.

  This did not make me terribly happy. I can't be sure that the man who wrote Mills ever read The Canceled Czech; even if he did, I can't be certain the theft was deliberate. A good friend of mine discovered to his horror that he'd committed grievous plagiarism in a novel, having stolen the plot of a well-known short story in considerable detail. He knew he'd read the story many years previously, although he had no conscious memory of it. The author of the short story never sued him and no reviewers ever remarked on the coincidence, but he still winces at the memory of this unintentional larceny.

  These things happen. More than a few times, an editor has recognized unintentional plagiarism in time to nip it in the bud, and quite a few authors have simply discarded stories and novels when they learned they'd duplicated someone else's plot. But the creative plagiarist, using someone else's work as a point of departure for his own, has no worries on this score.

  Discontent will often serve to initiate an act of creative plagiarism. Much as the oyster copes with an irritating grain of sand by coating it so as to form a pearl, so may an author deal with an irritating film or story by refashioning it into a more satisfying story of his own. When I watch a character behave stupidly, I find myself calculating what he should do, and what the effects of this proper behavior will be. Occasionally my solution to his problem is sufficiently different from the author's, and seems to me to constitute a sufficient improvement, so that I'll go ahead and write a story of my own.

  I've come up with other plots by trying to figure out the endings to somebody else's stories. Television is handy for this sort of thing, and the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents program was ideal. Every once in a while I'd see the trick ending halfway through?but some of the time I was wrong, and my version was completely different from what the writer of the teleplay had come up with. A couple of times I sat down and wrote out my version, since it amounted to a completely different story from what I'd seen.

  I have known some authors who, when stuck for an idea, will specifically set out to steal a story. I used to know a science-fiction writer, for example, who would systematically read through back issues of S-F mags, looking to find a story that he could alter enough so that he could feel free to steal it. I've made occasional attempts at this sort of thing with crime stories, and it never seems to work out for me.

  With one exception, which I guess I'll tell you about.

  Twenty years ago, I read a story of Fletcher Flora's in Manhunt. The plot ran something like this: a friend of the narrator's had been arrested for committing a series of homicides, having strangled half a dozen young women with identical shoelaces. (He used identical shoelaces to strangle various young women, that is. He didn't seek out women wearing a particular variety of shoelace and wring their necks. Just wanted to clear that up.)

  The narrator visits his friend in jail, sees that the case against him is over-powering, then returns home where there's another shoelace that he found in the friend's closet. Not only does he not turn this evidence over to the cops, but, with his friend safely alibied by being in prison, he goes off to use t
hat shoelace to commit murder, all as a way of freeing his friend.

  For twenty years I had a yen to steal that story. I guess there was something I really liked about it, but what the hell, Fletcher Flora wrote it first, so I didn't do anything about it. But often when I was stuck for a plot the idea would come to mind and I would put it regretfully aside.

  Then, a little less than two years ago, I happened to reread the story in an old copy of Manhunt. And I began to play with the plot idea, trying to find a way to change it enough so that I would feel sanguine about stealing it.

  I changed the shoelace to a necktie, which didn't amount to much of a change. Then I made the man in jail not a multiple murderer but a rejected suitor who strangled his former fiancŽe with his old school tie. I had his mother seek the help of a criminal lawyer I invented for the occasion, a very unusual lawyer who collected fees only when he succeeded in winning his clients' freedom.

  And I made the lawyer a criminal?i.e., I had him, operating offstage and inferentially, fly over to England to purchase a batch of ties identical to the murder weapon and then commence strangling a slew of women similar in appearance to the original victim, so as to transform her death from a motivated murder to the first episode in a multiple homicide.

  By the time I was finished, I don't know that Fletcher Flora himself would have spotted the theft. And the little lawyer?I named him Martin H. Ehrengraf?emerged as a sufficiently compelling character to appear in half a dozen stories to date. The series has been running in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine over the months and I've greatly enjoyed writing the stories.