Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  And Fred Dannay, editor of EQMM, commented that my man Ehrengraf had obviously derived from Randolph Mason, the creation of pulp writer Melville Davisson Post. Mason, you see, was a lawyer who used criminal methods to get his clients off the hook. Fred didn't think I was stealing from Post, but that Ehrengraf had obviously been inspired by Randolph Mason.

  Well, I'll tell you a secret. I never heard of Randolph Mason, never read any of those stories. If I had, I'd probably never have dared come up with Ehrengraf. Interesting, don't you think? Because Ehrengraf grew out of creative plagiarism, but not the creative plagiarism people have assumed.

  Some notes, finally, on what does not constitute creative plagiarism. It's not CP to steal an element from each of half a dozen stories, put them all together and pass them off as your work. It's not CP to turn a western into a piece of science fiction, or a Shakespearean play into a modern story, if you do no more than change the costumes and external trappings. (West Side Story is CP, for example, but in a recent short-story contest I judged there were three or four S-F versions of western gunfights, with the principals riding blue dragons and drawing blasters, and they were all just awful.)

  Finally, it's not creative plagiarism when you're writing non-fiction. In fact, it's not plagiarism at all.

  They call it research.

  CHAPTER 23

  Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

  IN THE past fifteen years I have established two incontrovertible if unrelated facts. One: glass-topped coffee tables can really hurt your shins if you're not careful. Two: admit you're a writer and someone will immediately ask you a foolish question. I avoid glass-topped coffee tables insofar as possible, and for a time I stopped admitting I was a writer, generally attempting to pass myself off as a gentleman jewel thief. I stopped this when I found that the questions they ask jewel thieves are even more unsettling than those they ask writers.

  Questions, questions, questions! Have I read anything you've written? I wouldn't know, sir. I'm a writer, not a mentalist. Have you had anything published? Why, no, madam. As I've told you, I've been doing this for fifteen years, and have written somewhere in excess (oh, wretched excess!) of a hundred books. And not a one of them published, madam. I am a compulsive masochist, you see, and I live in the woods upon roots and berries. How long does it take to write a book? Long enough to get from the beginning, sir, to the end. Like Mr. Lincoln's legs, don't you know.

  Say, where do you get your ideas?

  Indeed.

  There, to be sure, is the rub. Because for all the banality of the question, it is one every writer asks himself often enough, one which ought to be answerable, and one which evidently is not. The writer clearly requires ideas. Precious little gets written without them. In many types of writing, once a certain level of professional competence is granted, it is the strength or weakness of the idea itself which determines the success or failure of the finished piece of work. It is this absolute need for ideas which one generates onself that makes the process of literary creation wholly incomprehensible to a great many people not engaged in it. The writer is not buying widgets from Mr. A and selling them to Mr. B. He is making something out of nothing, out of thin air. He is getting ideas, and it would seem to follow that he must be getting them somewhere.

  But where?

  Or, more important for our purposes, how?

  Because every writer knows what it's like when the mind is as fertile as a field of Illinois bottomland, with ideas sprouting at every turn. And sooner or later every writer knows the other side of the metaphor, wherein he languishes in a vast Dust Bowl of the mind, barely able to type his name at the top of the page. I've been rich and I've been poor, Sophie Tucker said, and believe me, rich is better. I believe her, and you may believe me that ideas are better than mental stagnation.

  Where does one get one's ideas? I had a friend once who told askers of this particular question that there was a magazine published twice a month called The Idea Book, or some such nonsense. It's loaded with excellent plot ideas, he said. I have a subscription, of course, and as soon as I get my copy I write in and select half a dozen ideas and get clearance on them, so that no other subscriber will go ahead and write them. Then I just work up stories around those ideas and Bob's your uncle.

  An encouraging number of oafs bought this premise, and of course they all wanted to subscribe to the magazine. You have to be a professional writer, my friend said, dashing their hopes. Have to be a member of Author's League and have a dozen sales to your credit. But keep plugging away by all means.

  Enough. Let us address ourselves to fundamentals. Obviously, a substantial number of ideas spring from the subconscious, lodged there by means of various phenomena from the trauma of birth onward (or back into the collective unconscious of the race, if your outlook is Jungian), and liberated therefrom and directed along creative lines by other processes impossible to understand.

  I submit, though, that enough ideas turn up in less abstruse ways, and that a look at them might help us to encourage the development of ideas.

  So where do I get mine?

  Bits of fact can fit together. Almost all of the successful fiction writers I know share a tendency to retain odd scraps of data to no apparent purpose. Sometimes these orts prove useful, sometimes they do not. I know, for example, that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman and child in the nation. I should be roundly surprised if I should ever build a story around this nugget of information.

  But perhaps a dozen years ago I read an item in one of the newsmagazines about a handful of people in the world who seemed to exist without sleep. I digested this item, and went on to study a bit about sleep, and then I set it aside. Shortly thereafter I was reading about the British House of Stuart in the encyclopedia and learned that there was still a Stuart pretender to the English throne, though he certainly didn't work at it very hard. Happily enough, he seemed to be a Bavarian. I now had the notion of a permanent insomniac with a madcap scheme to restore the House of Stuart, and that didn't add up to a story, either, so after some more speculation on the sort of life a sleepless man would lead, I found other things to think about.

  Two years later I spent an evening doing some moderately serious drinking with a numismatic journalist who had recently returned from Turkey, where he'd spent a couple years earning a very precarious living smuggling ancient coins and antiquities out of the country. I found his conversation fascinating, especially when he spoke at length about a rumor he'd tracked down about a cache of gold coins in the front stoop of a house in Balekesir, where the Armenian community had hoarded its wealth at the time of the massacres in Smyrna. He and some associates actually located the house as described by a survivor, broke into the stoop in the dead of night, established that, the gold had been there, but established, too, that someone else had beaten them to it.

  Aha!

  A couple of weeks later I began a book about a young man, his sleep center permanently destroyed by a shrapnel fragment, and a devotee of all lost causes, restoration of the House of Stuart just one among many, who goes to Turkey and damn well finds that Armenian gold. I called him Evan Tanner, I called the book The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, and I wrote seven books about the chap before he quit on me and stretched out for forty winks.

  If I'd tried writing about Tanner when I first got the idea of insomnia as a character trait, I'd have had no story for him and my mind wouldn't have had time to keep him on the back burner while his character defined itself. If I'd forgotten him entirely, if I'd dropped the insomnia notion once I failed to find an immediate use for it and had let it stay permanently dropped, the item about the Armenian gold cache would have led at best to a routine foreign-intrigue chase with stereotyped characters. But everything came together, and I had as much fun writing those seven Tanner books as I've ever had with my clothes on.

  People give you ideas. In the vast majority of cases, those who say they have great ideas for stori
es are quite wrong. They don't. The people who do provide good story ideas are almost invariably other writers or people in publishing.

  What? Other writers give away good ideas? Are they crazy or something? Oh, yes, they'll give away ideas, and they're not crazy at all. Everybody does it. The fact that I might have an idea that ought to make a good novel or short story is not reason enough in and of itself for me to write it. It might be the foundation of a good story without being my kind of story. Either I wouldn't have any fun with it or I wouldn't do a good job with it?or most likely both. So I'll give it to someone else.

  Publishers are far more likely to give away book ideas. In a sense they're not giving anything away; they supply the author with the idea and contract to publish the book once he's written it. This happens rather more frequently than the reading public realizes. There are quite a few writers who spend most of their time working up novels from ideas supplied by publishers. I'm not just talking about lower-level writers knocking out formula paperback fiction to order, but carefully calculated and well-promoted best-selling novels the ideas of which, and sometimes a fair portion of plot and characterization, originate with the publisher.

  There is a very real danger in working from an idea that is spoon-fed to you in this manner. When an idea is your own, the odds are that it's been kicking around in your subconscious for a long time, and as you work on it you'll be bringing all of that subconscious concentration to bear on it. When you're working with someone else's idea, unless you like it a great deal right from the start, you won't improve it as you go along. That's why so many books developed in this fashion, written by good writers and based on commercially sound ideas, turn out flat and mechanical.

  I wrote one book which I stole?with permission?from another writer. He had a premise, a bride is raped on her wedding night and the groom hunts down the bad guys. And he had a title, Deadly Honeymoon. I stole them both.

  I waited over a year to do it. Then, when I couldn't get to work on anything else and couldn't get Deadly Honeymoon out of my mind, I called him up and asked him if he was going to do anything with the idea?he wasn't?and did he mind if I did. He didn't. I had the bride and the groom hunt the villains, and Macmillan published it and Dell reprinted it and the movies kept optioning it and dropping it and it was like an annuity for a while there.

  Writers get ideas the way oysters get pearls. There are those who would hold that all creative ideas are spun out of one's neurotic defenses. That may be going a little far, but sometimes the process is fairly obvious. Several years ago I was in a state of depression that made Schopenhauer look positively giddy. Every day I got up a little after noon and played solitaire until it was time for dinner. Then I played solitaire for a few more hours and then I drank myself to sleep. I must have been sensational company.

  I would try to write now and then but I couldn't seem to motivate a character. I couldn't think of a sound reason for anybody to do anything. Ever. I would get a plot notion and think, Hell, why doesn't he just turn over and go back to sleep? And I would do just that.

  So I wrote a book about an ex-Green Beret, a burnt-out case turned down for employment by CIA, who just can't get it together and can't think of a reason to do anything at all, who finally winds up all by himself on an island in the Florida Keys, fishing for his meals and living a rigidly controlled life. Then somebody from Central turns up and gets him involved in an operation, but by that time the character's set and the book virtually wrote itself. (It was published as Such Men Are Dangerous, by Paul Kavanagh.)

  Ideas turn up on television. I suspect television is a great source for story ideas. I'd use it more often if I could bear to watch it, but I generally can't.

  I don't mean that you take what you see on television and write it down. That's called plagiarism, and it's a no-no. What you do?and you can't set out to do it, it just happens now and then?is you rewrite what you see on the screen. You improve on it, which, given the state of the art, is not by any means a Herculean task.

  I probably did this several times unconsciously, but there is one time I recall when I knew just what I was doing. (Which is rare for me in any area of human endeavor.) I was watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents and there was this man who was not getting along with his wife, and he seemed to be having episodes of madness.

  Ha! said I to my future ex-wife, I see how they're going to end it. He's pretending to be mad, establishing a pattern, and after he's got a mental history he'll kill that bitch he's married to, and he'll get off easily on a temporary insanity plea, while actually he's been planning it from the beginning.

  Wrong. Dead wrong.

  I don't remember how the silly thing ended, but I wasn't even in the ballpark. He wasn't pretending to be nuts. Maybe his wife was making him think he was nuts, or making other people think so, or something. I don't remember. Actually, I didn't pay too much attention to their ending. I was busy working out mine.

  I didn't even wait for Hitch to come out at the end and explain that the criminal didn't really get away with it. I went straight to my typewriter and wrote the story my way, tagged it If This Be Madness, and sold it first shot out of the box to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I figured they deserved first crack at it. Fair is fair.

  That brings up a point. I wrote that story immediately upon getting the idea. In that instance it worked out fairly well because I got the whole story in mind in the course of the program. But I've written a lot of stories that way, getting to the typewriter as soon as I have the idea, or shortly thereafter, and I've come lately to the conclusion that it's a great mistake.

  One idea may carry a short story, but for the story to be at its best it should be played out in the right setting by a cast of well-realized characters. The sort of alchemy that gets place and background and characters to the right spot at the right time will occasionally take place while you're at the typewriter, and certainly some of the creativity that makes a story work will happen during the writing of it.

  But I have found that, if I take a couple of days to mull a plot notion over, other ideas will spring to mind to complement what I've started out with. I'll get characters, I'll get plot complexities, I'll get whole slabs of dialogue. I may not use all of this, but I'll have it in mind so that I can sift through it all while I'm at the typewriter doing the actual writing.

  My present routine lends itself to this practice admirably. I don't live anyplace, but spend my time traveling from place to place, following the sun around and endeavoring to leave a town before I'm asked to. I get up in the morning, put in a couple of hours at the typewriter, then either drive a couple hundred miles or, if I'm going to stay in the same spot another night, wander around looking at things, talking to people, and fishing. All that time with myself for company lets plots and situations develop so that they're well-formed by the time I tackle them in my morning's stint. And all those new places and new people are productive of ideas.

  Ideas come out of conversation. I was in a gift shop on the North Carolina Outer Banks a couple weeks ago. The woman whose shop it was and I got into a rap about recycled jeans, which she sells a great many of at six dollars a pair. What I wondered was where they came from, and I learned that she ordered a hundred pair at a time from a firm which is one of the nation's chief suppliers of this commodity. I learned, too, that all the jeans thus supplied were just at the broken-in stage.

  Now where does the company get them from? Who on earth sells jeans that have just reached the comfy stage? And what can the company pay for them if they retail at six dollars? A buck a pair?

  Curious.

  So we talked, and I said maybe I'd write a story about an agent of the firm murdering young people for their jeans, and we laughed over that, and I went on my way. Now here's a good argument in favor of giving an idea time to develop. If I'd written the story right away it would have been thin, and there was also the fact that it's hardly worth murdering someone for jeans that will retail for six dollars. But by the time the stor
y got written, the jeans-recycling operation was just a sideline for the company; their major business, you see, is the manufacture of dog food.

  Well, I might not sell that one. It's a little grisly. But I like it.

  When I lived in New Jersey, my neighbor's father ran the local animal shelter. They had an incinerator for disposal of dead animals, and my neighbor told me how a couple of local cops were eyeing the machine longingly. That dope peddler we can never make anything stick on, one said. Just pop him in there one night and there's nothing left but a little envelope of ashes, and nobody'd ever know, would they?

  And, said my friend, they were dead serious.

  I almost turned that into a story but it was missing something so I forgot about it. Quite a while later my friend's dad had to close the outdoor animal compound where he kept farm animals penned up for kids to feed and play with. For the nth time, vandals had come over the fence at night and slaughtered animals for the thrill of it. So he closed up.

  And now I had a story. In my story, the operator of the shelter traps a kid who has slaughtered a sheep, gives him a tour of the place, then pops him in the incinerator and cooks him. Hitchcock's magazine published it as The Gentle Way and Al Hubin selected it for Best Detective Stories of 1975, and neither plot component would have been worth dust without the other.

  Ideas, ideas, ideas. An idea doesn't do you much good if it's not right for you, however good it may be in and of itself. The idea of casting Dashiell Hammett as the detective in a period murder mystery is nothing less than brilliant, but how many people besides Joe Gores, himself a San Franciscan and ex-private eye, could have begun to do the book justice? (It doesn't hurt a bit either that Joe writes like a dream.) Why, if I'd had that idea I'd have given it away?or more likely simply forgotten about it.