Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  The Sins of the Fathers, the first of three books featuring ex-cop Matthew Scudder, opens with Scudder hired by a murdered girl's father. The action which follows is gradual and I felt the book would build most effectively if events were dealt with in chronological order. Flashbacks are a component of the other two Scudder books, however.

  The Specialists is a caper book, a crew of ex-Green Berets and their legless colonel banding together to right wrongs and make money by doing in the evil-doers. I elected to open it with what the movie people call a pre-credit sequence: a hooker in Vegas is abused by a hood and she goes to one of the guys in the group and tells him about it. That's set off as a prologue and then the action begins.

  (And I'll insert a confession here. Some books have spun themselves out in chronological order because I didn't know where they were going when I started writing them. Their plots just growed, Topsy-style. And occasionally topsy-turvy style. When the resulting narrative seemed natural enough I left it alone.

  But whether your novel ought to begin at the beginning or not, just how and where it does begin is vitally important. All article writers know the importance of getting the lead paragraph absolutely right, and short-story writers know that a lead is every bit as important in fiction. (I think it's more important: a reader may stay with an article because the subject matter's interesting to him, but a weak lead will make him skip a short story nine times out of ten.)

  Well, your first chapter is the lead paragraph of your novel. Mickey Spillane has said more than once that the first chapter sells the book and the last chapter sells the next book. I wouldn't dream of arguing with that.

  A novel, as we've all heard far too often, ought to have a beginning and a middle and an ending.

  No question about it.

  But not necessarily in that order.

  CHAPTER 26

  Spring Forward, Fall Back

  ONE, TWO, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven-

  Well, if you were going to take the numbers one through eleven and put them in order, that's probably the order you'd put them in?unless you happened to be perverse, ignorant, psychotic, or wildly original. Most of us, however, while a wee bit perverse, ignorant, psychotic, and original, tend to arrange things in their natural order. When it comes to arranging events in a prose narrative, fictional or otherwise, the order we select is chronological order. We relate events as they happen, one after another.

  I suspect human beings have always told stories in this fashion, ever since the first cave dweller embroidered the truth a bit in describing a hazardous altercation with a sabre-tooth tiger. By relating the events in the order in which they took place, the storyteller best holds the attention of his audience and maintains the highest possible degree of suspense. Will the tiger sense the man's approach? Will the beast attack? Will those keen fangs draw blood? Will the hunter's skill prevail? These questions become substantially less urgent if the narrator begins by describing the process of gutting and skinning the tiger, because by so doing he answers them before they can be asked.

  There are other risks involved in departing from straightforward chronological narration. A major one is confusion. When you play games with the temporal order of things, you run the risk of leaving the reader wondering just what the hell is going on. In Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print I discussed two works that skipped artfully to and fro in time, Sandra Scoppettone's novel Some Unkown Person and Stanley Donen's film Two for the Road. While both gain something aesthetically from this reshuffling of time, both lose some of their audience in the process.

  A story, it has been said far too many times, has a beginning, a middle and an ending. I think it's high time I admitted that I for one don't understand what this particular sentence means. One might as well announce that a story has a first page, a last page, and some pages in between the two. Or that a football game has a first half, an intermission, and a second half. Or that a golf tournament has a first round, two middle rounds, and a fourth round. Or that?

  Enough. It might be more useful to point out that a story has two beginnings, its beginning on the first page and its chronological beginning. Sometimes they coincide. Sometimes they do not.

  The chronological beginning of the chapter you are now reading lies in a memo from John Brady. I'll reproduce a part of it here, not only because it is pertinent but because I delight in retyping an editor's words and selling them back to him:

  When I teach magazine article writing, I always say, Start in the middle and end at the beginning. It's rigid, it's handcuffs; it also works. Start full steam with a topic, get the reader involved and interested; then backtrack, fill in, move through the research, the topic, build, build, build-then, when you get to the end, look back at what you suggested in the beginning and round it out.

  Magazine article writing is a different discipline from the writing of short or long fiction, and the process John describes here is better geared to non-fiction. The trick of starting in the middle, however, is extremely useful in fiction. By beginning at a point where events are already in motion, you involve your reader in the flow of action and get him caught up in your fiction right away. Then you can back off and let him know what it is he's gone and gotten himself interested in.

  In the preceding chapter we saw how this principle works in opening a novel. The basic gimmick of switching one's first and second chapters is as simple and useful a one as I've learned.

  And it's as useful in short fiction as it is in the novel. Short stories have to get to the point quickly, and one way to manage this is to begin them with the story already in motion and the action in process.

  For illustration, the example that comes to mind is a negative one. Some months ago I happened on an ancient magazine story of mine, a crime-pulp yarn that begins with a guy coming home from the office only to find that the bar he always goes to is closed for alterations. So he wanders around until he comes to another bar, where he has a drink and meets a beautiful woman, and one thing leads to another and he becomes a dope dealer, as I recall.

  Now it may be significant that he's in that second bar by coincidence, that the whole thing never would have happened if his usual watering hole had been open for business as usual on that particular evening. But that don't butter no parnsips. What's more significant is that I had this clown wandering around for perhaps a thousand words before much of anything actually happened.

  If I were writing this story today?and I won't, because it was a pretty lousy story in the first place?I'd begin much further along in the story's chronological flow. Perhaps I'd start with the lead's initial contact with the woman. Perhaps I'd begin with the two of them already engaged in some illegal transaction. In any event, I could go back later and fill in, letting the reader know who the guy is and how he got in this mess in the first place. I could do this in a full-scale flashback, or, more likely, in a briefer summary.

  This basic technique of starting with action and filling in later on is applicable to more than the openings of stories and novels. It can be employed effectively over and over again in the course of a prose narrative. By springing ahead and falling back, a writer can create any number of new beginnings and avoid dull patches that would slow down his story.

  Any transition may be the opportunity for a new beginning of this sort. If one chapter ends with the lead character going to bed, the succeeding chapter doesn't have to start with him getting up the next morning.

  Here's an example from The Last Good Kiss, a particularly fine private eye novel by James Crumley. The narrator, who has just learned that the woman he's been seeking has died some years ago, is beaten up in his motel room and left trussed up in the bathtub. One chapter ends like so:

  Then his associate gagged me with a sock. I was thankful that it was clean, thankful that after they left I was able to shove the water control off with my foot, and thankful too that when the maid came in the next morning, she jerked the sock out of my mouth instead of screaming-I tipp
ed the maid and told her to tell the desk that I would be staying over another day. I needed the rest.

  Here's how the next chapter begins. Notice how Crumley starts things off not only after a spring forward but right in the middle of a new scene:

  It's just not true, Rosie said for the fifth time.

  I'm sorry, I repeated, but I saw the death certificate and talked to the woman she was living with who saw the body. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

  No, she said, and struck herself between the breasts, a hard, hollow blow that brought tears to her eyes. Don't you think I'd know in here if my baby girl had been dead all these years?

  It was an early afternoon again in Rosie's, soft, dusty shadows cool inside, and outside a balmy spring day of gentle winds and sunshine-. After a quick visit to the emergency room for an X-ray and some pain-killer, I had left Fort Collins and driven straight through on a diet of speed, codeine, beer, and Big Macs, and had arrived at Rosie's dirty, unshaved, and drunk-. Fireball woke up long enough to slobber all over my pants, but when I didn't give him any beer, he slunk over behind the door. Rosie wouldn't look at me, though, not when I came in, not even when I told her the news.

  I'm sorry, I said, but she's dead.

  This business of springing ahead and falling back is a timesaver, but Crumley could have handled the material in the same number of words without this mini-flashback. The chapter might have begun After a quick visit to the emergency room and covered the trip to Rosie's in the same abbreviated form. Instead, Crumley jumps directly into the scene at Rosie's. We want the scene to go on, want to know what will happen next in it, and thus are glad to receive the recapitulated material in the summary fashion in which it is presented.

  The technique's a useful one in all manner of fictional narrative. In a long novel spanning many years, a jump into action can bridge a gap neatly and effortlessly. In a story with continuous action, like The Last Good Kiss, the same technique helps establish the novel as a collection of vivid scenes.

  Spring forward, fall back. A good maxim to remember. If you don't get to apply it in your writing, at least it'll help you remember how to reset your clock when the country goes on or off Daylight Savings Time.

  CHAPTER 27

  Don't Take the D Train

  IN AN early novel, written in my salad days (they were mixed and green, heavy on the oil and vinegar), I wrote, after intense deliberation and painstaking research, a passage that read something like this:

  I hung up the phone, thought for a moment, then got my topcoat from the hall closet. I let myself out of the apartment and used the key to lock the door after me. The elevator took me down six flights. I walked through the lobby to the street and headed west on 77th Street.

  At Broadway I turned downtown. There was a newsstand at the entrance to the subway station at 72nd and Broadway. I bought a paper and read it while I waited for the train. I took the downtown local to Columbus Circle where I walked through a passageway to the IND platform. I caught a Brooklyn-bound D train and rode it to DeKalb Avenue where I transferred to a local. At the Avenue M stop I got off the train and walked up a flight of sooty steps to?

  Enough!

  I trust you get the idea. The passage is imperfectly recalled, as well it might be, but the point is that I used to do this sort of thing all the time. Like the biography that told the high school girl more than she cared to know about Queen Victoria, I was telling my readers considerably more than they cared or needed to know about something that was neither germane to my story nor interesting in and of itself?i.e., the subway system of the city of New York.

  Now this sort of detail might have been relevant in, say, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, where the action of the story specifically concerns the hijacking of a subway train, but my narrator was using the train solely to get from Point A to Point B. So all I had to do was write something like this:

  I hung up the phone, thought for a moment, then got my topcoat from the hall closet. Forty minutes later I stepped off a subway train in Brooklyn and walked up a flight of sooty steps.

  Ah, those sooty steps-.

  Well, transitions are tricky. Getting your characters in and out of the room is as complicated a problem for the novice fiction writer as shuttling them on and off the stage is for the neophyte playwright. While an increase in skill and confidence at this sort of thing does come with experience, transitions continue to demand that the writer make a choice, deliberate or intuitive, as to just how and where he will interrupt the narrative action and how and where he will pick it up again.

  In multiple-viewpoint stories, this is just a matter of closing down one scene and skipping across space and time to open up another. The author still has choices to make as to just how much must be reported to the reader, but he's rather less likely to spend eternity on the subway. But in single-viewpoint narratives, whether told from the first or the third person, there's a natural tendency to account for every moment of the lead character's time and to tell the reader far too much.

  Sometimes, of course, you'll want to tell the reader a great deal. Even the subway sequence at the beginning of this article might be appropriate, for instance, if you wanted to convey a sense of the tedious passage of time, the monotony of dragging oneself here and there beneath the city streets, and the dogged persistence of the narrator in carrying out his task, whatever it may be.

  If, on the other hand, you want to stress action and pace, you might prefer to make your transitions as abrupt as possible. No one does this better than Mickey Spillane. His detective, Mike Hammer, just never spends any time getting from one scene to another. In one sentence he's stuffing some chap's head into a men's room toilet; a sentence later he's clear across town shooting a girl in the stomach. He may waste time now and then at lovemaking or thinking aloud but he never wastes it getting from place, to place from one piece of action to another.

  Spillane started out writing comic books, and I think that's where he learned to make fast cuts. While I'd personally rather read the label on the little bottle of Worcestershire sauce than check out Mike Hammer's adventures, there's no getting around the fact that Spillane, especially in his early books, had an immediacy and a gut instinct for the dramatic that won him a large and genuinely loyal readership, and there's a little more to his success than sex and sadism.

  In Spillane's books and writing of that sort, the story's action is all more or less continuous. Fast abrupt transitions are easy enough because what is skipped is pretty much routine. In stories that cover a great deal of time, though, you have to skip over days or weeks or months or years, and when you do the transitional passage sometimes reads like this:

  Summer mellowed into fall and fall into winter. The days grew shorter and the nights colder. The holidays came?Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day. Then, as the days lengthened again and the sun's rays once more began to warm the receptive earth-.

  Years ago filmmakers used to do this sort of thing by showing us hands spinning merrily on a clock or months flipping by on a calendar. Or they'd hurl a montage of newspapers on the screen, their headlines advancing history from, say, Armistice Day to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Without flipping calendar pages, you can make faster cuts and still give the reader a sense of the passage of time. You might simply take up your character in the middle of a new scene and add a sentence somewhere along the way to establish the scene, like so:

  Susan slipped out of bed, moving silently to avoid waking Howard. She put on a robe and hurried downstairs, mindful of the board two steps from the bottom that would groan if you stepped in its center. It was January now, they'd been in the house for three months, and he still hadn't found the time to fix the creaking stair.

  The transitional information here?that it is January and they've been in the house for three months?is slipped in here in a quick sentence that lets Susan whine to us about Howard's procrastination and perhaps tells us something about their relationship. We've advanced the action an
d told the reader what time it is in unobtrusive fashion.

  Here's another way to cover a lot of time quickly, in this case through a long-range weather report:

  The next two winters were mild ones. Then, when the boy was four years old, frost came the last week in September and the first snow fell before Thanksgiving, and it was well into April before the ground was warm enough to plow.

  Suppose your story involves a relationship between the narrator and another character. You might have a transition along these lines, simply bridging the gap between two wide-spaced meetings of the two:

  I shook his hand and smiled. I'll see you, I said, but in fact it was nearly three years before I saw Waldo Gordon again. I thought of him from time to time, though not too intently or too often. Then one May evening on the way home from my club I turned a corner and there he was. The first thing I noticed about him was that he'd put on weight. He was jowly and he'd taken on a bit of a paunch, and my eyes registered this before I happened to note that his right arm was missing from the elbow down. Indeed I had already reached out to shake his hand when-

  But let's go back to the D train for a moment. One reason that it's permissible, and indeed desirable, to skip all that garbage is that nothing much happens in its course. It's no real challenge to get from place to place by subway?at least it's not supposed to be?and this particular passage is uneventful.

  It's a temptation for novice writers to over-report such subway rides because they're easy to write about while skimping on more important scenes which are trickier to write. When that subway ride's important?when the hero gets beaten up in its course or shinnies up the third rail or whatever, that's when you can't cheat. You've got to write about it.