Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  Well, time passed, as it tends to do, and my writing developed, albeit slowly. For a couple of years I turned out a soft-core sex novel every month, and those potboilers certainly taught me how to keep the pot boiling. While my lead characters may not have been getting into hot water in every chapter, they were at least getting into something, or vice versa.

  My early suspense novels, now that I think of it, suffered from a lack of ever-heightening tension. In Deadly Honeymoon, for example, a bride and groom join together to hunt down and kill the thugs who raped the bride. There's tension, and they have problems along the way, but I can see now that the book would have been stronger had there been an increasing threat to them developing even as they contended with these problems.

  The seven books I wrote about Evan Tanner were faintly similar in structure to The Odyssey, in that my ardent insomniac played a sort of global hopscotch in the course of solving a problem or two and finding his way back home. In a typical novel, Tanner would cross half a dozen international borders illegally, confronting pitfalls in seven languages before he was back home again on the Upper West Side.

  Detective novels have a more confined structure. They don't ramble around so much, and the story is essentially over when the main problem?the identity of the murderer?is solved. This notwithstanding, the more effective books are generally marked by pitfalls and stumbling blocks which the lead keeps encountering, developments which he is unable to anticipate, and any number of elements which make the problem more difficult and its solution more urgent and imperative. A suspect turns out to be innocent. A key witness turns up dead. A murderer strikes again. The detective finds himself framed for the killing. An important item?money or jewelry or a Maltese falcon?disappears. One way or another, things get worse before they get better, and they hold the promise of getting even worse, and of not getting better at all.

  To do this sort of thing effectively, you have to be your lead character's best friend and worst enemy all at the same time. You send your hero on a walk through the woods. Then you have a bear chase him. You let him climb a tree. You chop the tree down. The bear chases him into the river. He grabs onto a log. It turns out to be an alligator. He grabs a floating stick and uses it to jam the beast's jaws open. You give the bear a canoe and teach it how to paddle?

  Well, you get the idea. At least I hope you do, because I'm not going any further with a bear in a canoe.

  Although he has not yet to my knowledge placed a bear in a canoe, Robert Ludlum is a master at keeping things hot for his lead characters. A typical Ludlum novel?insofar as the books run to type?has his hero confronting a shadowy conspiracy of monumental proportions. From the onset, even before he's more than peripherally involved, Ludlum's hero is in Deep Trouble. Cars leap curbs at him. Safes fall from high windows and crash at his feet. Bullets whine overhead. Before he even knows who's doing what or why, the Ludlum lead has to do something in order to save himself.

  And this sort of thing keeps happening. Some of it, in the final analysis, may not make absolutely perfect sense. You might finish a Ludlum novel, properly breathless and ready for bed. A couple of hours later you might wake up hungry, and on the way back from the icebox it might occur to you that there was no reason for the Estonian nationalists to put cyanide in the hero's peanut-butter cookies. That kind of icebox thinking may make it hard for you to get back to sleep, and it might even move you to write the author a letter demanding a full and proper explanation. But it can't negate the fact that the author and his poisonous Estonian villains kept you reading way past your normal bedtime. The incidents themselves were sufficiently involving, and the tension they generated sufficiently gripping, that your objections didn't manifest themselves until you'd finished reading the book?and enjoyed every page of it.

  Does this mean you shouldn't worry about keeping your own plots sound and logical? Certainly not. You can't be sure that the reader won't spot your flaws until he's made a trip to the fridge. He may detect them immediately, in which case he may very well stop buying the whole premise of your story then and there.

  It does mean you can take a few chances, trusting that you'll figure out a way to pull things together later on. This sort of thing happened in The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. Bernie Rhodenbarr, the very hero indicated in the title, has filched a rare book from a home in Forest Hills. Now, the following afternoon, he has just arranged to deliver it to the person on whose behalf he pilfered it.

  It occurred to me that something dramatic ought to happen. So, while Bernie is standing behind the counter of his second-hand bookstore, the door opens and in walks a bearded Sikh with a turban. The Sikh points a gun at him and demands the book. Bernie gives it to him and out he goes.

  When I wrote that scene, I hadn't the foggiest notion who the Sikh was, where he came from, or how he was going to fit into the book's future development. But he did liven things up, and I figured I'd burn those other bridges when I came to them. Later on, in the course of fitting him in and making sense of his actions, I got some ideas that enriched other elements of the book's plot.

  There's a moral here. When things flag a wee bit, do something dramatic, Put a bear in a canoe or bring in a bearded, turbaned Sikh with a gun in his hand. Or work your own variation of this procedure. Try it with an Estonian bear, say, who walks into the bookstore with a canoe in his pocket. Instead of a turban, have the bear wearing one of those Smoky hats. Make the canoe an ocean liner. Make the bookstore a bakery so you can fit in those poisoned peanut-butter cookies. Make the Sikh a girl, but first get rid of the beard, and?

  You don't like it? Maybe we can turn it around. There are a whole bunch of bears, see, and they've just finished fighting a war, and they're anxious to get back home to their wives and sweethearts and aged mothers-.

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  After the foregoing was written and set in type, I learned that The Warriors was based not on The Odyssey but on The Anabasis, Xenophon's account of the Greek retreat after a disastrous military engagement in Persia. Rewriting it accordingly just seems like more trouble than it's worth, especially since it would require my reading The Anabasis. I beg the reader's indulgence for my Xenophobia.

  CHAPTER 32

  Judging Distances

  HAVE YOU ever noticed how some writers draw you in close to their characters while others keep you at arm's length? The distance between a reader and a character is to a large extent a question of identification. The more the reader finds a character sympathetic, and the more he is able to relate to that character, the narrower the gulf between them becomes. When identification is intense enough, the reader may feel as though he's experiencing the story along with the character, seeing it through his eyes or over his shoulder. When identification is minimal, it's as if he's observing the action through the wrong end of a telescope.

  But identification isn't all there is to it. On innumerable occasions I have found myself drawn close to unsympathetic characters and kept at a remove from sympathetic ones. Harry Bogen, the protagonist of Jerome Weidman's I Can Get It for You Wholesale, is certainly an unpleasant sort, with little of the charming rogue about him. Yet I can still remember how close I felt to him while reading that novel. On the other hand, although I identified strongly with Larry, in W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, I never felt that kind of close proximity.

  There are certain things you as a writer can do to draw the reader in or push him away from your lead character. The first thing to consider is how you're going to refer to the guy.

  Let's say your lead character's a mining engineer named Lucian Hapgood. Well, as the fellow on television might put it, you could call him Lucian, or you could call him Hapgood, or you could call him Lucian Hapgood, or?

  Enough. What you call him does make a difference in terms of distance. If you wanted the reader to be drawn closer to him?not necessarily in terms of liking him so much as in terms of sharing his experience?you wouldn't refer to him as mining engineer Lucian P. Hapgood except when you first
introduced him, or when he's reintroduced after having been absent from the narrative for an extended period of time. You won't go on calling him by his full name, either. It'll have to be either Lucian or Hapgood.

  Once you make this choice, I think you ought to stick with it. Not every writer does, however. In the early Ellery Queen novels, authors Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay took turns at the typewriter, with the result that their hero is called Ellery in one chapter and Mr. Queen in the next. Other writers haven't needed to collaborate in order to bounce back and forth between first name and surname, and one of the elements that make Russian novels impenetrable for me?one of many elements, I'm afraid?is the tendency of their authors to make a guy named Dmitri Ivanovitch Glinkov, say, and call him one thing in one paragraph and another in the next and a third on the following page, until I really don't know who we're talking about.

  The conventional wisdom holds that your reader will feel closer to your lead if you call the lead by his first name. I think this is probably true, but I think the decision of whether or not to call the character by his first name is more complicated than that.

  Sometimes, it seems to me, you diminish your lead character by calling him by his first name. You reduce his statue and undermine his importance.

  In a book called The Triumph of Evil, which I wrote under the name of Paul Kavanagh, I had to decide what to call Miles Dorn. On the one hand he is the presumably sympathetic lead from whose viewpoint the entire story is perceived. On the other, he's a professional assassin, a middle-aged terrorist with a lifelong history of violence who murders a great many people in the course of the book. While I wanted strong reader identification, I was leery of drawing Dorn's fangs by making him someone you'd call by his first name.

  Writers almost always get on a first-name basis with female characters, and with juveniles. I'm not sure why this is, though I'm willing to believe that it's consciously or unconsciously patronizing, and that, in respect to female characters, sexism is at the root of it. For the time being, I'm afraid fiction writers are stuck with this situation. I may decide that I'm lessening a character's dignity when I call her Susan, but if I start calling her Ackerman instead I'm going to confuse readers. Furthermore, that sort of stylistic departure creates yards and yards of distance between character and reader.

  In multiple-viewpoint novels, a frequent auctorial trick consists of calling your hero by his first name while calling other characters by their last names, even in scenes where they are the viewpoint characters. Robert Ludlum generally does this. It's a way of putting a white hat on the good guy, telling the reader whom to root for. Sometimes I find this device awkward, but sometimes it seems perfectly natural.

  Come to think of it, I have a hunch the first-name-last-name question is one that is most effectively settled intuitively. I didn't consciously decide to call my man Dorn instead of Miles, making the decision for good sound reasons. I just recognized that I was more comfortable with him that way and acted accordingly.

  At least as important as what you call your lead is the extent to which you call him anything at all. The more you use any name, the more distance you create. If you want to draw the reader in close, the trick is to use pronouns at all times except where to do so would result in confusion. Use the name to establish who we're talking about, and often enough throughout to avoid unclarity. At all other times, stick with he and she. You'll probably find that you don't have to use names very often.

  In dialogue passages, you can cut down the distance even more by eliminating everything but the dialogue itself. Whatever else you include calls the reader's attention to the fact that he's not really overhearing a conversation but reading something that somebody wrote. Some of the distance is eliminated when you use said instead of substitute verbs, when you use pronouns instead of names, and when you cut out modifiers. Jennings ruminated archly is a more distancing phrase than he said. When you drop the he saids and she saids as well, slipping one in now and then only when it would otherwise become hard to keep straight who's speaking, you make the conversation that much more intimate and bring the reader that much closer into it.

  It's not hard to understand why a writer would want to reduce this kind of distance. Sometimes, however, it's desirable to create distance between the reader and the story.

  A frequent device in mystery novels, for example, involves the use of a Watson, so called after the narrator of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. The obvious functions of a Watson include keeping the reader in the picture while hiding certain things from him; he knows only what the Watson knows, not what the Great Detective is thinking or observing. Additionally, the Watson character can marvel at the brilliance and eccentricity of the Great Detective, who would appear egomaniacal were he to mutter such self-aggrandizement directly into our ears.

  But I think another important advantage of the Watson device is the distance it creates, distance from the Great Detective but not from the story. That character, with his quirks and idiosyncrasies, is more commanding if we are made to stand a bit apart from him. Let us peer over his shoulder and we can see his feet of clay.

  The use of a subordinate character as narrator is by no means limited to mystery fiction. Consider Maugham's first-person narrators in The Razor's Edge, The Moon and Sixpence, and Cakes and Ale, John O'Hara's Jim Malloy, or Melville's Ishmael. These voices are hardly Watsons, but their functions are not all that dissimilar.

  In a handful of stories I wrote about a criminous criminal lawyer, I used several techniques to keep the reader at a distance from my character, Martin H. Ehrengraf. For example, I frequently referred to Ehrengraf as the little lawyer or the diminutive attorney. The purpose of this was not so much as to fix Ehrengraf's appearance in the reader's mind as to make the reader aware that he was reading a narrative, that this was a piece of fiction about an imaginary character.

  Why did I do this? For one thing, the Ehrengraf stories were by nature unrealistic, the character a dapper eccentric who fabricates evidence and murders people in order to exonerate guilty clients. Write something like that and make it genuinely realistic and, paradoxically, readers react by failing to come through with the voluntary suspension of disbelief which fiction requires. By distancing the reader from Ehrengraf, I was effectively saying, Relax, this is just fiction, this disagreeable madman doesn't really exist, so it's okay to unwind and pretend that he does long enough to enjoy the story.

  Similarly, the Ehrengraf stories were illogical and implausible?or would have been if seen from up close and treated realistically. At a remove, they could be allowed to have their own mad logic.

  I generally feel a little funny writing about specific fictional techniques. I think it's enormously valuable to know how writers get the effects they do. I know that my own reading is marked by a good deal of reflection as I notice the particular technical choices a writer makes and their various effects.

  At the same time, it is exceedingly rare that I consciously apply the fruits of this analysis in my own writing. I have just now been reflecting on those Ehrengraf stories, and I cannot recall ever deciding to keep the reader from stepping on Ehrengraf's heels. The techniques I employed were selected intuitively, without thought; it simply seemed the natural way to tell a particular story. Once in a great while I make this sort of decision purposefully, but the rest of the time it's an unconscious one.

  This makes it no less a choice, but it does make me feel wary of overexplaining this sort of thing to you. If you were to gain anything from this column, I would hope it would be just a little more awareness of your options as a storyteller, and perhaps a touch more analytical perspective when you read other writers' work. And perhaps this will ultimately improve your ability to make choices of your own, on the unconscious intuitive plane where most creative decisions seem to be made.

  CHAPTER 33

  It's a Frame

  GOOD MORNING, class.

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  Good morning, Mr. Block.
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  As you may recall, last week we were discussing?yes, Arnold?

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  Actually it's afternoon, sir.

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  So it is. Thanks so much for bringing that fact to my attention, Arnold. Ahem. Last week we were discussing distance in fiction, and the various ways in which the distance between the reader and the story may be either diminished or increased. There was one rather interesting distancing device I didn't mention at all. It's called a frame. Anyone know what a frame is? Rachel?

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  Yes, sir. it's when you're innocent but the police fabricate a case against you anyway. Or the real criminal leaves false clues so that you'll be suspected. Or?

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  Thank you, Rachel. I'm afraid the frame I'm referring to is a different matter. A frame as a literary device is a way of setting a story?either a short story or a novel?within a fictional superstructure of one sort or another. In its simplest form, such a story might consist of two men running into each other in a bar, say, and?yes, Gwen?

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  Why do they have to be men, sir?

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  They don't. They could be women. They could be one man and one woman. No reason, actually, for them to be human beings at all. Let's say two Venusians encounter each other in a bar, all right? They're having a friendly drink together, and one says something and the other is reminded of a story. Which he?or she, Gwen?tells at considerable length. When the story's finished they have one last drink and go their separate ways.

  See how this works? The actual core of the story is whatever the one Venusian relates to the other, and the reader's in the position of a person on the next barstool, eavesdropping on their conversation. That barroom sequence encloses and sets off the true story just as a picture frame surrounds a canvas.