Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  I certainly didn't describe the room much. The scene is rendered briefly, almost sketchily. But because I visualized and experienced the entire scene before I wrote it, I intuitively selected certain words and rejected others, included certain observations and left others unvoiced. Because I had the experience of this scene, I was equipped to make it a real scene for the reader. No reader will be likely to picture the same room I pictured, but that hardly matters.

  This may be a subtle point, as hard to convey as the principles of Zen archery. It has elements of commonality, I suspect, with the tricks actors use to prepare themselves for roles, calling on bits and pieces of their own past to center themselves and get into character.

  Maybe it would be helpful if I gave you an exercise.

  Let's give it a try. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed. Picture in your mind a piece of fruit?the apple we mentioned earlier or something else. See it. Experience it. Get a sense of its dimensions. Notice its color. Sense the amount of space it occupies. Imagine yourself holding it in your hand, weighing it. How much mass does it have? How heavy is it?

  How does it feel in your hand? What's its temperature?

  Is it moist or dry to the touch? Rough or smooth?

  See yourself drawing it close to your face. Smell it. Can you imagine the aroma? Pierce the skin with your thumbnail and smell it again, its inner juices released to the open air.

  Imagine yourself peeling or cutting into it. Taste the fruit. Go ahead?chew it up, swallow it. Taste it. Experience the act of eating it.

  You may have noticed, while performing this exercise, that the fruit changed somewhat from one moment to the next. You may have realized such elements as color and weight and odor more vividly at one time than at another. That's fine. This process of visualization is a fluid one, and the images we conjure up are apt to keep redefining themselves for us.

  This simple exercise becomes increasingly useful if you practice it on a more or less regular basis. The capacity for visualization seems to develop with this sort of training. You might prefer to conjure up other things than pieces of fruit. As a change of pace, now and then you might enjoy focusing on an actual past experience, recreating it in your mind as completely as possible. When you do this, you might find it helpful to concentrate less on linear memory and more on sensory memory?in other words, don't dwell on what actually took place as much as on how everything looked and sounded and felt and tasted and smelled, and how you felt about it and experienced it.

  This is a good exercise for any time of the day. Another exercise is more specifically useful before undertaking the day's stint at the typewriter, and that involves seeing what you're going to write before you write it, as we discussed at the beginning of this piece.

  Perhaps I should stress that I don't always see every scene fully and completely. Some of the stage sets I use are more real to me than others. Some are more completely furnished. Some change in certain unimportant aspects from time to time, just as that piece of fruit changed while you were imagining it. Sometimes my mental picture will be more painting than photograph, with details alternately stressed or blurred. I have found, though, that the more completely I realize scenes before writing them, the more at ease I am in recreating them for the reader and the more apt I am to be satisfied with my work.

  There was once a school of thought in the theater that maintained that scenery should be as detailed as possible, even down to details which could never possibly be apparent to the audience. If there was a desk on stage, for example, there ought to be papers and pencils and such in its drawers, even if those drawers were destined to remain shut throughout the performance.

  I don't suppose there are many set designers nowadays who devote much time to filling up unopened desk drawers, but I think the principle is a sound one. I know it works at the typewriter, and at root the reason is as basic a one as you can get.

  Fiction, let us never forget, cannot work properly without the reader's voluntary suspension of disbelief. He knows it's just a story but he elects to discard this knowledge. While he reads its, he chooses to believe in it.

  But first is it not essential that the writer suspend his own disbelief? He more than anyone knows it's just a story?after all, he's the one who's inventing it. To the extent that he visualizes it first, to the extent that he has the experience of his fiction himself before he puts it on paper for someone else, his work acquires an essential reality in his own eyes. He suspends his own disbelief and makes it easier for the reader to go and do likewise.

  I hope I haven't succeeded only in taking a rather simple process and making it unbearably complicated. I can only suggest that you reread the exercise and give it a try. See it first, and then write it. It works.

  CHAPTER 41

  Hum a Few Bars-and Fake It

  IRATE NEIGHBOR: Do you know your bleeping piano is driving me crazy?

  PIANIST: No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it.

  When I told a friend the theme of this chapter, she treated me to a look of moral reproach. Telling writers how to fake, she said, is like teaching children how to steal. You should be ashamed of yourself.

  I should indeed be ashamed of myself, and I often am, but not this time. For fakery is the very heart and soul of fiction. All our novels and short stories are nothing but a pack of lies.

  Unless your writing is pure autobiography in the guise of fiction, you will continually find yourself practicing the dark arts of the illusionist and the trade of the counterfeiter. In order to foster the voluntary suspension of disbelief which fiction demands, you must give the reader the clear impression that you know a great deal more about things than you in fact do. If your story is set in some exotic clime, you want the reader to think your passport has more stamps than the Post Office. If an important character is an auto mechanic, you've got to look as though you know a camshaft from a hood ornament. Otherwise the reader is forcibly made aware of the fact that he's reading something somebody made up, that it's all a story, that it didn't really happen?that there's no life in it, no reality.

  One way to make your writing seem authentic is to write about the things you know. Sometimes, though, plots may suggest themselves which cannot be situated in your home town or peopled with your friends or neighbors. When this is the case, you create the illusion of reality through a combination of research and verbal sleight-of-hand.

  Shall I hum a few bars?

  1. FAKING LOCATIONS. I once wrote a con game novel set in Toronto and Olean, New York. I was living in Buffalo at the time and spent two days in Toronto and one in Olean, jotting down the names of streets and restaurants and otherwise doing research. It was fun, in a way; I was young and felt professional as all hell doing what I assumed writers were supposed to do.

  A couple years later, when I wrote a series of spy novels that hopped all over the globe, I discovered it wasn't necessary for me to go to Yugloslavia just because I was sending my lead character there. And if I didn't have to go to Belgrade, I certainly didn't have to go to Olean. The only place you really have to go is the library.

  Travel guides are an obvious source. Telephone directories, usually accessible at the phone company, often contain rudimentary city maps. The Yellow Pages help you salt your work with references to hotels and restaurants and local landmarks in some unknown-to-you town.

  I've found novels similarly useful. Before a spate of moves decimated my library, I kept every book I ever bought. If I wanted to drop a little local color into something I was writing, I could almost always put my hand on a book with the appropriate setting.

  Sometimes it's easier and just as effective to avoid research altogether and bluff your way through. For example, I wrote a book a few years ago loosely based on the Starkweather murders in the midwest. I wanted a Nebraska locale, and decided against creating a town and making up a name for it. Instead I selected Grand Island, a city I have never visited and knew no more about than the Encyclopaedia Britannica could tell me, which was very l
ittle indeed.

  I made up street names, neighborhoods, stores, everything. I didn't brother worrying what the real Grand Island was like because in the context of the novel it did not matter. Perhaps one reader in a thousand would know there's no Kleinhans Mens Wear in Grand Island, and the odds are good that he'd simply think I had described a specific store and changed the name to avoid a lawsuit.

  2. FAKING EXPERTISE. Bernie Rhodenbarr is a gifted man; he could pick his way into Fort Knox with a hairpin. Since he made his appearance, any number of people have asked me somewhat apprehensively how I know so much about the ins and outs of burglary.

  I've told them, honestly enough, that I studied up on the subject a couple years ago when it looked as though I'd need a second career. (It's a natural for writers?you work alone and set your own hours.) What I didn't add is that Bernie knows more about the business than I do. For example, he talks very knowledgeably about the merits of the Rabson lock. Now there's no such brand; I used the name because Archie Goodwin always used to praise Rabson locks in the Nero Wolfe books.

  3. EASY DOES IT. When you try too hard to look as though you know what you're talking about, the reader may be able to tell that you're protesting too much.

  I have a tendency to overcompensate when I'm setting a scene in unfamiliar territory. In an effort to prove I know what I'm writing about, I take all my guidebook research and hurl it in the reader's face. On such occasions, I can't send my hero across a bridge without quoting the cornerstone inscription, all the way down to reporting who was mayor when the span was completed. If somebody drives crosstown through streets unfamiliar to me, I'll chart the route on a map and report every left and right turn to the reader.

  What I have to keep reminding myself is that the purpose of my fiction is not to convince the reader that I've been a lifelong resident of Wall, South Dakota?or whatever setting I've chosen. The test, of course, is a simple one: Would I put in all this crap if I were more sure of myself? Would I include as much information if the scene were set in my own neighborhood? If not, I'm probably overdoing it.

  4. WATCH OUT FOR SHARP MULETAS. Ages ago I wrote a short story in which a wise old ex-bullfighter kills a neophyte by stabbing him in the throat with his muleta. Now this would have been a neat trick because the muleta is the cloth, not the sword, and that's the sort of thing I really ought to have known. The story would have been unpublishably bad regardless, but that certainly didn't help my cause.

  5. TAKE CARE OF THE PENCE. Just as a misbegotten muleta can utterly destroy credibility, so can a well-chosen detail endow a whole book with an air of authenticity.

  In Tanner's Twelve Swingers, the hero at one point teaches some Latvian to a Lithuanian child, and we have the following passage:

  Runatsi latviski, I said. You will speak Lettish. I took her hand. You see how the words change? Zale ir zalja?the grass is green. Te ir t?vs?here is father. T?vs ir virs?father is a man. Mate ir plav??mother is in the meadow.

  Mate ir plav? zalja, said Minna. Which meant that mother was in the green meadow, and which also meant that Minna was getting the hang of it-.

  All that was painstakingly faked with the aid of a book called Teach Yourself Latvian, a volume I may have been the only person ever to buy and peruse. The response I got from various Latvian-Americans more than justified the time I spent on research. A couple of years later, when I was keeping company with a young lady born in Riga, Tanner's Twelve Swingers was a great help in establishing good relations with her parents.

  One never knows, does one? Get a few little details right and people begin to think you know what you're doing.

  Sometimes phony details work just as well. Another of Tanner's adventures took him to Bangkok. When I read galleys I was startled to learn that a CIA agent pointed out drops and meeting places and fronts?a travel agency, a tobbo shop, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant-.

  What on earth was a tobbo shop?

  I checked my manuscript. I'd written a tobacco shop and a creative linotypist had vastly improved on it. I decided a tobbo shop would be the best possible CIA front, adding a crackerjack bit of local color. Yeah, a tobbo shop. Why not?

  So I left it like that.

  And now I look forward to the day when I spot in someone else's fiction a reference to the notorious tobbo shops of Siam.

  And who's to say? If enough of us write about tobbo shops, sooner or later some enterprising Thai will open one. Life does imitate art, after all.

  CHAPTER 42

  Character Building

  I JUST finished reading an English mystery set in turn-of-the-century Paris. The author knows a lot about French history and conveyed a good deal of his knowledge in his novel. The plot, while not remarkable, was adequate. The writing, if occasionally clumsy, was no great drawback. What kept me from getting caught up in the book was my inability to respond greatly to the characters. They lacked the spark of life, and the detective, an inspector of police, never came alive for me.

  I've commented before, in this space and elsewhere, on the importance of characterization. In order for a piece of fiction to work, its characters must fulfill three requirements. They must be plausible, they must be sympathetic, and they must be original.

  When characters are implausible, the reader cannot manage that trick of voluntary suspension of disbelief without which fiction never becomes involving. No policeman would react that way, he says. No character in this position and supplied with these attributes would do thus and so. Therefore I cannot escape the fact that I am reading a book, that someone sat at a desk and painstakingly invented all of this, and if I am forever aware of all this, how can I possibly gull myself into giving a damn what happens next?

  When characters are unsympathetic, the reader loses interest for a different reason. To believe in them and to get caught up in their fate is to spend time in their company, and if they are unsympathetic the prospect is unpleasant. A character need not be a saint to be sympathetic. Indeed, flawless characters tend to be curiously unsympathetic because they come across as lacking in humanity. A character can in fact be more than a bit of a villain, as long as there is something about him to which a reader can comfortably respond and with which he can identify. If I were that type of person, he ought to be able to say, then I'd be like that, too. If I were that kind of guy, that's the kind of guy I'd be.

  When a character is lacking in originality, the reader's capacities for both believing and identifying are strained. If the hero walks through the pages like an empty suit of clothes, how can we regard him as more than a mechanical device of the author's invention? His features, metaphorically speaking, remain fuzzy around the edges. Nothing sets him off and makes him a living, breathing individual, so why are we to care what happens to him?

  It's not uncommon for writers to do a lot of labeling and mistake it for originality of characterization. I'm starting a detective series, a hopeful writer said to me not long ago, and I think I've got something really original. My character never gets out of bed before noon, and he makes it a rule always to wear one piece of red clothing, and the only thing he ever drinks is white cr�me de menthe on the rocks. He has a pet rhesus monkey named Bitsy and a parrot named Sam. What do you think?

  What I think is that the speaker has not a character but a collection of character tags. It might work to have a character with any or all of these labels in his garments. Matter of fact, I wrote the above paragraph thinking of a detective character of the late David Alexander's who lived upstairs of a 42nd Street flea circus, always wore a loud vest, drank only Irish whiskey and never took a drink before four o'clock or refused one after that hour. That character, however, was not the mere sum of these attributes. It is not the quirks that make an enduring character but the essential personality which the quirks highlight. How that character views the world, how he acts and reacts, is of much greater importance than what he had for breakfast.

  In my own writing, I have found that my most effective viewpoint characters are aspe
cts of myself. This is not to say that they are based on me, or that I share their views or attitudes or patterns of behavior. Perhaps the best way I can put it is to say that they act as I would act if I happened to be them. In addition, some aspects of their nature and circumstances can often be seen to derive from my own nature and circumstances.

  Perhaps I can best show how this works in the case of a character named Matthew Scudder. I wrote three novels and two novelettes about Scudder in the mid-seventies, and have just finished a fourth novel about him after having left him in cold storage for several years. I was more than a little apprehensive at the prospect of taking him up again. I have changed, certainly, in the intervening years, and I was unsure of my ability to resume seeing the world through Scudder's eyes and reporting in his voice.

  Happily, getting back into character turned out to be virtually effortless, no harder to relearn than swimming or riding a bike. Now this does not prove that the book I've just written is any good, or even that Scudder, now or half a dozen years ago, is any great shakes as a character. What it does demonstrate, however, is the extent to which Scudder was and is a vital character for me. Clearly I find him plausible, sympathetic, and original. Clearly I know just who he is in a way that goes beyond his wardrobe and his mannerisms. I can believe in him, and I can care about him?and I can write about him.

  Scudder provides a better example than most of the process of character construction because I knew a great deal about him before I started chronicling his adventures. Often my characters develop on the page as I write. Scudder did, to an extent, and still does evolve while I'm at the typewriter, but he was largely conceived and developed before any words went onto paper.

  I had talked with Bill Grose, then at Dell, about developing a character for a detective series. A reading of Leonard Shecter's On the Pad gave me the idea of using a corrupt policeman who happened to solve homicide cases while actively seeking opportunities for graft. I liked the notion, but it became quickly evident to me that I could not comfortably write about a member of a bureaucracy like the police force. My detective had to be operating on his own hook.