Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  If you keep a notebook?and you really should?you can stockpile interesting names for future use. A few years back writer and bridge expert Patricia Fox Sheinwold was boasting about her dog Honey Bear, whom she hoped to star in some dogfood commercials. If Bear turns out not to be photogenic, Pat said, they can always use her to do the bark-overs.

  I laughed politely?what, after all, are friends for??and I scribbled Barkover in my notebook. In due course one Simon Barckover appeared as a talent representative in a book called The Topless Tulip Caper, by Chip Harrison.

  Once I spent a night in a motel room in Grenada, Mississippi, with nothing to read but the phone book. Someone must have swiped the Gideon Bible. So I read the phone book and discovered that there was a local family named Palmertree. I think that's a wonderful name, but I haven't yet found a place to use it. It's in my notebook, waiting.

  4. FIRST NAMES CAN BE INTERESTING, TOO. Of late I've taken to using surnames as first names, and I like the effect of it. Nothing endows a character with the trappings of wealth and status like a proper British surname for his first name. Remember, a substantial number of first names started out as surnames?Milton, Seymour, Irving, etc. And the practice of giving a child a family name as a first name is a long-established one. In recent months I've named characters Wilson Colliard, Grantham Beale, Walker Gladstone Murchison, and so on.

  Grantham Beale, by the by, started out as Graham Beale. But that began to sound too much like Graham Bell to me, as in Alexander Graham Bell, so he became Grantham instead.

  5. DON'T GET TOO CUTE. If too many of your character names are too interesting, plausibility is sacrificed. You don't want the reader to be drawn into constant awareness of the unusual and original names you've fastened on your characters; that kind of awareness just gets in the way.

  Ross Thomas likes interesting names for his characters, and I sometimes think he goes overboard. The police chief in The Fools in Town Are on Our Side is Homer Necessary, for instance. Now parents do name their sons Homer now and again, and Necessary is a perfectly legitimate surname, not an invention of the author's, but I just have a lot of trouble believing in Chief Homer Necessary, especially in the same book with Lucifer Dye.

  Of course, if your fiction isn't supposed to be taken seriously, then your characters' names can be as outlandish as you can make them. Think of Ian Fleming's Pussy Galore, for example, or my own personal favorite?Trevanian's Urassis Dragon. (Hint?say it aloud.)

  6. DON'T TWIST THE READER'S TONGUE. Even though your story or novel may not be designed to be read aloud, and even though you are not aiming your fiction at an audience of lip-movers, you should avoid throwing a jawbreaker of a name at your reader. He ought to be able to pronounce everything he reads. He may not say it out loud but he'll certainly be hearing it in his head, and it can throw him off-stride if he's unsure how it ought to sound.

  This doesn't mean names have to be of the sort that every reader will pronounce identically. What's important is that the reader can assume he knows how to pronounce them.

  Kerr, for instance, is sometimes pronounced to rhyme with fur, other times to rhyme with bar. The reader can't know for certain which you intend, but neither will he very likely lose much sleep over the question. He'll make up his own mind, probably without hesitation, and will forever after think of your character as Car or Cur, as the case may be. But if your character's named Przyjbmnshkvich, it's going to rub the reader the wrong way every time he encounters it.

  7. RESEARCH YOUR ETHNIC NAMES. If one of your characters is a Latvian or Montenegrin or whatever, it's easy to add an authentic note to your work by picking a suitable name for him. A good encyclopedia comes in handy. If you want a Latvian character, look up Latvia and Latvian Language and Literature. Those articles will contain the names of any number of historical personages and writers. You take the first name of one and the last name of another, you put them together, and you've come up with an authentic and original Latvian name. It takes very little time and the result is quite impressive.

  What's in a name? Plenty?and don't think Shakespeare didn't know it, considering the apt tags he fastened on so many of his characters. A rose by any name might smell as sweet, but would you send anybody a dozen American Beauty Skunkweeds?

  CHAPTER 45

  Repeat Performances and Return Engagements

  EVAN TANNER had the sleep center of his brain destroyed by a piece of North Korean shrapnel, and he hasn't had a wink of sleep since. He lives in New York, on 105th Street west of Broadway, where he shares a fifth-floor walkup apartment with Minna, the sole surviving descendant of Mindaugas, ninth-century king of independent Lithuania. Tanner speaks dozens of languages, belongs to political nut groups and supports lost causes, and earns a living writing masters and doctoral theses for irresolute students. Intermittently he leaves the country as a sort of free-lance secret agent, nominally attached to a super-secret Washington agency but bending methods to serve his own ends.

  Bernie Rhodenbarr also lives on New York's Upper West Side, at 71st Street and West End Avenue. He operates Barnegat Books, a marginal second-hand bookstore on East 11th Street, and hangs out a lot with Carolyn Kaiser, who operates the Poodle Factory, a dog-grooming salon a couple doors down from Barnegat Books. For a living, Bernie steals things. He's a burglar, and no Raffles-style amateur cracksman either. He's a pro, and he does it for the money plus the undeniable thrill he gets out of it. He knows all this is morally reprehensible but there's nothing he can do about it.

  Matthew Scudder's an ex-cop. Once a moderately corrupt New York police detective, Scudder went through changes when a bullet of his ricocheted and killed a young girl. He left his wife and sons, moved to West 57th Street, took a room in a seedy hotel, and began drinking alcoholically. He earns his bread and booze as an unlicensed private eye. Although he has no faith, he hangs out in churches and unobtrusively slips a tenth of his earnings into poor boxes. He's a brooder, hip-deep in existential angst, working as an outsider with an insider's understanding of the system.

  Chip Harrison's an eighteen-year-old kid who lives about a block away from his employer, private detective Leo Haig. Haig's a lifelong mystery fan who has always wanted to be Nero Wolfe. An uncle's legacy permitted Haig to set up shop upstairs of a Puerto Rican bordello in the top half of a carriage house in Chelsea, where he breeds tropical fish and tries to emulate his hero's eccentricity and acuteness. Chip runs around in a state of perpetual lecherous innocence, helping Haig solve such classic crimes as present themselves.

  Martin H. Ehrengraf is a diminutive criminal lawyer with a passion for poetry and a dandy's attention to the niceties of dress. He keeps himself immaculate, although his office is generally in disarray. Ehrengraf is unique in that he handles criminal cases on a contingency basis, collecting fees only when his clients are acquitted or otherwise released. He rarely appears in court, operating behind the scenes to get his clients off the hook?and doing so by fabricating evidence, framing other persons, committing murders of his own, and otherwise launching end runs around the long arm of the law. Ehrengraf's home base is unspecified, but an astute reader might identify the city as Buffalo.

  You won't find him in the Buffalo telephone directory, however, nor will you be able to locate any of the other four chaps in the New York phone book. They are all series characters of mine. Tanner has appeared in seven novels, Bernie Rhodenbarr in three, Chip Harrison in four. There have been three novels and two novelettes about Scudder, while Ehrengraf has been the subject of half a dozen short stories.

  All five of them are exceedingly real to me. Some of them are less active than others, to be sure. It's been more than a decade since I wrote a word about Tanner, and several years since the most recent appearance of Chip Harrison. This hasn't diminished their reality in my eyes. I may not know precisely what they look like, and certain aspects of their backgrounds may be somewhat unclear. I may or may not write about any or all of them again. That's all beside the point. These gentlemen have p
layed a predominant role, not only in my literary career but in the continuing evolution of my consciousness. They have been, and continue to be, a part of my life. They have evolved and grown and changed and defined themselves upon the printed page even as I have done likewise in what we presumptuously call the real world. If they are aspects of me, so too have they become parts of me.

  The creation of a series character was an early ambition of mine. Once I passed the stage of merely wanting to write some indefinable great book and developed specific auctorial aims, I recognized the desire to create an enduring character and write voluminously about him.

  Part of this urge stemmed from the amateur's conviction that there's an easy way to literary success. A great many non-writers tend to make this assumption. Once you've got a formula, I suppose you've got it made, no end of people have said to me, the envy unmistakable in their tone. It strikes me that they've made two false assumptions?(1) that I've got a formula and (2) that I've got it made. Wrong and wrong. (As we'll see later, once I do have a formula I'm likely to be in Deep Trouble.)

  Akin to the nonsense about formula, these same non-writers assume that the development of a series character is a major step toward success, financial security, and a final solution to the heartbreak of psoriasis. Once you've got a character, they say, all you have to do is write about him for the rest of your life.

  Terrific. Once you've got a pair of running shoes, all you have to do is leg it from Hopkinton to Boston. Once you've learned the Australian crawl, all you have to do is swim the Channel. Once you've hit puberty?oh, never mind.

  More to the point, I wanted to write about a series character because I enjoyed reading about other people's series characters. Once I had made the acquaintance of an attractive and compelling lead character, I wanted to meet him again and learn more about him. If his world view was one I found interesting and illuminating, I wanted to see more of the world through his eyes.

  This ambition notwithstanding, it wasn't until I'd been writing professionally for seven or eight years that I first created a series character. I did attempt to carry over one Ed London, the detective narrator of Death Pulls a Doublecross, and I faintly recall writing one or perhaps two magazine novelettes about him. But I never did get the handle on a second Ed London novel, and I think that's just as well. London wasn't much of a character, and in many respects I wasn't much of a writer. I could keep stories moving and my prose and dialogue were adequate, but my people had relatively little to them.

  With Tanner, my first series character, I had a handle on his personality and lifestyle years before I had a book to put him in. By the time I came up with the plot of The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, I already knew a great deal about Evan Tanner. I was to find out a great deal more in the course of writing the book, as Tanner's character and narrative style defined itself on the page, and before I finished the book I knew beyond doubt that I wanted to learn?and to write?a great deal more about the man.

  Other volumes followed in due course, and Tanner books established a pattern, if not a formula. Chronicling Tanner's adventures became very nearly a fulltime occupation, until after having written seven books I stopped abruptly and went on to other things.

  Why the sudden halt? Well, while the books were not drugs on the market, neither did they set any sales records, and I'm sure this influenced me. If the series had ever really taken off commercially I might have sustained enthusiasm for a longer run. Then too, changing times made Tanner's world rather less amusing. All the lost causes he'd embraced were suddenly blossoming in the real world, with wars breaking out and bombs going off. What had been quaint had turned suddenly nasty, and I felt it was time my sleepless knight lay down for a nap.

  But far more important a reason was that there was a sameness about the books that made them increasingly tedious for me to write. Tanner's fans?a small but ardent band?were never put off by this sameness. Nor, to be sure, am I as a reader ever angry at a series writer for mining the same vein repeatedly. Richard Stark's Parker novels are all of a piece; I not only take comfort in this but am delighted when a remembered character returns from an earlier volume. Rex Stout's books about Nero Wolfe have a sameness to which I have never objected, and those atypical volumes in which Stout takes his hero away from the 35th Street brownstone and onto terra incognita have always seemed the weaker for it. Similarly, I want to meet Agatha Christie's Jane Marple on her own turf, in the stifling little village of St. Mary's Mead. When Christie broke the pattern by transplanting Marple to London or the Caribbean, I felt cheated.

  Series fans, then, want each book to be the same only different. But Tanner's fans were spending six or eight or ten hours a year reading about their hero while I was devoting that many months a year to writing about him, and I was accordingly more affected by what I perceived as repetition.

  I suppose, too, that I was ready to outgrow Tanner as a vehicle for self-expression. I had not yet finished developing as a writer and needed other books, other sorts of stories, in order to facilitate this growth.

  Some writers handle this by allowing the character to grow. The most striking example that comes to mind is Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, who was not a whole lot more than a wisecracking carbon copy of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in his earliest appearances. As Macdonald grew, so did Archer, and by the time The Galton Case was published in the late fifties, Archer had undergone a radical change. This evolution has continued over the years, and I reach for each new volume as it is published, wondering what Archer's up to now.

  I don't think I could have done anything like this with Tanner. To change him would have been to lose him utterly. Better to lay him to rest, or put him out to pasture, or let him go his own way while I went mine.

  Chip Harrison, on the other hand, did change dramatically so that I might continue writing about him. He made his debut in No Score as a seventeen-year-old virgin with a desperate yearning to change his status. The book was episodic, with Chip traveling around and getting into various scrapes and never managing to get it together with an acquiescent young woman until the final chapter, when his efforts were crowned with success.

  I never expected to write more about Chip. But No Score did exceptionally well on the newsstands, and it occurred to me that I would enjoy spending a month or so seeing the world through Chip's innocent eyes. I sent him roaming in Chip Harrison Scores Again, which was essentially the mixture as before, and it worked fairly well.

  That made two books but it didn't make a series, and I found I wanted to do more with the character. So I thought up Leo Haig and put Chip to work for him, retaining his character pretty much intact as a sort of lecher in the rye but making an apprentice detective out of him.

  I'm certainly not the first person to turn an unintentional series character into a detective. In The Name of the Game Is Death, Dan Marlowe created as his lead a hardened professional criminal named Earl Drake. The book worked well and was well received, and in the course of writing further about Drake, Marlowe gradually turned him from a criminal into a problem-solver, working (as I recall) at the behest of some national security agency. I stopped reading the books when Drake stopped pulling heists and became just another secret agent, feeling the essence of the character had been lost.

  Still, I can understand what prompted Marlowe to make the change. It's difficult to sustain the criminality of a series character. Over a period of time, such characters tend to mellow, to work increasingly on the side of the law. It is as if their creators are uncomfortable with them as criminals and yearn to reform them. Perhaps, at the risk of plumbing psychoanalytical depths, we might suggest that they're uncomfortable with themselves writing repeatedly from a criminal perspective.

  Voltaire, it is said, made a visit to a highly specialized bordello and enjoyed himself. He declined an opportunity to return for a second visit. Once, a philosopher, he said. Twice, a pervert.

  So it is, perhaps, with writers. To explore the mind of the criminal by writing from
his viewpoint is one thing. To establish him in an extended series of books as one's literary alter ego is something else.

  Harrumph. Bernie Rhodenbarr is unquestionably a criminal, and very much a professional at that. He, too, is unquestionably an unintentional series character. Bernie's prototype was born in a never-finished Scudder novel as a burglar who found himself framed for murder and enlisted Scudder's help. When I scuttled that particular book I held over the basic situation while remaking the character entirely, making Bernie flip and urbane and making him solve the murder himself.

  He became a series character because I found I liked writing about him. I wrote a second book and a third, and by the time you read this I hope and pray I shall have written a fourth. I don't know that I can go on writing about Bernie indefinitely, given my propensity for outlasting my series characters, but he certainly would seem to have another book or two in him, and as long as I feel that way I suppose I'll carry on. I sincerely hope, though, that I don't let the clown turn respectable. The image of a Bernie-turned-straight using his talents for illegal entry on behalf of the forces of law and order is one I find more than a little sick-making.

  Same thing goes for Martin Ehrengraf, of whom I suspect I may already have finished writing. Ehrengraf was another unintentional series character; one story led to another, and each time it became a little more difficult to hatch a new plot that would lend itself to his particular character. Fred Dannay has pointed out that Randolph Mason, a similarly corrupt fictional attorney, ultimately reformed and used his talents to uphold the law. I have no intention of allowing Ehrengraf to come to such a bad end.