Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  Matt Scudder was my one series character who was so conceived before a word was written about him. I had an opportunity to develop a series for Dell and went into a huddle with myself to dream up a character. Leonard Shecter's book On the Pad got my mind working, and as we observed in the chapter on Character Building, I shaped and molded my impression to fit my own perspective. I have long felt that every series character is very much a projection of self, and in Scudder's case the parallels were clear enough.

  Before I began work on The Sins of the Fathers, the first Scudder novel, I had written a handful of pages about Scudder's character and lifestyle, first as a sort of letter to myself to clarify my grasp of the character, then as a series proposal for Bill Grose at Dell. By the time I began writing the book, I accordingly knew a great deal about my lead. But I didn't really know him until he began to develop on the page, speaking in his own voice and showing me how he was inclined to act and react, how he perceived the world and related to it. Writing, however well I prepare for it, is never a simple matter of filling in the blanks. The magic that happens at the actual moment of creation is an indispensable part of the whole.

  For all my prior planning, Scudder grew and ripened from one book to the next. Infuriatingly, one reviewer groused that the third book seemed a bit weaker than the second; as it happened, Dell reversed the second and third books when publishing them.

  For several years it looked as though Scudder and I were through with one another. Then, as I've mentioned earlier, I wrote a fourth book about the character, and it was like embracing an old friend. Perhaps an actor feels something similar when he plays a role with which he had a success years earlier. I was particularly pleased to find that Scudder was a better character for his time at leisure; the book, A Stab in the Dark, is to my mind the best to date.

  While I would hardly set myself up as an expert on series novels, I do seem to have fulfilled my youthful dream with a vengeance. Perhaps some thoughts on series in general might be of value to those of you out there dreaming a similar dream.

  1. CONCENTRATE ON THE BOOK AT HAND. I've occasionally had letters from neophyte writers who describe themselves as working on the first volume of a series, and I know that first novels thus described frequently turn up in the hands of agents and publishers. The agents and publishers are not much impressed. Their interest in a manuscript is in its own merits or lack thereof, not in what may or may not follow it in the course of time.

  It's hard enough to write a novel and make it work. Projecting an entire series merely dilutes your efforts. Stay in the now, work on the book you're working on, and leave the question of future books open until you've finished the job.

  2. SOME BOOKS USE UP THEIR LEAD CHARACTERS. The strength and appeal of a character is not in and of itself reason to hang a series on him. Such Men Are Dangerous (written under the pen name Paul Kavanagh) is arguably my best book, and had as strong a lead character as I've created. But the book used him up, not in the sense of killing him off but in that he completed his business by its end. Hollywood of late has been making sequels of everything that does well at the box office, and the lamentable quality of most of these sequels shows the fallacy of this principle. If your lead character is sufficiently altered by what he has experienced, you can't put him in another book and make him do the same thing over again without losing something. In my own experience, I had to jam Chip Harrison into a detective series so that he would not be used up.

  3. DON'T PRESUME THE READER HAS READ THE PREVIOUS VOLUMES. The sixth book you write about Private Eye Studd Boring will be some reader's introduction to your hero. You can't take prior knowledge for granted. On the other hand, you don't have to reiterate every single fact you've established about your hero in the course of all of the earlier books. There's a delicate balance here. You want to make things fully comprehensible for the new reader without boring the jaw teeth out of your longtime fans. For my own part, I've grown tired of hearing again how Meyer Meyer got his name and lost all his hair; every Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel tells me the story over again. My own readers may be every bit as tired reading about how a bullet of Scudder's ricocheted to kill Estrellita Rivera and plunge my hero into the Slough of Despond. A delicate balance indeed.

  4. REMEMBER WHAT YOU WROTE. The maddening thing about writing a series over a period of years is keeping track of what you established about your characters and their friends and relations in earlier books. What floor does Tanner live on? What's the name of Carolyn Kaiser's lover's aunt in Bath Beach? Or did we establish that the aunt lived in Bensonhurst? What's the name of the bar where Chip likes to watch the Mets game? That hooker Elaine whom Scudder pals around with?what's her last name? And that tie Ehrengraf always wears at triumphal moments?it's the official cravat of the Caedmon Society, but what's the color combination?

  Some writers let the chips fall where they may. Rex Stout furnished any number of street numbers over the years for Nero Wolfe's 35th Street brownstone, and sprinkled the books with a multitude of other minor inconsistencies. I myself am sufficiently obsessive-compulsive to make every effort to avoid that sort of thing, and the only way I've found is to stop writing and start paging through my collected works. Arthur Maling has a chart with all the characters and their interrelationships in his Price, Potter and Petacque series. If I had such a chart, I'd doubtless fail to keep it up to date?or I'd always find myself needing to know some minor point I hadn't bothered entering in the first place.

  5. THE FIRST-PERSON/THIRD-PERSON CHOICE. Of my series characters, all but Ehrengraf speak in the first person. That doesn't mean this is the right way to do it. As a rule of thumb, I would suggest that larger-than-life characters like James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, and Nero Wolfe are more effectively handled either via third-person narration or with the aid of a Watson?i.e., a first-person narrator other than the lead character. Direct first-person narration is more likely to work when the writer identifies strongly with the lead character and wants to write from the inside out, showing the world through his character's eyes. But whatever comes most naturally to you as a writer is probably the best choice.

  Much of my most enjoyable hours at the typewriter have been spent in the company of one or another of my series characters. And, when a series seems to have run its natural course, I'm not without a pang of regret, as though I've abandoned an old friend by ceasing to write about him. I'm grateful that my writing career has not been so rigid, glad I've not spent the past fifteen years writing nothing but Tanner books?and yet I sometimes feel guilty for having cast him aside like a tattered shirt.

  Is the series for you? You'll find out?a book at a time, over the years. Enjoy it.

  CHAPTER 46

  We Can Always Change the Title

  ONCE UPON a time, many long years ago, a woman wrote a novel of the Civil War and called it Tomorrow Is Another Day. By the time the book saw print its title had been changed at the publisher's suggestion. The new title was Gone With the Wind.

  The clarity of hindsight is never more vivid than when dealing with titles. It's a simple matter now to argue that Margaret Mitchell's novel owed a measure of its enormous popular success to its title change, and to maintain that Tomorrow Is Another Day wouldn't have sold ten thousand copies.

  I'm not so sure that's true. When a book has enough going for it, it seems capable of finding its audience with or without a strong title. When it doesn't, the most intriguing title in the world won't add up to impressive sales figures.

  But I do think it's safe to say that Gone With the Wind is a better title than Tomorrow Is Another Day, and that the superior title contributed to the effectiveness of the book's advertising and promotion campaign and enabled it to find its audience faster and with more immediate impact.

  Fair enough.

  Now the tricky question. Why is Gone With the Wind a better title than Tomorrow Is Another Day?

  One is tempted to reply as any number of musicians are said to have done when pressed for a definiti
on of jazz. If you have to ask, they said, you'll never know. In other words, one ought to be able to grasp intuitively the intrinsic superiority of GWTW to TIAD. The one is lively, provocative, compelling. The other is tired, humdrum, prosaic.

  On the other hand, the publishing industry has known for years the only honest definition of a good title. A good title, you see, is the name of a best-selling book.

  Peyton Place, for instance, is a terrific title. It's even managed to become a part of the language. Without Grace Metalious's novel, however, it's nothing much more than three syllables' worth of alliteration and meter. Because the book happened to sell like Geiger counters in Harrisburg, the title promptly became a household word. A bandwagon effect helped this process along; for several years every faintly steamy book set in a small town was bally-hooed as another Peyton Place, and this did the original novel immeasurable good.

  Is The Exorcist a good title? I certainly wouldn't have thought so in advance of the book's publication. I doubt most of the public knew what the word meant. But if it was a bad title, it doesn't seem to have harmed sales much.

  How about The Other? If there's any merit whatsoever to that title I'd be pleased to have it explained to me. It's absolutely flat. It doesn't linger in the mind. You get no sense from it of what the book's about, or even of what type of book you're dealing with. Nor is there a mystery in the title intriguing enough to make you pick up the book and find out what the title means. Yet the book certainly sold well.

  Is Twins a good title? Or The Thorn Birds? Or The Shining? How about Coma, perhaps the first novel ever named for what it induces? What makes a good title, anyway? And how do you go about picking one for your own story or novel?

  First let's place the whole question in perspective. The title you give your manuscript is very likely the least important factor in determining whether or not it sells. A really sensational title may well predispose an editor in favor of your script, but it won't do a thing for you if your work doesn't live up to its promise. Similarly, while a weak title may lessen the enthusiasm with which an editor approaches your material, it won't keep him from being receptive to a good piece of writing; he certainly knows that the title can always be changed.

  That said, here are some random thoughts on this whole business of titles.

  1. A TITLE SHOULD BE MEMORABLE. I've been reading entries in the WD short-story contest. While no title has yet made a bad story good or a good story bad, I've been struck again this year by the high proportion of singularly dull label titles. Entry after entry passes across my desk with titles like The Dog or The Pen or The Teacher or An Autumn Afternoon or Marilyn or The Affair or?but that's enough, isn't it? These titles are flat and not terribly interesting. They don't promise much. They don't whet the appetite, and they should.

  2. A TITLE SHOULD FIT THE BOOK OR STORY THAT FOLLOWS IT. When you've written a certain type of material, the title should indicate as much. If you call your book Gunfight at Rio Lobo, most people are going to leap to the conclusion that it's a western. If it's not a western, that's probably not the best possible title for it?even if there is a central incident in the book involving a shootout at a place called Rio Lobo.

  A couple of years ago Charles McGarry wrote a novel of suspense and intrigue called The Secret Lovers. The title was supposed to mean that the principal characters?spies and bureaucrats?had a love of secrets. That's fine if you've got a little miniature salesman attached to each copy of the book to explain what the title means. In the absence thereof, a lot of folks assumed McGarry had written a Harlequin Romance.

  3. WATCH OUT FOR UNPRONOUNCEABLE WORDS. Robert Ludlum's titles are always carefully chosen and invariably combine a distinctive proper name and a noun?The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Osterman Weekend, The Matlock Paper, The Matarese Circle. One book was very nearly entitled The Wolfsschanze Covenant, until an informal survey revealed that a lot of people were by no means confident of their ability to pronounce Wolfsschanze correctly. As The Holcroft Covenant, the book made its way to the top of the bestseller list. Would it have done so regardless? Perhaps. Perhaps enough readers would have picked up the book wordlessly and carried it to the cash register. Perhaps others would have asked for the latest Ludlum novel if intimidated by its title.

  But why take chances?

  4. DON'T MAKE THE TITLE DO THE STORY'S JOB. Years ago, when I spent a year reading slush at a literary agency, it sometimes seemed to me as though a full forty percent of the stories I read were entitled As the Twig Is Bent. Another thirty-five percent were called So Grows the Tree.

  Doubtless I exaggerate. But I've noted in this year's contest entries that a lot of new writers still fashion titles from tired proverbs. The problem is twofold. First of all, the titles thus formed have a trite quality to them; more to the point, they pull the punch of the story by telling the reader in advance what conclusion he is meant to draw from it. It's tiresome enough to have a story's moral spelled out, but when it's spelled out ahead of time, why bother reading the story at all?

  Other stories get defused when too much information is given in the title, often in the name of quaintness. The Day Jimmie Jeff Rayburn Drove Clear to Harrisonville for the Papers might be an example of this sort of thing.

  When I first started publishing short stories, my titles tended to be pedestrian and unmemorable. In recent years I've been happier with my ability to come up with something striking. Sometimes I can see the title I would have used, had I approached it with a little less imagination. I did a story about a gas station holdup, for instance, that I once would have been pleased to call Highway Robbery. Instead the title I used was Nothing Short of Highway Robbery; it's more arresting and memorable, and it fits the story better.

  My favorite title is Burglars Can't Be Choosers, and I've never doubted that it contributed to the sale of the first Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery. It was a neat enough play on a familiar phrase, and it managed to convey a sense of the book, that it would offer a lighthearted look at criminous matters. Once I hit on that title it seemed to have been the inevitable choice from the beginning.

  But I almost missed it. I didn't have a title when I was readying the first fifty or sixty pages for submission to Random House. While proofreading, I happened on the phrase in one of Bernie's interior monologues. I didn't even remember having written it, but fortunately I was able to recognize a good title when it bit me, so I quick-typed out a title page.

  Series titles, incidentally, constitute a special problem. On the one hand, they provide an opportunity for you to let the reader know that the books are indeed volumes in a series. A certain amount of uniformity it thus desirable. Too much uniformity, though, and it can become very difficult for a reader to remember if he's read a particular book or not. Consider the Matt Helm titles?The Betrayers, The Ambushers, The Ravagers, etc. How does the mind keep them separated?

  John D. MacDonald found an answer in the Travis McGee books, using a different color in each title but otherwise making no effort at uniformity. Nightmare in Pink, A Tan and Sandy Silence, The Scarlet Ruse?the titles fit the individual books, with only the memorable color word providing series continuity.

  After my second novel about Evan Tanner was published with the title The Canceled Czech, I decided to try for similar word-play in future volumes. Tanner #3, dealing with romance in Latvia, was submitted as Letts Fall in Love, with an alternative title of The Lettish Tomatoes. It was published as Tanner's Twelve Swingers. Tanner #4, concerning a sexually unsuccessful Siamese, was proudly handed in as The Scoreless Thai. Fawcett published it as Two for Tanner, and I decided the hell with it.

  All of which suggests that perhaps we shouldn't attach too much importance to titles. Publishers not only change bad ones, but they're sometimes just as quick to change good ones. On several occasions Hollywood studios have (a) bought a book for its title, (b) scrapped the story and written a wholly original screenplay, and (c) then changed the title. Publishers rarely go that far, but they're capable of bizar
re behavior.

  Back in the late fifties, science-fiction writer Randall P. Garrett had a standing assignment to deliver ten thousand words a month to Amazing Stories. Each month he submitted three or four pieces of fiction, each with a title and with one of his regular pen names. Each month, sure as death and taxes, Amazing's editor would change all Randy's titles and all of his pen names.

  Randy decided he shouldn't bother being creative if his titles weren't going to be used anyway, and that he might as well enjoy himself. His agent's files can testify that, over the next year or so, he wrote and submitted and sold the following works of fiction: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, and so on. Nobody at Amazing Stories ever cracked a smile. The checks came in, invoiced accordingly, and the stories?titles and pen names changed?appeared in due course.

  Which reminds me?I'm not sure why?of the perhaps apocryphal story of the reporter who cornered a Hollywood studio boss for an interview. Pardon me, sir, but my name is Henry Gorgenplatz, and I?

  Don't worry about a thing, said the studio head. We can always change it.

  PART FIVE

  Isn't That the Truth:

  Fiction as a Spiritual Exercise

  CHAPTER 47

  A Writer's Prayer

  LORD, I hope You've got a few minutes. I've got a whole lot of favors to ask You.

  Basically, Lord, I guess I want to ask You to help me be the best writer I possibly can, to get the most out of whatever talent I've been given. I could probably leave it at that, but I think it might help me to get a little more specific.