Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  For starters, help me to avoid comparing myself to other writers. I can make a lot of trouble for myself when I do that, sliding into a routine that might go something like this:

  I'm a better writer than Alan, so why don't I have the success he has? Why don't I get book-club sales? Why wasn't my last book optioned for a TV mini-series? How come Barry gets so much more advertising support from his publisher than I do? What's so great about Carol that she deserves a two-page review in The New Yorker? Every time I turn on the TV, there's Dan running his mouth on another talk show. What makes him so special? And how come Ellen's in Redbook four or five times a year? I write the same kind of story and mine keep coming back with form rejection slips.

  On the other hand, I'll never be the writer Frank is. He can use his own experience with a degree of rigorous self-honesty that's beyond me. And Gloria has a real artist's eye. Her descriptive passages are so vivid they make me aware of my own limitations. Howard's a real pro?he can knock off more work in a day than I can in a month, and do it without working up a sweat. Irene spends twice as much time at the typewriter as I do. Maybe she has the right idea, and I'm so lazy I don't deserve to get anyplace at this game. And as for Jeremy?

  Lord, let me remember that I'm not in competition with other writers. Whether they have more or less success has nothing to do with me. They have their stories to write and I have mine. They have their way of writing them and I have mine. They have their careers and I have mine. The more I focus on comparing myself with them, the less energy I am able to concentrate on making the best of myself and my own work. I wind up despairing of my ability and bitter about its fruits, and all I manage to do is sabotage myself.

  Help me, Lord, to write my own stories and novels. At the beginning I may have to spend a certain amount of time doing unwitting imitations of other people's work. That's because it may take me a while to find out what my own stories are and how to tap into them. But I'm sure they exist, and I'm sure it will ultimately be possible for me to find them.

  Flannery O'Connor said somewhere that anybody who manages to survive childhood has enough material to write fiction for a lifetime. I believe this, Lord. I believe every human being with the impulse to write fiction has, somewhere within him or her, innumerable stories to write. They may not bear any obvious resemblance to my own experiences. They may be set in a land I never visited or at a time I never lived. But if they're the stories I am meant to write they will derive from my observations and experience in a significant way. I'll know the feelings, the perceptions, the reactions, for having lived them in some important way.

  Of the traits likely to help me get in touch with these stories, perhaps the most important is honesty. Help me, Lord, to be as honest as I'm capable of being every time I sit down at the typewriter. I don't mean by this that I feel I ought to be writing non-fiction in fiction's clothing, that I think honesty entails telling stories as they actually happened in real life. Fiction, after all, is a pack of lies. But let my fiction have its own inner truth.

  When a character of mine is talking, let me listen to him and write down what I hear. Let me describe him, not with phrases dimly recalled from other books, but as I perceive him.

  It seems to me that a major element of writing honestly lies in respecting the reader. Please, Lord, don't ever allow me to hold my audience in contempt. Sometimes I find this a temptation, because by diminishing the reader I am less intimidated by the task of trying to engage his interest and hold his attention. But in the long run I cannot be disrespectful of my reader without my work's suffering for it.

  If I cannot write for a particular market without contemning that market's readers, perhaps I'm banging my head against the wrong wall. If I can't write juveniles without being patronizing to young readers, I'm not going to be proud of my work, nor am I going to perform it well. If I can't write confessions or gothics or mysteries or westerns because I think the product is categorically garbage or the people who read it are congenital idiots, I am not going to be good at it and I am not going to gain satisfaction from it. Let me write what I'm able to respect, and let me respect those people I hope will read it.

  Lord, let me keep a dictionary within arm's length. When I'm not sure of the spelling of a word, let me look it up?not so much because a misspelled word is disastrous as because of a propensity of mine for substituting another word out of simple laziness. By the same token, let me use the dictionary when I'm uncertain of the precise meaning of a word I want to use.

  But don't let me keep a really good dictionary on my desk, Lord. Let me reserve my Oxford Universal Dictonary for important matters. If I grabbed it up every time I wanted to check the spelling of exaggerate, only to spend twenty minutes in the happy company of word derivations and obsolete usages and other lexicographical debris, I'd never get any work done. A small dull pedestrian dictionary close at hand is sufficient.

  Checking spelling and definitions requires a certain degree of humility, Lord, and that's a characteristic I could use more of. It's easy for me to run short of humility?which seems curious, given how much I've got to be humble about. But it strikes me that writing demands such colossal (I just looked up colossal?thanks) arrogance that humility gets lost in the shuffle. It takes arrogance, doesn't it, to sit down at a typewriter making up stories out of the whole cloth and expecting total strangers to be caught up in them? I can think of little more arrogant than every artist's implicit assumption that his private fantasies and perceptions are worth another person's rapt attention.

  Humility helps me keep myself in perspective. When my humility is in good order, both success and failure become easier to take. I'm able to recognize that the fate of empires does not hinge upon my work. I can see then that my writing will never be perfect, and that perfection is not a goal to which I can legitimately aspire. All I ever have to do is the best I can.

  Please let me learn, Lord, to let it go at that. My capacity for arrogance and self-indulgence is balanced by an equally limitless capacity for self-deprecation. I can be awfully hard on myself, Lord, and it serves no purpose. If I turn out five pages a day I tell myself that with a little extra effort I could have produced six or eight or ten. If I write a scene without researching a key element of it, I accuse myself of being slipshod; if I do the research, I beat up on myself for wasting time that could have been spent turning out finished copy. If I rewrite I call it a waste of time, a process of washing garbage. If I don't rewrite I call it laziness.

  This self-abuse is counter-productive. Give me, Lord, the courage to get through life without it.

  Help me, Lord, to grow as a writer. There are so many opportunities to do so, to gain in skills and knowledge just by practicing my craft and keeping my eyes open. Every book I read ought to teach me something I can use in my own writing, if I approach it with a willingness to learn. When I read a writer who does things better than I do, enable me to learn from him. When I read another writer who has serious weaknesses, allow me to learn from his mistakes.

  Give me the courage to take chances. There was a point early in my career when I spent far too long writing inferior work, work that did not challenge me, that I could no longer respect, and that I no longer was able to grow from. I did this out of fear. I was afraid to take chances, either economically or artistically, afraid I might produce something unpublishable.

  I have only grown when I have been willing to extend myself, to run risks. Sometimes I have failed, certainly, but help me to remember that I have always been able to learn from this sort of failure, that it has invariably redounded to my benefit in the long run. And, when I do take chances and do fail again, let me remember that so that the memory may soften the pain of failure.

  Let me be open to experience, Lord, in life as well as at the typewriter. And give me the courage to take my experience undiluted, and to get through it all without chemical assistance. There was a time, Lord, when a little green pill in the morning seemed to concentrate my energies and improve my writing
. It turned out that I was merely borrowing tomorrow's energy today, and the interest turned out to be extortionate in the extreme. There was a time, too, when other chemicals in pill or liquid form brought me what passed for relaxation. All of those props limited my capacity for experience and narrowed my vision like blinders on a horse. I thought I needed those things to write, Lord, and have since found out how much better I can write without them. They kept me from growing, from learning, from improving. Please help me keep away from them a day at a time. Let me know, too, where my responsibilities as a writer begin and end. Help me to concentrate my efforts on those aspects of my career I can personally affect and let go of those over which I can have no control. Once I've put a manuscript in the mail, let me forget about it until it either comes back or finds a home. Let me take the appropriate action, Lord, without diluting my energies worrying over the result of that action. My primary job is writing. My secondary job is offering what I've written for sale. What happens after that is somebody else's job.

  Don't let me forget, Lord, that acceptance and rejection aren't all that important anyway. The chief reward of any artistic effort (and perhaps of every other effort as well) is the work itself. Success lies in the accomplishment, not in its fruits. If I write well, I'm a success. Wealth and fame might be fun (or they might not) but they're largely beside the point.

  Let me accept rejection, when it comes, as part of the process of gaining acceptance. Let me accept dry spells as part of the creative process. All across the board, Lord, let me accept the things I can't do anything about, deal with the things I can, and tell which is which.

  And let me always be grateful, Lord, that I am a writer, that I am actually doing the only work I've ever really wanted to do, and that I don't need anyone's permission to do it. Just something to write with and something to write on.

  Thanks for all that. And thanks for listening.