Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

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