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

Reading Ten North Frederick for the fifth or sixth time, I am no less caught up in the inexorable decline of Joe Chapin for my noticing how O'Hara uses the viewpoints of various characters to reveal facets of his protagonist.

I've slowed down in my reading. I used to dash through books like a self-taught speedreader. Now I take more time, savoring what I read, chewing each mouthful thoroughly before swallowing. Writing has indeed made me a better reader, just as reading continues to make me a better writer.

How to read like a writer? I'm afraid I can't think of many specific tips toward that end. One thing I've observed is that I'm more critical and detached when I read a manuscript than when I read galleys, more so too with galleys than with a bound book. The closer I am to what came out of the writer's typewriter, the more conscious I am that I'm reading a person's work rather than something that came down from the mountaintop carved in stone tablets. By the same token, it's easier for me to get caught up in a bound book than a manuscript.

But that's by the way. I don't know that you have to make a particular effort to learn to read like a writer. If you keep writing?and keep reading?it just happens.

Enjoy it.

CHAPTER 9

Rolling With the Punches

A COUPLE of months ago a writing student of mine was discussing a story he'd written a year or two previously. It had come within a hair's breadth of being accepted by a prestigious literary quarterly. The author then submitted it to Harper's and got it back with a personal letter from Lewis Lapham.

Well? I said. Where'd you send it next?

I didn't.

Beg pardon?

I put it in a drawer, he said, shrugging. I figured it got rejected twice so there must be something wrong with it, so why should I waste my time sending it out again?

Extraordinary, don't you think? Any story that came that close to acceptance at these two markets is almost certainly publishable somewhere. But this particular story will almost certainly not be published?because the author isn't sufficiently determined to give it every possible chance of publication.

When novice writers ask my advice about getting published, one point I can't emphasize too strongly is the importance of being absolutely relentless about submissions. Once you've got a story to the point where you think it's worth submitting, you must submit it and submit it and submit it until someone somewhere breaks down and buys it. Before this happens, you will very likely accumulate rejection slips sufficient to insulate an attic. Your collection may not represent any near misses, may not include any personal notes from eminent editors. You may not even experience the wee thrill of seeing Sorry hand-scrawled across the bottom of a printed slip.

Tough. If you really want to be in this silly business, you cannot let this sort of thing bother you. You paste the rejection slip on the wall or toss it in the wastebasket. You take the story out of the envelope it came back in and tuck it into a fresh one. You consult your records, see where it's been, then flip through Writer's Market and pick out a place where it hasn't been. And then you put it in the mail, and you repeat this process ad infinitum until the damn thing sells.

Over and over. Again and again. Relentlessly.

What do you suppose it means when your manuscript comes back to you like a well-hurled boomerang? It doesn't mean you're a brain-damaged churl who couldn't write your name in the dirt with a stick. It doesn't mean your story stinks on ice. It doesn't mean you should forget about writing and pay more attention to those ads promising high profits raising chinchillas in your bathtub.

All it means is that a particular editor didn't want to buy a particular story on a particular day.

Maybe he didn't even read it. Editors are as apt to be overworked as the rest of it, and sometimes the prospect of wading through slush is uninviting, and who's to say that no one ever had a bad day and just rejected everything unread? This doesn't happen often, but even an editor with the best will in the world can have a headache or a hangover and simply not like anything he reads under those conditions.

Suppose the editor does read your story, and reads it on a good day. He can still despise it?but that doesn't mean it's despicable. When all is said and done, editorial reactions to all material, and most especially to fiction, are ultimately subjective. The fact that one person dislikes something does not mean it is bad.

Furthermore, a rejection doesn't have to mean the editor dislikes the story. Maybe it simply means he doesn't like it enough to buy it. Maybe he's over-inventoried on fiction at the moment, and you'd have to knock him out of his chair in order to sell him, and he just doesn't like your story all that much. Maybe he just bought a story very much like yours. Maybe your story's about eggs and he got a bad one at breakfast. Maybe?

Well, you get the idea. Bad stories get rejected, but so do most good stories most of the time.

It's important to recognize?and then dismiss?the enormous odds we all face every time we put a story in the mail. I was talking