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

in two ways that I can think of. They diluted my efforts and thus kept me from building a following as quickly as I might have, and they allowed me to spend more time writing recognizably inferior work than I might otherwise have done. All the same, the freedom of a pen name may have constituted a liberating influence at the time; perhaps, knowing I intended to publish everything under my own name, I'd have tightened up and written nothing at all.

Should you use a pen name? I wouldn't presume to advise you. Your own circumstances, like everyone else's, are special. The choice must be entirely your own.

CHAPTER 11

Writing With Two Heads

COLLABORATION ALWAYS seems like such a good idea. Two heads, after all, are purported to be superior to one, especially if they're attached to two different bodies. Why shouldn't a piece of writing go faster and more smoothly if two minds conceive it and two pairs of hands commit it to paper? Nobody's perfect, and if one combines one's talents with another writer, perhaps the match will be complementary, with each making up for the other's deficiencies. With luck, the union may even prove synergistic, with the collaborative persona of two writers yoked in harness greater than the sum of their separate abilities. Where, after all, would Beaumont be without Fletcher? Gilbert without Sullivan? Abbott without Costello? Jekyll without Hyde? Leopold without Loeb?

Ahem. By collaboration I mean those joint ventures wherein two writers work together. This might well seem obvious, but for the fact that the opportunity for collaboration most frequently presented to us is something rather different. Typically, we are offered this sort of chance by a bore at a cocktail party.

You know, we ought to get together, a chap will say upon learning my occupation. I got some stories you wouldn't believe. My problem is I have tons of ideas but I'm not a writer; I can't put them on paper. So what we'll do is I'll give you the ideas and you'll do the writing and we'll split the money. How's that?

Suppose we switch roles? I'm apt to say, particularly in the party's later stages. Suppose I give you my ideas, and you do the writing. And then we'll split the money.

Whoever's ideas we use, I'm not inclined to call this sort of literary partnership collaboration. It's a good deal closer to what the non-fictioneer calls ghostwriting. And on occasion it's exactly that.

I know of one instance, for example, in which it was decided that what this country most needed was a novel of political intrigue by a muckraking Washington columnist, since deceased. Unfortunately the man in question was either unequipped or disinclined to write such a novel. He was, however, quite willing to see his name below the title, so a competent novelist was quickly found to handle the actual chore of hatching a plot, dreaming up characters, and tapping out a few hundred pages of unexceptional prose and dialogue. The columnist's contribution, in addition to the use of his name, consisted presumably in his sharing some inside poop with the writer and reading the final manuscript to make sure its reflection of the Washington scene contained no obvious clinkers.

In this case the book sold reasonably well, so none of the parties concerned had reason to complain of the financial result. Still, the process was substantially less collaborative than the ghosting of a movie star's autobiography, in which case the star at least provides the story and a working version of the facts. It was certainly not a matter of the work being shared by the two principals of the arrangement.

Such genuine collaboration seems to work out much more often for play-wrights than it does for prose writers. I'm not certain why this should be true, but it may well be that theatrical writing, even when one man does all of it, is apt to have a collective aspect to it. One takes it almost for granted that rewriting will play a substantial role in the process of readying the play for production, and that any number of persons will offer input in this direction. Producers and directors will suggest changes. Actors will propose improved versions of their lines. Finally, the process of actually performing the play, first in a bare theater and then before an audience, will indicate where changes must be made if the play is to succeed.

Thus there's a long record of theatrical collaboration. This seems to be particularly true with comedy, and there are some comedic playwrights who can't seem to work effectively by themselves, George S. Kaufman having been perhaps the most obvious example.

Bill Hoffman, a playwright friend of mine, spent three years collaborating with another playwright and found the process quite successful. One of us would sit at the typewriter and we batted each line around before it got written. The process seems to stimulate both of us. Our abilities complemented one another to a certain extent; he was a little better at storyline development and I was probably a little better at actual dialogue, but by the time something was actually written down it was impossible to say who had contributed what. Everything amounted to a joint effort.

I know two women who write novels in this fashion, Barbara Miller and Valerie Greco. One of them sits at the typewriter, the other