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

they were; I'm sure many working writers eventually arrive at the same conclusions. But what a comfort it is to come across them in print. Reading Lawrence Block's opinions has reinforced my own. There's consolation in knowing our experiences are so similar. After all, if he has survived, then maybe I will, too.

Most valuable to me is the fact that he takes me behind the scenes, making me a part of his process, privy to the struggles he has endured over the course of his long career. He, too, has suffered resistance, bewilderment, occasional lapses in faith. He has begun and abandoned manuscripts, been blocked, given up all hope, has returned to half-finished books with puzzlement about why he broke off the writing, turning them then into some of his most accomplished published works. He's candid about his failures and refreshingly modest about his numerous successes. His wisdom, his munificence, his warmth, and his down-to-earth admonitions about the craft of fiction are the equivalent of a home-study program.

I would urge other writers, at whatever point in their careers, to take the time to read this indispensable handbook. In it, Lawrence Block addresses with humor and common sense the issues that every writer faces. His ruminations about his fictional destinations, his recognition of the myriad obstacles along the road, and his suggestions about how to cope with every aspect of the journey have made me a better traveler. Telling Lies for Fun and Profit should be a permanent part of every writer's library. Certainly, the book holds a treasured place on my shelf.

At the moment, I'm hoping another quick read will give me the solution to my current crisis. And on it goes.

Santa Barbara, California

PREFACE

IN THE summer of '75 I hit the road. I gave up my New York apartment, sold or gave away most of the possessions of a lifetime, packed the remainder into the back of a diseased station wagon, and set out for Los Angeles.

It took me about eight months to get there. I followed the coast down to Florida, then drifted west. I would linger in a spot for a couple of days or weeks, then pull up stakes on a whim. Once I checked out of a motel and drove five miles down the road because the television set at the first place wouldn't pick up a football game I wanted to watch.

During this time I continued writing. I had, after all, done virtually nothing else since college. I wrote the first draft of a novel which ultimately became Ariel. I wrote several books that withered and died after fifty or sixty pages; when I think of them now I imagine them as mummified fruit on a tainted tree.

I wrote short stories, too, something I hadn't done in years. And I wrote an article which I called Where Do You Get Your Ideas? I did a mental first draft in the car heading west from Wilmington, North Carolina, typed it the following morning in a motel room, and mailed it the next afternoon from a branch post office in Greenville, South Carolina.

And had not the slightest idea what I was getting into.

Half a year later I was living at the Magic Hotel in Hollywood. One day I remembered that article I'd sent to Writer's Digest. I'd never heard from them. I wrote, asking wha hoppen, and got a phone call in reply from WD's editor John Brady. He'd been attempting to buy the piece for months but some secretary had garbled my address and the correspondence had gone awry. We discussed a couple of changes he wanted me to make. I mentioned I'd be driving east sometime in August, and he invited me to say hello if I got within hailing distance of Cincinnati.

By August I decided Writer's Digest needed a fiction column. I made a point of stopping in Cincinnati on my way back to New York, and after a hearty lunch continued east with an assignment to write a column every other month on the techniques of fiction. After I'd done five or six columns there was some editorial reshuffling and my column went monthly. I've been at it ever since.

Looking back, I found myself wondering what ever prompted me to write that piece on the genesis of fictional ideas in the first place. I can think of a couple of factors. I'd been deprived entirely of the company of other writers for a few months at that point, and I guess I was feeling the isolation; it must have concentrated my mind upon the nature of my work and its underlying processes. For another thing, I was writing short stories again after a long layoff, and my mind was serving up plot ideas one after the other. I found the process interesting enough to write about.

I certainly never suspected that a few pages on the development of ideas would eventually transform me into someone who spent a significant amount of his time writing about writing. But that is what has happened, and it has had interesting effects above and beyond my monthly check and the ego gratification of a regular column.

It's a commonplace in the profession that writers work twenty-four hours a day. (See Chapter 13, Writer's Hours.) I don't know about that, but I do know that my column keeps me working far more than the time I devote to its actual composition. Everything I read is potentially grist