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

whose expertise I should seek. None of these extramural activities is as hard as actually sitting down and writing something; thus, but for the conscience that hounds me, I could happily go months on end without wearing out a typewriter ribbon.

Sometimes, though, I find myself backed into a corner, locked into a no-win situation, damned if I do and damned if I don't. This happened quite vividly when I was working on The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. Bernie Rhodenbarr, the burglar of the title, had just hied himself off to Forest Hill Gardens, an upper-middle-class enclave in the borough of Queens. It occurred to me that I had not been to Forest Hill Gardens in over twenty years, at which time I had visited it very briefly. I had only dim memories of the neighborhood and had no way of knowing if it had changed in the intervening years.

I had two choices. I could trust my memory while taking comfort in the fact that every work of fiction takes place in its own alternate universe anyway. Or I could spend an afternoon zipping out there on the F train and walking aimlessly around to see what I could see.

Either way I was determined to feel guilty about it. If I stayed home and worked, I'd beat myself up for slacking on research. If I went out there, I'd accuse myself of wasting time on pointless research when I might have been tapping typewriter keys and producing finished pages. Once I was able to see that I was in a double bind, I tossed a mental coin and went to Forest Hill Gardens.

As it turned out, my memory was sound and the place hadn't changed a bit. But I felt my time had been profitably spent; I'd refreshed my impressions, picked up a little local color, and certainly enabled myself to write the scene with increased confidence.

It doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes hours devoted to this sort of research are a waste, and sometimes there's no way to determine in advance whether this will be the case. American Tobacco's George Washington Hill used to say that fifty cents of every dollar he spent on advertising was wasted. The trouble was, he went on to explain, that there was no way of knowing which fifty cents it was, so he'd go on spending the whole dollar all the same. It's that way with research, and with all the other tasks that take me away from my desk.

One factor in the operation of my personal Jiminy Cricket mechanism is, I'm sure, that I don't spend all that many hours at my desk. Years ago I was given to putting in long stretches at the typewriter; I was younger then, which may have had something to do with it, and I was a less meticulous writer, which must have had plenty to do with it. In any event, I could work effectively for five or six or eight hours at a clip.

I can't do that now. I don't structure my work in terms of hours, finding it more useful to aim at producing a certain amount of work, usually somewhere between five and ten pages depending on the sort of material I'm working on, the deadline I'm facing, and the phases of the moon. My work usually takes me somewhere between two and three hours. If I'm done in an hour, I'm delighted to call it a day. If I'm not done in three hours, I generally call it a day anyway, though I'm by no means delighted about it. There's a point at which it becomes counter-productive for me to continue to work, on a par with running a car's ignition when the gas tank's empty. You don't get anywhere and you just run down the battery.

Most workers, I've been told, don't really spend more than two or three hours a day actually doing anything. They take breaks, they file their nails, they daydream at their desks, they talk baseball, and two hours get stretched into eight. It's comforting to know this, but it doesn't change the fact that I think of myself as putting in a shorter working day than the rest of the world.

I've found a couple of things I can do to make my writing life as guilt-free as possible, and I pass them on for whatever they're worth.

1. I MAKE WRITING THE FIRST THING I DO. Over the years, I've written at every possible time of day and night. For some time now I've written immediately after breakfast, and it's by far the best system for me. There are several advantages?I'm freshest then, my batteries recharged after a night's sleep?but the most important reason for me is that once I've got my day's work done, I'm able to give myself permission to do as I wish with the remainder of the day.

2. I TRY TO WORK SEVEN DAYS A WEEK. Again, there are other reasons why this is useful. With a novel, for example, working every day keeps the book from slipping away from my subconscious mind. Whatever I'm working on, novels or short stories, daily production helps me keep from feeling profligate over working so few hours per day. By the same token, when I do take an unscheduled day off, I can do so with a clear conscience; after all, I'm still working six days that week.

3.