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

Brady. I'll reproduce a part of it here, not only because it is pertinent but because I delight in retyping an editor's words and selling them back to him:

When I teach magazine article writing, I always say, Start in the middle and end at the beginning. It's rigid, it's handcuffs; it also works. Start full steam with a topic, get the reader involved and interested; then backtrack, fill in, move through the research, the topic, build, build, build-then, when you get to the end, look back at what you suggested in the beginning and round it out.

Magazine article writing is a different discipline from the writing of short or long fiction, and the process John describes here is better geared to non-fiction. The trick of starting in the middle, however, is extremely useful in fiction. By beginning at a point where events are already in motion, you involve your reader in the flow of action and get him caught up in your fiction right away. Then you can back off and let him know what it is he's gone and gotten himself interested in.

In the preceding chapter we saw how this principle works in opening a novel. The basic gimmick of switching one's first and second chapters is as simple and useful a one as I've learned.

And it's as useful in short fiction as it is in the novel. Short stories have to get to the point quickly, and one way to manage this is to begin them with the story already in motion and the action in process.

For illustration, the example that comes to mind is a negative one. Some months ago I happened on an ancient magazine story of mine, a crime-pulp yarn that begins with a guy coming home from the office only to find that the bar he always goes to is closed for alterations. So he wanders around until he comes to another bar, where he has a drink and meets a beautiful woman, and one thing leads to another and he becomes a dope dealer, as I recall.

Now it may be significant that he's in that second bar by coincidence, that the whole thing never would have happened if his usual watering hole had been open for business as usual on that particular evening. But that don't butter no parnsips. What's more significant is that I had this clown wandering around for perhaps a thousand words before much of anything actually happened.

If I were writing this story today?and I won't, because it was a pretty lousy story in the first place?I'd begin much further along in the story's chronological flow. Perhaps I'd start with the lead's initial contact with the woman. Perhaps I'd begin with the two of them already engaged in some illegal transaction. In any event, I could go back later and fill in, letting the reader know who the guy is and how he got in this mess in the first place. I could do this in a full-scale flashback, or, more likely, in a briefer summary.

This basic technique of starting with action and filling in later on is applicable to more than the openings of stories and novels. It can be employed effectively over and over again in the course of a prose narrative. By springing ahead and falling back, a writer can create any number of new beginnings and avoid dull patches that would slow down his story.

Any transition may be the opportunity for a new beginning of this sort. If one chapter ends with the lead character going to bed, the succeeding chapter doesn't have to start with him getting up the next morning.

Here's an example from The Last Good Kiss, a particularly fine private eye novel by James Crumley. The narrator, who has just learned that the woman he's been seeking has died some years ago, is beaten up in his motel room and left trussed up in the bathtub. One chapter ends like so:

Then his associate gagged me with a sock. I was thankful that it was clean, thankful that after they left I was able to shove the water control off with my foot, and thankful too that when the maid came in the next morning, she jerked the sock out of my mouth instead of screaming-I tipped the maid and told her to tell the desk that I would be staying over another day. I needed the rest.

Here's how the next chapter begins. Notice how Crumley starts things off not only after a spring forward but right in the middle of a new scene:

It's just not true, Rosie said for the fifth time.

I'm sorry, I repeated, but I saw the death certificate and talked to the woman she was living with who saw the body. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

No, she said, and struck herself between the breasts, a hard, hollow blow that brought tears to her eyes. Don't you think I'd know in here if my baby girl had been dead all these years?

It was an early afternoon again in Rosie's, soft, dusty shadows cool inside, and outside a balmy spring day of gentle winds and sunshine-. After a quick visit to the emergency room for an X-ray and some pain-killer, I had left Fort Collins and driven straight through on a diet of speed, codeine, beer, and Big Macs, and had arrived at Rosie's dirty, unshaved, and drunk-. Fireball woke up