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

it can't negate the fact that the author and his poisonous Estonian villains kept you reading way past your normal bedtime. The incidents themselves were sufficiently involving, and the tension they generated sufficiently gripping, that your objections didn't manifest themselves until you'd finished reading the book?and enjoyed every page of it.

Does this mean you shouldn't worry about keeping your own plots sound and logical? Certainly not. You can't be sure that the reader won't spot your flaws until he's made a trip to the fridge. He may detect them immediately, in which case he may very well stop buying the whole premise of your story then and there.

It does mean you can take a few chances, trusting that you'll figure out a way to pull things together later on. This sort of thing happened in The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. Bernie Rhodenbarr, the very hero indicated in the title, has filched a rare book from a home in Forest Hills. Now, the following afternoon, he has just arranged to deliver it to the person on whose behalf he pilfered it.

It occurred to me that something dramatic ought to happen. So, while Bernie is standing behind the counter of his second-hand bookstore, the door opens and in walks a bearded Sikh with a turban. The Sikh points a gun at him and demands the book. Bernie gives it to him and out he goes.

When I wrote that scene, I hadn't the foggiest notion who the Sikh was, where he came from, or how he was going to fit into the book's future development. But he did liven things up, and I figured I'd burn those other bridges when I came to them. Later on, in the course of fitting him in and making sense of his actions, I got some ideas that enriched other elements of the book's plot.

There's a moral here. When things flag a wee bit, do something dramatic, Put a bear in a canoe or bring in a bearded, turbaned Sikh with a gun in his hand. Or work your own variation of this procedure. Try it with an Estonian bear, say, who walks into the bookstore with a canoe in his pocket. Instead of a turban, have the bear wearing one of those Smoky hats. Make the canoe an ocean liner. Make the bookstore a bakery so you can fit in those poisoned peanut-butter cookies. Make the Sikh a girl, but first get rid of the beard, and?

You don't like it? Maybe we can turn it around. There are a whole bunch of bears, see, and they've just finished fighting a war, and they're anxious to get back home to their wives and sweethearts and aged mothers-.

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After the foregoing was written and set in type, I learned that The Warriors was based not on The Odyssey but on The Anabasis, Xenophon's account of the Greek retreat after a disastrous military engagement in Persia. Rewriting it accordingly just seems like more trouble than it's worth, especially since it would require my reading The Anabasis. I beg the reader's indulgence for my Xenophobia.

CHAPTER 32

Judging Distances

HAVE YOU ever noticed how some writers draw you in close to their characters while others keep you at arm's length? The distance between a reader and a character is to a large extent a question of identification. The more the reader finds a character sympathetic, and the more he is able to relate to that character, the narrower the gulf between them becomes. When identification is intense enough, the reader may feel as though he's experiencing the story along with the character, seeing it through his eyes or over his shoulder. When identification is minimal, it's as if he's observing the action through the wrong end of a telescope.

But identification isn't all there is to it. On innumerable occasions I have found myself drawn close to unsympathetic characters and kept at a remove from sympathetic ones. Harry Bogen, the protagonist of Jerome Weidman's I Can Get It for You Wholesale, is certainly an unpleasant sort, with little of the charming rogue about him. Yet I can still remember how close I felt to him while reading that novel. On the other hand, although I identified strongly with Larry, in W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, I never felt that kind of close proximity.

There are certain things you as a writer can do to draw the reader in or push him away from your lead character. The first thing to consider is how you're going to refer to the guy.

Let's say your lead character's a mining engineer named Lucian Hapgood. Well, as the fellow on television might put it, you could call him Lucian, or you could call him Hapgood, or you could call him Lucian Hapgood, or?

Enough. What you call him does make a difference in terms of distance. If you wanted the reader to be drawn closer to him?not necessarily in terms of liking him so much as in terms of sharing his experience?you wouldn't refer to him as mining engineer Lucian P. Hapgood except when you first introduced him, or when he's reintroduced after having been absent from the narrative for an extended period of time. You won't go on calling him by his full name, either. It'll have to be either Lucian or Hapgood.

Once you make this choice, I think you ought to stick with it. Not every writer does, however. In