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

the early Ellery Queen novels, authors Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay took turns at the typewriter, with the result that their hero is called Ellery in one chapter and Mr. Queen in the next. Other writers haven't needed to collaborate in order to bounce back and forth between first name and surname, and one of the elements that make Russian novels impenetrable for me?one of many elements, I'm afraid?is the tendency of their authors to make a guy named Dmitri Ivanovitch Glinkov, say, and call him one thing in one paragraph and another in the next and a third on the following page, until I really don't know who we're talking about.

The conventional wisdom holds that your reader will feel closer to your lead if you call the lead by his first name. I think this is probably true, but I think the decision of whether or not to call the character by his first name is more complicated than that.

Sometimes, it seems to me, you diminish your lead character by calling him by his first name. You reduce his statue and undermine his importance.

In a book called The Triumph of Evil, which I wrote under the name of Paul Kavanagh, I had to decide what to call Miles Dorn. On the one hand he is the presumably sympathetic lead from whose viewpoint the entire story is perceived. On the other, he's a professional assassin, a middle-aged terrorist with a lifelong history of violence who murders a great many people in the course of the book. While I wanted strong reader identification, I was leery of drawing Dorn's fangs by making him someone you'd call by his first name.

Writers almost always get on a first-name basis with female characters, and with juveniles. I'm not sure why this is, though I'm willing to believe that it's consciously or unconsciously patronizing, and that, in respect to female characters, sexism is at the root of it. For the time being, I'm afraid fiction writers are stuck with this situation. I may decide that I'm lessening a character's dignity when I call her Susan, but if I start calling her Ackerman instead I'm going to confuse readers. Furthermore, that sort of stylistic departure creates yards and yards of distance between character and reader.

In multiple-viewpoint novels, a frequent auctorial trick consists of calling your hero by his first name while calling other characters by their last names, even in scenes where they are the viewpoint characters. Robert Ludlum generally does this. It's a way of putting a white hat on the good guy, telling the reader whom to root for. Sometimes I find this device awkward, but sometimes it seems perfectly natural.

Come to think of it, I have a hunch the first-name-last-name question is one that is most effectively settled intuitively. I didn't consciously decide to call my man Dorn instead of Miles, making the decision for good sound reasons. I just recognized that I was more comfortable with him that way and acted accordingly.

At least as important as what you call your lead is the extent to which you call him anything at all. The more you use any name, the more distance you create. If you want to draw the reader in close, the trick is to use pronouns at all times except where to do so would result in confusion. Use the name to establish who we're talking about, and often enough throughout to avoid unclarity. At all other times, stick with he and she. You'll probably find that you don't have to use names very often.

In dialogue passages, you can cut down the distance even more by eliminating everything but the dialogue itself. Whatever else you include calls the reader's attention to the fact that he's not really overhearing a conversation but reading something that somebody wrote. Some of the distance is eliminated when you use said instead of substitute verbs, when you use pronouns instead of names, and when you cut out modifiers. Jennings ruminated archly is a more distancing phrase than he said. When you drop the he saids and she saids as well, slipping one in now and then only when it would otherwise become hard to keep straight who's speaking, you make the conversation that much more intimate and bring the reader that much closer into it.

It's not hard to understand why a writer would want to reduce this kind of distance. Sometimes, however, it's desirable to create distance between the reader and the story.

A frequent device in mystery novels, for example, involves the use of a Watson, so called after the narrator of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. The obvious functions of a Watson include keeping the reader in the picture while hiding certain things from him; he knows only what the Watson knows, not what the Great Detective is thinking or observing. Additionally, the Watson character can marvel at the brilliance and eccentricity of the Great Detective, who would appear egomaniacal were he to mutter such self-aggrandizement directly into our ears.

But I think another important advantage of the Watson device is the distance it creates, distance from the Great Detective but not from the story. That character, with his quirks and idiosyncrasies, is more commanding if we are made to stand a bit apart from him. Let us peer over his shoulder and we can see his feet of clay.

The use of a subordinate