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

because it allows me to experience what I see in my mind?and then, having had the experience of the furnished room or the apple or whatever, I can write out of that experience in creating fiction for my own purpose.

What does this mean? Well, maybe I can give you an example. The passage which follows is an unremarkable one from a novel of mine and describes the fatal heart attack of one of the characters.

He returned to his own house, ate dinner with his wife at the usual hour. He helped her load the dishwasher. While it ran they sat with newspapers in the front room. First he read the Times while she read the Buffalo News. Then they traded. She was reading Clive Barnes's review of a new English play when he said, Syl?

She lowered the paper. His face looked drawn and his expression was one of puzzlement.

I don't feel well, he said.

What's the matter? Stay right there, I'll phone Irv Zucker.

Oh, it's probably nothing, he said, and then he sat back in his chair and died. Her eyes were on him as it happened and she knew instantly what had happened. He was there and then he was not, he was gone.

I've bothered to quote this passage because I remember the extent to which I visualized it before writing it. I had a very strong image of the room in which those two persons sat reading their newspapers. I saw their chairs and knew the distance between them. I felt the mood in the room, relaxing with newspapers after cleaning up the dinner dishes. I saw each character from the other's point of view. And, as the scene unfolded, I felt it.

I certainly didn't describe the room much. The scene is rendered briefly, almost sketchily. But because I visualized and experienced the entire scene before I wrote it, I intuitively selected certain words and rejected others, included certain observations and left others unvoiced. Because I had the experience of this scene, I was equipped to make it a real scene for the reader. No reader will be likely to picture the same room I pictured, but that hardly matters.

This may be a subtle point, as hard to convey as the principles of Zen archery. It has elements of commonality, I suspect, with the tricks actors use to prepare themselves for roles, calling on bits and pieces of their own past to center themselves and get into character.

Maybe it would be helpful if I gave you an exercise.

Let's give it a try. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed. Picture in your mind a piece of fruit?the apple we mentioned earlier or something else. See it. Experience it. Get a sense of its dimensions. Notice its color. Sense the amount of space it occupies. Imagine yourself holding it in your hand, weighing it. How much mass does it have? How heavy is it?

How does it feel in your hand? What's its temperature?

Is it moist or dry to the touch? Rough or smooth?

See yourself drawing it close to your face. Smell it. Can you imagine the aroma? Pierce the skin with your thumbnail and smell it again, its inner juices released to the open air.

Imagine yourself peeling or cutting into it. Taste the fruit. Go ahead?chew it up, swallow it. Taste it. Experience the act of eating it.

You may have noticed, while performing this exercise, that the fruit changed somewhat from one moment to the next. You may have realized such elements as color and weight and odor more vividly at one time than at another. That's fine. This process of visualization is a fluid one, and the images we conjure up are apt to keep redefining themselves for us.

This simple exercise becomes increasingly useful if you practice it on a more or less regular basis. The capacity for visualization seems to develop with this sort of training. You might prefer to conjure up other things than pieces of fruit. As a change of pace, now and then you might enjoy focusing on an actual past experience, recreating it in your mind as completely as possible. When you do this, you might find it helpful to concentrate less on linear memory and more on sensory memory?in other words, don't dwell on what actually took place as much as on how everything looked and sounded and felt and tasted and smelled, and how you felt about it and experienced it.

This is a good exercise for any time of the day. Another exercise is more specifically useful before undertaking the day's stint at the typewriter, and that involves seeing what you're going to write before you write it, as we discussed at the beginning of this piece.

Perhaps I should stress that I don't always see every scene fully and completely. Some of the stage sets I use are more real to me than others. Some are more completely furnished. Some change in certain unimportant aspects from time to time, just as that piece of fruit changed while you were imagining it. Sometimes my mental picture will be more painting than photograph, with details alternately stressed or blurred. I have found, though, that the more completely I realize scenes before writing them, the more at ease I am in recreating them for the reader and the more apt I am to be satisfied with my work.

There was once a school of thought in the theater that maintained that scenery should be as detailed as