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

an inferior book. So I'd advise you to write the book your own way. Give it your best shot and then when you've finished worry about finding somebody who likes it enough to publish it.

I wheeled about and made my way to the refreshment table at this point lest I find myself in the middle of Polonius's little spiel to Laertes, advising the poor man neither to borrow nor to lend. I hadn't actually said To thine own self be true, but that was certainly the thrust of my comments.

Afterward, through the medium of what one might call sober reflection, I wondered if I hadn't overstated the case. I hadn't said anything I didn't believe, but perhaps I had glossed over the fact that writing for certain markets demands a familiarity with the requirements of those markets.

This is especially true for the neophyte writer who is aiming at one of the more accessible markets?gothics, let us say, or light romances, or confession stories. I devoted considerable space in Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print to a discussion of how to analyze the requirements of a particular fictional genre and how to write one's own story within such a framework. Wasn't I being inconsistent, saying this in print and then loftily advising this chap to go follow his own star?

Years ago, when I worked for a literary agent, I had dealings with a would-be writer who was possessed of enormous energy, a serviceable way with prose and dialogue, and the survival instincts of a lemming. All he ostensibly wanted was to see his work in print, yet all he did was sabotage himself at every turn. Advised that confessions constituted a particularly receptive market for newcomers, he produced several, but insisted upon writing them from a male viewpoint. At the time, a confession magazine might publish one male-viewpoint story an issue, if they happened to run across one they really liked. By writing his confessions from a male point of view, the man was deliberately making things harder for himself.

I had occasion to remember all of this just a few days ago when I began work on a new novel. The basic plot notion was one that had suggested itself to me some months ago?a girl's mother dies, her father remarries, and the girl becomes convinced that her stepmother is trying to kill her. I hadn't given the idea any conscious thought in months, but evidently my subconscious had been playing with it while I was at work on something else, and I found bits and pieces of the plot coming to me rapidly.

I also found myself with decisions to make. Did I want an urban or a rural setting? Would I write the book in the first or the third person? Single or multiple viewpoint?

I don't always have to make decisions of this sort. Quite a few of the novels I've written over the years have recounted the continuing adventures of series characters, and in such a case a lot of these questions are predetermined. When I write a mystery about burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, for example, I know I'm going to use the first person. I know, too, who the character is and how he operates, where he lives, who his friends are, and so on. A series involves turning out books that are the same only different, and while that requirement presents problems of its own, it does eliminate certain decisions.

A year ago I spent a week in Savannah, where I scouted locations with the intention of using the city in a novel sooner or later. When I first got the idea for The Stepmother, I felt it would fit quite neatly into that charming Georgia seaport.

Two factors changed my mind. First off, I recognized that there were already elements of plot and character in The Stepmother that were evocative of Ariel, a recent novel of mine. Ariel was set in an old house in Charleston, and while Charleston and Savannah are by no means indistinguishable one from the other, they do have points of similarity. This might not have kept me from setting the book in Savannah if I had been convinced it would work best there, but it did predispose me to look for another setting.

As I thought further about the book, a second reason for getting away from Savannah came to mind. I decided I wanted to make the girl a New Yorker out of her element. I saw her as a child who has grown up in Greenwich Village, not so much precocious as sophisticated. Suppose the family moved to the country? Someplace fairly isolated, say. Delaware County, Schoharie County, one of those forgotten areas of upstate New York a few hours from the city and hence out of commuting range.

With the choice of location, more of the plot immediately began to take form. Why would the family move from the Village out into the middle of nowhere? Maybe the father's a writer who just made a lot of money and wants to play landed gentleman for a change. I began to get a sense of the house and grounds. I decided there would be an old overgrown cemetery on the property, and I saw a few ways this would fit into the plot.

At this point I wrote out a few hundred words of notes, talking to myself at the typewriter, and a couple of days later I started actually