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

reader cannot manage that trick of voluntary suspension of disbelief without which fiction never becomes involving. No policeman would react that way, he says. No character in this position and supplied with these attributes would do thus and so. Therefore I cannot escape the fact that I am reading a book, that someone sat at a desk and painstakingly invented all of this, and if I am forever aware of all this, how can I possibly gull myself into giving a damn what happens next?

When characters are unsympathetic, the reader loses interest for a different reason. To believe in them and to get caught up in their fate is to spend time in their company, and if they are unsympathetic the prospect is unpleasant. A character need not be a saint to be sympathetic. Indeed, flawless characters tend to be curiously unsympathetic because they come across as lacking in humanity. A character can in fact be more than a bit of a villain, as long as there is something about him to which a reader can comfortably respond and with which he can identify. If I were that type of person, he ought to be able to say, then I'd be like that, too. If I were that kind of guy, that's the kind of guy I'd be.

When a character is lacking in originality, the reader's capacities for both believing and identifying are strained. If the hero walks through the pages like an empty suit of clothes, how can we regard him as more than a mechanical device of the author's invention? His features, metaphorically speaking, remain fuzzy around the edges. Nothing sets him off and makes him a living, breathing individual, so why are we to care what happens to him?

It's not uncommon for writers to do a lot of labeling and mistake it for originality of characterization. I'm starting a detective series, a hopeful writer said to me not long ago, and I think I've got something really original. My character never gets out of bed before noon, and he makes it a rule always to wear one piece of red clothing, and the only thing he ever drinks is white cr�me de menthe on the rocks. He has a pet rhesus monkey named Bitsy and a parrot named Sam. What do you think?

What I think is that the speaker has not a character but a collection of character tags. It might work to have a character with any or all of these labels in his garments. Matter of fact, I wrote the above paragraph thinking of a detective character of the late David Alexander's who lived upstairs of a 42nd Street flea circus, always wore a loud vest, drank only Irish whiskey and never took a drink before four o'clock or refused one after that hour. That character, however, was not the mere sum of these attributes. It is not the quirks that make an enduring character but the essential personality which the quirks highlight. How that character views the world, how he acts and reacts, is of much greater importance than what he had for breakfast.

In my own writing, I have found that my most effective viewpoint characters are aspects of myself. This is not to say that they are based on me, or that I share their views or attitudes or patterns of behavior. Perhaps the best way I can put it is to say that they act as I would act if I happened to be them. In addition, some aspects of their nature and circumstances can often be seen to derive from my own nature and circumstances.

Perhaps I can best show how this works in the case of a character named Matthew Scudder. I wrote three novels and two novelettes about Scudder in the mid-seventies, and have just finished a fourth novel about him after having left him in cold storage for several years. I was more than a little apprehensive at the prospect of taking him up again. I have changed, certainly, in the intervening years, and I was unsure of my ability to resume seeing the world through Scudder's eyes and reporting in his voice.

Happily, getting back into character turned out to be virtually effortless, no harder to relearn than swimming or riding a bike. Now this does not prove that the book I've just written is any good, or even that Scudder, now or half a dozen years ago, is any great shakes as a character. What it does demonstrate, however, is the extent to which Scudder was and is a vital character for me. Clearly I find him plausible, sympathetic, and original. Clearly I know just who he is in a way that goes beyond his wardrobe and his mannerisms. I can believe in him, and I can care about him?and I can write about him.

Scudder provides a better example than most of the process of character construction because I knew a great deal about him before I started chronicling his adventures. Often my characters develop on the page as I write. Scudder did, to an extent, and still does evolve while I'm at the typewriter, but he was largely conceived and developed before any words went onto paper.

I had talked with Bill Grose, then at Dell, about developing a character for a detective series. A reading of Leonard Shecter's On the Pad gave me the idea of using a corrupt