Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  Here's a good example of the way prose differs from film. A film, unlike a book, moves at a predetermined pace. The viewer has to put up with the cuts that the director has made. He can't set the film aside for a moment and frown, then pick it up again, back it up a few frames, and examine it for inconsistency. As a result, films can be wildly inconsistent and illogical, and their cuts can get the characters in and out of unexplained trouble.

  But you can't get away with that in a book or story.

  Some years back I wrote a book called The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, about a sort of whimsical adventurer who played hopscotch all over the map of Europe in the course of chasing down some long-buried treasure. A lot of the plot business was devoted to his crossing borders surreptitiously through diverse stratagems abetted by various odd characters. While I never got a Pulitzer Prize for this, it worked well enough as a book.

  A while later, after many a summer had melted into fall and the Jets won the Super Bowl, it became my job to transform this book into a screenplay. (Of which, sadly, nothing ever came.) Well, a lot of those border crossings, amusing enough on the page, clearly would not work on film. Too slow, too talky, not enough happening visually. So, having previously established the resourcefulness of the character, I took to showing his achievements. I had him cornered in an alleyway in France, wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase. Then I cut to an interior shot of a busful of Italian workmen in Milan, laughing and singing and eating their lunch, and the camera moved in to reveal that one of their number, dressed like them and behaving like them, was our hero. No explanation, because this was film and how he dunnit didn't matter much.

  Film and television techniques have made readers more sophisticated. We don't have to have things spelled out for us as thoroughly as we once did. But this still doesn't mean you can cheat in prose, and that cut to the bus in Milan is something I'd never dream of doing in cold print.

  Transitions are interesting. It can be instructive to see how other writers handle them, for better or worse, and you might want to take special note of this sort of thing in your own reading. But whatever you do, don't take the D train. Mr. Ellington says you should take the A train instead.

  It's still the quickest way to get to Harlem.

  CHAPTER 28

  The I's Have It

  SOME TWENTY years ago, when I was earning a dishonest living criticizing manuscripts for a schlock agent, a stock paragraph in my letters of rejection cautioned hopeful writers against the use of first-person narration. The first person, I was quick to point out, was fraught with pitfalls for the inexperienced writer. It served as a barrier between the reader and the story itself, limited the scope of the narrative, and, as I recall, caused dental caries in children and skin cancer in laboratory mice.

  Now this admonition to shun the first person was by no means my own private aberration. It still seems to be part of the conventional wisdom of writing courses to inveigh against this narrative form. I recall hearing all these warnings at an impressionable age and thinking what a shame it was that the first person was such a bad thing, since it was at the same time the most natural way to write.

  Hmmmmm.

  Now that I think about it, I wonder if this bias against the first person isn't very much a part of our Puritan tradition. Mencken defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy, and I don't think he'd mind our amending the definition to include the fear that someone somewhere may be doing what comes naturally. After all, if something's easy to do, if it comes naturally and simply and works like a charm, there must be something wrong with it. It'll give you hair on your palms, or make you blind, or something.

  About the same time that I was telling people not to write in the first person, I came upon a how-I-do-it piece by David Alexander, a reporter for the old Morning Telegraph and the author of a series of excellent private eye novels featuring Bart Hardin, a Broadway type who lived upstairs of a flea circus, wore flamboyant vests, drank nothing but Irish whiskey and never took a drink before four in the afternoon. In order to give his writing a feeling of immediacy, Alexander explained, he wrote all his first drafts in the first person. But, in order to avoid hairy palms, he then rewrote them start to finish in the third person.

  Mr. Alexander's no longer around so I'll never be able to ask him whether he really did this. I've a hunch he was having us on. Any man who deliberately writes a book in one voice with the intention of rewriting it in another is a man who makes government projects look like the invention of an efficiency expert. But it hardly matters what Alexander actually did. The fact that he could even conceive of this approach points up the two significant aspects of first-person narration?it provides a sense of immediacy, and it's somehow considered reprehensible.

  Well, I myself may have joined the club and warned other clods not to use the first person, but that doesn't mean I was fool enough to take my own advice. My own first novel was written in the first person, and most of my mystery and suspense novels, including all those books involving series characters, have been so written. At the beginning I felt I was running grave risks, and that I was at the same time taking the easy way out, but I decided I'd just write this way, so to speak, until I needed glasses.

  I haven't gone blind yet, although I've moving into the foothills of Bifocal Country. And over the years I've received support in my addiction to the first person from sources as diverse as Somerset Maugham and the Ogallala Sioux (and I'll bet you a nickel no one ever put them in the same sentence before).

  Indians first. An acquaintance who was raised on a reservation told me how Indian oral history, involving the repetition over the centuries of the stories of important battles and buffalo hunts, is always couched in the first person. While his listeners are aware that the tribal storyteller is recounting incidents that happened hundreds of years before his birth, it's an accepted convention for him to speak in the voice of a participant or observer. And then as I lay in the tall grass I saw Carries Two Spears riding from the mountains, and I felt the ground shake at his approach-.

  Maugham explained that as a young man he wrote with the stunning confidence of youth, adopting the omniscient third-person viewpoint. But when he grew older, he reported, he found it much more secure to write in his own voice and from a fixed point of view. (In Maugham's particular case, the limitations of the first person have less effect than gravity on a soaring hawk. If you want to see the agility with which a master can bend the first person to his ends, dealing with events at which his narrator is not present, swimming to and fro in the currents of time, give some attention to The Razor's Edge, Cakes and Ale, and The Moon and Sixpence.)

  I've also noted my own tendency as a reader, when confronted with a rack of unknown paperbacks, is to select a book written in the first person in preference to one written in the third. All things being equal, a first-person book is more likely to have a sense of reality about it and the lead character is more apt to come alive for me.

  As a writer, one of the things I like most about first person is the way it enables me to convey character easily and rapidly. In Burglars Can't Be Choosers, my lead's a sort of gentleman burglar who finds himself framed for murder and has to solve it to save himself. I wanted to get across right at the onset that this chap was a rather arch sort, so I wrote the first paragraph like this:

  A handful of minutes after nine I hoisted my Bloomingdale's shopping bag and moved out of a doorway and into step with a tall blond fellow with a faintly equine cast to his face. He was carrying an attachŽ case that looked too thin to be of much use. Like a high-fashion model, you might say. His topcoat was one of those new plaid ones and his hair, a little longer than my own, had been cut a strand at a time.

  Hardly an immortal bevy of sentences, but they do limn the character and get things going. If the same paragraph were recast in third person, I don't think it could do the job nearly as well.

  Characterization in general comes more easily for me in first
-person books because it's such a natural matter. You don't observe from without. Instead, you get under your character's skin and speak to the reader in his voice, and by doing this you not only make the character come alive for the reader. You make him come alive for your own self as you write.

  A standard objection to first person is that you can't describe your narrator. You can, of course, have him look into a mirror and report on what he sees, but I really hope you'll restrain yourself in this regard. Without an actual description you can convey some information about your lead's appearance?in the sample above, for instance, we have an idea what the lead's hair is like.

  Anyway, I've long felt that there's a great advantage in not furnishing a physical description of a viewpoint character, and this is true whether you tell your story in first or third person. The story, after all, is seen through his eyes and over his shoulder, and you often come out ahead letting the reader make up his own mind what the lead looks like. (Often, I suspect, the reader winds up seeing the narrator as looking rather like himself. That's as vital a process in fiction as transference is in psychoanalysis, and the last thing you want to do is impede it.)

  While first-person narration comes easily to most beginning writers?it is, after all, the natural voice one employs when telling a story to a friend?there are certain undeniable pitfalls which may come into play. Perhaps the most common is the tendency to tell the reader far too much about what is running through the narrator's mind. If reading a first-person story is like hearing a story at a party, reading a story with this fault is like being cornered by a crashing bore who won't let go of one's coat.

  I don't know exactly how one sets about avoiding this. You might simply bear in mind that it is not necessary to report to the reader every thought that goes through the narrator's mind, any more than you would report every single act the narrator performs in his day-to-day existence. (You don't have to mention every time your lead shaves, or goes to the toilet, or freshens her makeup, or whatever.)

  Along the same line, it is possible for significant things to happen to the narrator without their being reported to the reader. This can be important in suspense fiction. While it's not fair or dramatically satisfying to withhold important information forever, you can pick your time to reveal it. In The Sins of the Fathers, for instance, I have Matt Scudder enter an apartment illegally to look for evidence. He reports:

  The window wasn't locked. I opened it, let myself in, closed it after me. An hour later I went out the window and back up the fire escape-.

  Now what Scudder found in the apartment is important, and a couple of chapters later he lets the reader know about it. But it would have slowed things down to report on his discoveries when he made them, so I postponed the revelations accordingly. More important, in the same book, there's a point where he figures out what Really Happened?but that explanation's postponed until a confrontation with the evil-doer rather than disclosed by having Scudder think aloud.

  There is one long-term hazard in first-person writing, and I had that brought home to me when I gave a writer friend a manuscript of mine called The Triumph of Evil. He reported that he liked it. Of course I knew how it was going to end, he said, but I don't think anyone else would have known.

  Why, I asked, had he known?

  The book wasn't multiple viewpoint. But you wrote it in the third person.

  So?

  So I figured the only reason you didn't use first person was the lead character was going to die at the end, so I wasn't exactly awestruck when he did.

  Hmmmmm.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Plot's the Thing

  DEAR MR. BLOCK,

  I read your column in Writer's Digest regularly and can't understand your statement that the plot is the single most important element of a story or novel. Either you're wrong or the cards are truly stacked against the beginner in this writing game. Many's the time I've put in long, hard hours writing a story to have it rejected. Agents will criticize the story as trite and explain to me what's wrong with the plot. Then a matter of months or years later I'll see a story with the identical plot published in a major magazine, but with the byline of a name writer. So I don't think plot is as important as you claim it is. Maybe it's a question of writing style. Mine may not be as smooth as some people's, although Lord knows I try. Or maybe, as I strongly suspect, it's largely a question of who you know-.

  For myself, I've always felt that it's not who you know, it's what you've got on 'em. But that's by the way. The letter quoted above is a fabrication, although it certainly echoes any number of letters in my files. It also echoes thoughts of my own that have come to me over the years. Ages ago, when I labored in the vineyards of a literary agent, my job consisted of criticizing the efforts of amateur writers who had submitted them with reading fees. I was under instructions to stress in each instance that the story's plot was at fault, so as to avoid reflecting adversely upon the client's writing ability and to encourage him or her to send us more stories?and more reading fees.

  I felt at the time that this was palpable nonsense. Here I'd be reading the effort of someone who couldn't write his name in the dirt with a stick and instead of telling him as much I'd talk about the fundamental inadequacies of the story's plot?knowing all the while that O. Henry once wrote a story with the identical plot and did just fine with it, thank you. I began to suspect that plot was the least important component of a story, that the only real question was whether the writer could write.

  Basic writing ability is essential, to be sure. Facility with prose and dialogue is vital, and when it is lacking one knows on the very first page that a story is not worth finishing. I was made freshly aware of this while judging entries in Writer's Digest's recent short-story contest. It was not necessary for me to scan more than a page of half or more of the entries in order for me to determine that the writing ability of the entrant was insufficiently high to rank the story among the prizewinners.

  Some writers fooled me, however. They had the ability, and there was a spark in their prose and dialogue that kept me reading all the way through, nearly certain I held a winner in my hands. Then, like as not, I wound up shrugging and sighing or ranting and raving?and in any event shredding the story and moving on to the next entry. Because, time and time again, the plot would prove to be a washout. No impact! I'd rant. No conflict! I'd rave. No story! I'd lament, and tear the offending manuscript in half.

  As this happened in story after story, I was struck anew by an old truth. The plot is the most important single element of a story. Indeed, the plot is the story. Unless it works, all you've got is words.

  But wait a minute. Isn't there a contradiction here? We've all seen writers succeed with plots with which we've failed, and it's not always a matter of style?or of who or whom you know. What gives?

  What gives, I suspect, is a confusion of plot and idea. An idea, as I see it, is the premise of a story. A plot is the structure by means of which that idea is transformed into a work of fiction.

  Sometimes an idea, if it's good enough, will make a story successful in and of itself. This is especially likely to be the case with short-shorts, which are often little more than ideas in prose form. In the Writer's Digest contest, for example, I awarded a high prize to one entry just a few hundred words long because it was a legitimate surprise and a wholly original notion. It was also nicely developed, but there's no question that the idea was primarily responsible for the story's high placement.

  Perhaps we can most effectively distinguish between idea and plot, and understand the subtle importance of the latter, by looking at a case in point. I only recently made the acquaintance in print of one William Trevor, a short-story writer of uncommon excellence whose work I recommend to you without reservation. Mr. Trevor, an Irish writer now living in Devon, not only writes involving and affecting stories but is also infintely variable in theme and subject matter. His stories do not run to type, and their only common denominator is their unflagging quality.
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br />   Having said as much, I'm going to ruin one of the best of his stories for you by telling you about it. The story in question is Last Wishes and it appears in Angels at the Ritz, a collection of a dozen of Mr. Trevor's stories currently available in paperback from Penguin.

  And here's the plot:

  Mrs. Abercrombie, an old woman, is both a recluse and a hypochondriac. She rarely leaves her bedroom, where she is attended by a flock of faithful servants who are devoted to her and who love their work. Her only contact outside her own household is with the doctor who makes regular visits to her bedside.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, Mrs. Abercrombie dies. The servants are threatened with the loss of their living situation, until one of their number realizes that they can go on indefinitely as long as no one knows of the woman's death. No one has seen her outside the house since her husband's death decades ago. They can bury her on the property and proceed as if she were still alive, living out their own remaining years in peace and harmony?if only they can get the doctor to countenance their deception.

  That's the story's idea, its premise, and while there's a good measure of ingenuity to it, it is William Trevor's considerable ability which makes Last Wishes as good as it unquestionably is. Writing style and characterization play their role, but plotting craftsmanship is also abundantly evident.

  The story begins with our introduction to life at Mrs. Abercrombie's house. We're given some background on the woman, then introduced to the servants in turn, with a paragraph or so about each to show us how ideal the Abercrombie household is for them all. Plunkett, the butler, is sleeping with Tindall, the housemaid. The two gardeners love their silent work, and the cook rejoices in having her meals appreciated after a lifetime of institutional cooking. We at once like these people and like the way they get on together. We want them to continue in this fashion forever.