Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  Writer's Digest

  Dear Rose,

  I enclose herewith (1) the galleys of the December column and (2) Documentary Evidence, the January offering. As you can see, it's itself masquerading as a collection of documents, and this letter to your estimable self is part of it. Wheels within wheels, Rose. If The Lord High Everything Else objects to the grammar and syntax and such, tell him it's all in the interests of verisimilitude. (You might want to check my spelling of verisimilitude, Rose.)

  Keep those cards and letters coming, love. And try to keep Brady away from the prepubescent schoolgirls. One of these days he'll find himself in real trouble.

  Larry

  CHAPTER 35

  Surprise!

  IN THE past several chapters we've taken a good look at the towering importance of Story. The great majority of readers occupy themselves with fiction for any number of reasons?to identify with the characters, to learn about different backgrounds or epochs or ways of living, to deepen their understanding of their own lives, or to kill a few minutes between the soup and the salad course. But the one factor that keeps them turning pages is the over-riding urge to learn what happens next.

  The element of surprise is one way writers add excitement to the resolution of the question of what happens next. The surprise ending is a classic component of fiction, particularly in the short story. Indeed, that abbreviated form known as the short-short is rarely anything more than twelve or fifteen hundred words of build-up to a snapper of a surprise ending.

  Endings don't have to surprise the reader in order to satisfy him. Whole categories of fiction are as predictable in their plot resolutions as the stars in their courses; while I would not go so far as to say, for example, that if you've read one gothic novel you've read them all, I doubt many of us could read too many of them and find ourselves bug-eyed with astonishment at their endings.

  On a more exalted level, few works of great literature hold extraordinary surprises for the reader. They are rather more likely to have plots which move inexorably to conclusions which seem in retrospect to have been inevitable from the beginning. This does not render their hold on us any less compelling, any more than our attention wanders at a performance of Macbeth because we recall the ending from tenth-grade English. We're no less caught up in the question of What Happens Next for being able to recite the speeches along with the actors.

  The surprise ending is very much with us, however, in both published and unpublished stories. Most mystery shorts, a good deal of science fiction, and a substantial number of general magazine short stories have surprise endings, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the production of unestablished writers hews to this pattern. In one WD short-story contest, for example, it would seem in retrospect that perhaps a third of the entries had surprise endings. (Another third had come-to-realize endings, of the sort in which a woman on her way to commit suicide sees two sparrows courting in a birdbath and decides the world's not such a bad place after all. And another third of the entries had no discernible ending whatsoever?the woman sees the sparrows in the birdbath, say, so instead of committing suicide she goes to the hardware store and buys two pounds of nails and a shiny new hammer.)

  Perhaps a look at some of the different kinds of surprise endings will give us an idea of what works and what doesn't?and why.

  1. WITHHELD INFORMATION. Probably the most common amateur surprise ending is one in which the author, having deliberately concealed a central fact from the reader simply to make the story work, concludes by revealing that fact with a flourish. The narrator, say, whom we've made the silly mistake of assuming to be a human being, turns out at the end to have been all along an ear of Golden Bantam corn. Or the really odd planet that our space-traveling heroes have landed on turns out to be Good Ol' Terra Firma. Or?oh, never mind.

  The reader's usual response to this sort of trickery is not awe at the author's imaginative powers and verbal legerdemain but cold fury at his unadulterated gall. The reader feels he's been unfairly gulled, and most of the time he's right. Most of the time this kind of story falls so flat it might have been a soufflŽ and the ending the slamming of the oven door.

  On the other hand, once in a while someone makes this kind of story work, and the result can be a masterpiece. The example that leaps to mind was a teleplay on an anthology show called Danger. I don't know when I saw it but it must have been twenty-five years ago. (I seem to recall peering at the set through the bars of my play pen.)

  Here's the plot: A band of brave men are living under a dictatorship. Their own country's been crushed by a neighboring country which has annexed them. We're with these guys as they risk everything on a plot to kill the dictator. In fact we're standing right beside him, cheering all the way, as their leader, a charismatic type named Johnny, sneaks up on the archfiend and shoots him dead.

  And then Johnny leaps down from the balcony and shouts. Sic semper tyrannis, and we catch our first glimpse of the slain dictator, and it's Abraham Lincoln.

  I'll tell you. It's a quarter of a century since I saw that show, and just telling you about it leaves a chill at the bone.

  That was withheld information, but it was artfully withheld, and there were clues all along the way, and there was, ultimately, a reason for the subterfuge. One did not feel cheated by the ending. One felt thunderstruck.

  Here's another example. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine published an impressive tour de force in June of 1977, a first story by Kenneth Watts called The Sounds of Summer. The viewpoint character is held hostage by a fugitive; we find out at the end, after the fugitive has been captured as a result of the lead's action, that the lead is a deaf man?he never even knew the fugitive was there! This is withheld information, all right, but it works brilliantly, and all in the space of perhaps a thousand words. I would urge you to find a copy of that issue and see for yourselves how and why the story works; I've ruined the ending for you because there was no other way to discuss the story, but I don't think that will altogether nullify your enjoyment of the story.

  One writer who makes a habit of tricking the reader with withheld information is William Goldman; he likes to pull off surprises this way not just at the ending but throughout the course of a work. In Father's Day, for example, we keep getting emotionally involved in a line of action, thinking it's really happening and caring how it turns out, only to learn that it's the protagonist's fantasy. Marathon Man is one cute trick after another. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. Goldman's a master at this sort of thing, but sometimes reading him for me is like watching card tricks with a hangover.

  2. TOO MUCH DOG, NOT ENOUGH TAIL. One of the reasons The Sounds of Summer works as well as it does is that it's short. When revelation constitutes the ending of a story, all that has preceded it has been build-up, important only as a means of achieving that ending. We wouldn't object to reading a thousand words to get to Mr. Watts's surprise, but the same story wouldn't be nearly so effective at triple the length, and it's hard to believe anyone would write a whole novel, say, leading up to that sort of surprise.

  But it wouldn't be the first time. Consider this plot, for example. Guy wakes up in Central Park. His wallet's gone and so's his memory. Doesn't know who he is or how he got where he is. There's a scrap of paper in his pocket with the word Buddwing on it. This means nothing to him but he figures maybe it's his name. So he spends the day trying to work out the facts of his existence, and he has some adventures and meets some interesting people and engages in sprightly conversation, and finally he finds his way back to his actual apartment and opens the door and there by George is his wife's dead body hanging from the chandelier, and this sight sends him reeling in shock, so much so that he stumbles back to Central Park and right back into amnesia, and we're left with the impression that this cycle has been repeating on him like a bad cucumber for days now.

  Not a bad notion at three or four thousand words tops, right? Evan Hunter's novel Buddwing runs about a hundred thousand words, and the endin
g positively ruins it. It's a short-short ending on a full-length novel and even a writer with Hunter's technical facility can't make it work.

  3. WHO'S SURPRISED? When the whole story's a build-up to the surprise at the end, you've got a real investment in that surprise. If the reader has seen it coming a mile away, the story's in serious trouble.

  The example that comes quickest to mind is not a story but a film. A few years back Dustin Hoffman played the title role in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying All Those Terrible Things About Me? Seems that one Harry Kellerman was phoning up everybody in Hoffman's life to spread dreadful rumors about him, and Hoffman spends the whole movie trying to find out the answer to the titular question, and have you guessed it yourself yet? Yeah, Dusty himself was Harry K., doing the dirty on himself in some sort of split-personality number, and nothing could have come as less of a surprise to the viewers. Most everybody tumbled to the secret ten minutes into the film, and some clever types guessed the ending without even entering the theater.

  How do you know whether a surprise ending is going to work or not? Tricky point. I guess you just have to develop, from your own analysis of what works and what doesn't work in the things you read over the years, a sense of what is and what is not genuinely surprising.

  Here again, the importance of a solid reading background is evident. Originality is an essential quality of a successful surprise ending, and how can you know whether your gimmick's original if you haven't read widely in your field?

  4. A SURPRISE?PLUS A NEW PERSPECTIVE. The best surprise endings don't merely surprise the reader. In addition, they force him to reevaluate everything that has preceded them, so that he views the actions and the characters in a different light and has a new perspective on all that's he's read.

  Consider Mark Hellinger's The Window. Three bedridden women share a room at a sanitarium. One, by right of seniority, has her bed next to the window. Day after day she recounts to the others what she sees through the window?little daily dramas in the lives of children playing outside, lovers quarreling and making up, the changing seasons, birds flying south, and so on.

  Then she dies. The woman who's been there the longest after her inherits her spot, and the other woman moves up one, and a new woman is moved into the room, and the woman who's got the window now is very excited to see what she's been hearing about for years, and she looks out the window, and?surprise!?it opens on a blank wall. And surprise! she looks at it for a couple of seconds and then proceeds to tell what she sees, the children playing, the woman sweeping her porch steps, the buds on the trees, making up stories for her roommates' entertainment just as her predecessor did.

  Now that's a surprise ending. I could tell you some others, but?surprise!?I'm out of space. But read John Collier, read Gerald Kersh, read Saki, read the stories in the current magazines. See what works and what doesn't, and keep on reading and rereading until you see why and how. Write your own stories and make your own mistakes. Send out your stories if they turn out well. Send 'em out again when they come back.

  And, when what you get back is a small white envelope instead of a big brown one, congratulations. That's the best surprise of all.

  PART FOUR

  One Damned Word After Another:

  Fiction as a Craft

  CHAPTER 36

  Never Apologize, Never Explain

  ONE THING I've noticed in reading the work of new writers, published and unpublished, is a tendency to explain too much. It seems to me that this generally stems from one of two things?a desire to control the reader's interpretation of what one has written or a reluctance to trust the reader's ability to make sense out of what is going on.

  It takes considerable self-confidence and monumental ego to write fiction in the first place. In order to put one word after another, we have to be able to believe that the plots and characters we invent, spun like spider webs out of our own innards, and couched in the particular words we arbitrarily select and arrange on the page, will be grippingly interesting and involving to some faceless reader whom we have never met and of whom we know nothing.

  This same ego quite naturally makes us want to take charge utterly, to control and direct everything with the fervor of a kid playing traffic cop. This desire can manifest itself in any of a number of ways. Here's an example:

  Don't talk to me like that, Margo shouted. She was really angry. You can't talk to me like that!

  I'll talk to you any way I want, Roy flared. He couldn't stand the way she was acting.

  I mean it, she said, furious. I've had enough.

  Oh? He drew back, worried at the new quality he could detect in her voice. What will you do about it, then?

  I'll do something, she said. But even as she spoke she could feel the determination draining from her-

  Do you see what the author's doing here? He's stepping right up onto the stage with his characters, leaning in over their shoulders and explaining why and how they're reading the lines he's given them. Instead of letting them reveal their feelings by what they say and do, he insists upon interpreting everything for us.

  This particular example is one I've created for the occasion, to illustrate a point. But I'm paraphrasing a short story a friend of mine asked me to read, and I think it's interesting to note that he's a stage director of some reputation. I pointed out to him that he was doing in his fiction what it's his job to do in the theater, telling the characters their motivation and how to deliver their lines. But as a director he doesn't get up there with the actors on the night of the performance, and neither can he get on the page with his characters without blunting the effectiveness of his dialogue.

  Dialogue is by no means the only area in which an author can get in the way with words of explanation. I ran across a rather clear example in one of the entries in last year's WD short-story contest. As I recall, one of the characters told a joke, whereupon the author wrote: Paul forced a laugh at Hilliard's weak joke.

  The word weak came from the author; he's butting in, assuring us that Hilliard's joke was a stinker. But we already knew that, for heaven's sake. We just heard the joke, and it bombed, and obviously it was a weak joke or Paul wouldn't have had to force a laugh over it, so why on earth shove your way in and tell us it was weak?

  Over-explanation can come not only through the intrusion of the author's presence. Sometimes the author uses his characters to tell us more than we need to know. One example of this is what has been called Soap-Opera Dialogue, because one of its functions is to render things crystal clear for those viewers who happened to miss the last couple of episodes. What happens is that the characters have a stilted conversation, explaining things to each other at unnecessary length, in order to convey information not to each other but to the reader.

  Like this:

  Your brother-in-law Sidney called this afternoon.

  Sheila's husband? I haven't spoken to him since I heard he was scheduled for surgery. What did he want?

  He's very worried about Rita. He would have called you, Charles, but Sheila told him how busy you've been with the Ackroyd case.

  Well, you get the idea. There's no earthly reason for Charles to say Sheila's husband? other than to let the reader know who Sidney is, in case he's forgotten. The whole passage shows us two people talking through each other in order to pass information on, and in the process the conversation ceases to appear realistic.

  Another form of over-explanation derives similarly from the writer's inability to trust the reader to keep up with what's happening. I've noted this tendency myself in my early suspense novels. Whenever my lead character began to figure something out, I had him think out loud so the reader would be able to follow what was going on in his mind. Whenever my lead set things in motion, I explained as I went along so the reader wouldn't be lost.

  I learned, eventually, that the reader doesn't have to be kept that completely in the picture. Sometimes it's a good deal more fun to watch the lead character go through his paces without knowing ex
actly what he's getting at; that way you can do a little guesswork and try to figure out just what's going on, and why.

  I first got the hang of this in a series of books I wrote about a private detective named Matthew Scudder. Scudder was a great character to work with, quirky and angst-ridden, and he did a lot of things without telling the reader why he was doing them. Some of the time he didn't know himself why he was doing certain things. When he began to dope things out, and set wheels in motion to work out whodunit, he didn't think out loud so that the reader would be with him every step of the way.

  Gregory Mcdonald's novels about a reporter named Fletch are an even better example of how to keep the reader in the dark without explanation or apology. In Fletch and Confess, Fletch especially, the hero goes through a great deal of convoluted business, setting up elaborate bits of plot machinery. We know what he's doing but we don't know why he's doing it or what it's supposed to lead to?and that's one of the things that makes the books work so effectively. We keep reading to find out not only how things will work out but why Fletch has been doing thus and so right in front of our eyes.

  Earlier I likened the writer to a theatrical director, moving his characters around the stage and telling them how to deliver their lines. In the theater, one important concept is that of the audience as constituting the fourth wall. In other words, the interpretive ability of the audience is part of the dynamic of the theatrical performance.

  I think the same thing holds true for fiction. A short story or novel constitutes a subtly different experience for every person who reads it, simply because each reader brings a different perspective and background to bear upon what he reads. A fictional scene about a woman undergoing an abortion in a railroad car traveling across Kenya will differ in its effect upon the reader depending whether that reader is a man or a woman, has or has not had an abortion, is or is not familiar with railroad cars, and has or has not been to Kenya. Further, its effect will depend on the nature of the reader's particular experience?on the abortion table or in Kenya, or whatever.