Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  So Scudder would be an ex-cop, working as a private detective. But what would his life be like? And why would he have left the force?

  Quite naturally, I borrowed elements of my own life and gave them to Scudder. I had recently separated from my wife and children and moved from rural New Jersey to midtown Manhattan. I decided that, after Scudder had left the police force, his marriage had fallen apart and he'd moved from Long Island to the city. Because I liked the neighborhood I lived in and wanted to use it as a backdrop for fiction, I placed Scudder right on my block, West 57th between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. I had an apartment, but I felt a hotel room was more Scudder's style, and I put him in one.

  Why had he left the force? Because of a scandal, I thought, and then I rejected the thought. I wanted to give him a more personal kind of a scar, wanted him to bear more guilt in his own eyes than in the eyes of others. I decided he'd been drinking in a tavern while off-duty, had foiled a holdup attempt, but that one of the shots he fired had ricocheted and killed a child. While he was exonerated of any wrongdoing, he'd been unable to exonerate himself.

  Where did this come from? I couldn't have told you this at the time, but it strikes me now that it constituted a pretty clear projection of self into character. I had abruptly quit a marriage of over a dozen years' standing. I believed, and professed to feel, that I had been correct in so doing. But, if I had not killed a child, I had abandoned three of them, and on some level I could not exonerate myself.

  One of the quirks with which I furnished Scudder was a propensity for hanging out in churches. He didn't attend services and had no formal belief in God, but after moving to Manhattan he found himself frequently entering churches and using them as a source of peace and quiet. In this instance, I was simply supplying Scudder with a behavior pattern I had lately adopted myself. New York is noisy, and churches do provide a quiet place to sit and think. There was very likely an element of unconscious spiritual quest in my visits to churches, and no doubt this was true of Scudder as well. I did make his behavior pattern rather more rigid, though, and I had him make a thing of lighting candles for people who had died, invariably including the little girl his ricocheting bullet had killed.

  In addition, I had him tithe in a compulsive fashion, giving a tenth of whatever income his detection brought him to whatever church he next visited. He did this not because he felt they would do something worthwhile with the money, or for any reason that made sense to him, but because it had come to be something he simply did. In explaining this in the character sheet I wrote about him, I noted, He does a lot of things without knowing why. While I certainly have never tithed, and seriously doubt that I ever shall, I certainly did things without knowing why. And still do.

  Since Scudder was already a denizen of my neighborhood, I let him hang out at the same saloon where I spent a great deal of my own time. I was drinking pretty heavily around that time, and I made him a pretty heavy drinker, too. I drank whiskey, sometimes mixing it with coffee. So did Scudder.

  He and I were different in innumerable ways. He'd been a cop for all those years, and he still looked and thought and reacted like one. His attitudes and responses were not mine. But there was enough of me in him so that I knew him, and his organic evolution made him plausible, sympathetic and original.

  It was good to renew that acquaintance. It was good to spend two-hundred-plus pages in his company, good to be able to report that Matthew Scudder is alive and well and living on West 57th Street.

  CHAPTER 43

  Casting

  THE WAITRESS watched him with wary hostility, as if she were afraid he might be putting her on. She was middle-aged and hard-faced, with a beehive of champagne-colored hair that she kept patting and touching to reassure herself it was still there in all its glory. But she was not a bit out of place in the steakhouse, with its linoleum-covered floor and tube-steel furniture and blaring, country-rock jukebox.

  That's from Cutter and Bone, by Newton Thornburg. It's good writing, but then if there's a bad sentence anywhere in the novel I didn't notice it. I picked this particular passage to quote because the writer has given us such a perfect description of a bit player. That's all we're ever told about this waitress. She doesn't have a line of dialogue, never turns up in another scene. But we already know everything we have to know about her. For some readers, her moment on stage will be memorable?as it evidently was for me, as I thought of her when I sat down to write this piece. For others she's part of the scenery, serving to evoke the ambience of the restaurant in which the protagonists are about to have a conversation and thus to lend atmosphere to that conversation. It doesn't really matter whether she's memorable or not. She's a bit player, a spear carrier.

  The way you delineate such minor characters is one of the things that separates-hmmmm. Not the men from the boys. That's sexist. The adults from the children? The sheep from the goats? The fool from his money?

  Enough. Out in Hollywood, where they know how to delegate responsibility, it's the job of the casting director to select actors for minor roles. The casting director studies the script, conceptualizes the characters for their roles as written, and combines intuition, experience, and familiarity with available talent to pick the right people.

  The poor prose writer, hack of all trades, has to be his own casting director. He uses his intuition and experience, adds his powers of imagination and observation, and does his best.

  Where do you find your minor characters? A good many writers do their casting from the world they live in, patterning characters after friends, acquaintances, or passers-by. This is perfectly legitimate, and is quite different from the roman ˆ clef, where a real story about real people is told in the guise of fiction. Instead your real-life model serves to give you a handle on the character you're creating?a conversational mechanism, a physical trait, an attitude of one sort or another.

  Wherever your minor characters come from, one thing you ought to train yourself to do is visualize them in your mind before rendering them on paper. Perhaps visualization is the wrong word here; it implies sight, and for some characters your process of realization may not be specifically visual at all. Sometimes I will get a strong visual impression of a character. I'll be able to picture him as graphically in my mind as I would a close friend. Other times I'll know instead how his voice sounds, or that he shifts his weight from foot to foot as he talks, or that there is something noteworthy about his eyes or hands.

  He stood five-ten, weighed around 155 pounds. His hair was dark brown verging on black, slicked down and combed straight back. He had a broad forehead and a strong, hawklike nose. His eyes were a medium brown. His mouth was wide, full-lipped, and when he drew back those lips to smile he showed large even teeth. His suit was a gray sharkskin, a three-button model with padding in the shoulders. He wore a buff-colored shirt with a tab collar, a navy silk tie with a restrained below-the-knot design. He?

  There's nothing horribly wrong with the description above but neither is there anything terribly right with it. It's photographic. It tells us how tall and how heavy the character is, what his features are like, what he's wearing. It's exactly the sort of description a cop would want to get from an eye-witness. As a quick study of a minor character in a work of fiction, it tells us more than we need to know and less than we'd like to know.

  In contrast, look again at the description of the waitress from Cutter and Bone. Thornburg doesn't tell us if the lady's tall or short, heavy or thin. He doesn't tell us much about her physical appearance, just a few words about her hairstyle and the hardness of her face. But I know what she looks like. And so do you. And while my picture of the woman may differ from yours, and while each of ours will differ from Thornburg's, that's irrelevant. We have a sense of the person, and we can fill in the rest ourselves to reflect our own intuition and experience and imagination. Reading, after all, is an audience-participation venture, and every story is a slightly different experience for every reader.

  What's important, th
en, is to furnish the reader with those details which impress themselves upon you when you visualize the character. Here's an example from Out the Window, a detective novelette of mine which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine:

  The door opened. He was tall and thin, with hollow cheeks and prominent eyebrows and a worn, wasted look to him. He must have been in his early thirties and he didn't really look much older than that but you sensed that in another ten years he'd look twenty years older. If he lived that long. He wore patched jeans and a tee-shirt with THE SPIDER'S WEB silkscreened on it. Beneath the legend there was a sketch of a web. A macho spider stood at one end of it, grinning, extending two of his eight arms to welcome a hesitant girlish fly.

  I chose this paragraph partly out of vanity (it is a nice paragraph, isn't it?) but also because I remember how it evolved. When I started writing it I didn't know what the guy looked like. I knew who he was?a bartender who'd been living with the girl whose death the lead character is investigating. I had a vague impression of his face, my idea amounting to a sort of composite of the faces of a slew of footloose predatory males I've met in life and on celluloid. More important, I had a sense of who he was. The paragraph all grew out of this knowledge and did so spontaneously and quickly. I'd already selected The Spider's Web as the name of his place of employment, and the idea of the tee-shirt came to mind of its own accord.

  By concentrating on details and not attempting to describe photographically, you greatly increase your chances of writing something the reader will happen to remember. By relating those aspects of the character worth mentioning, and by omitting pedestrian physical description, you make an impression upon the reader. I won't quickly forget that waitress touching her hair to reassure herself it was still there.

  There's a thin line between this sort of impressionism and out-and-out caricature. The art of a caricaturist consists of ignoring the ordinary and exaggerating the remarkable. Sometimes, to convey a minor character rapidly and indelibly, caricature is tempting.

  Ian Fleming did this all the time, and not without knowing what he was about. James Bond's supporting players were all caricatures, deliberately twisted to comic-book grotesquery. They had improbable names and unlikely physical attributes and mannerisms. This made the Bond books vivid and memorable and had a great deal to do with their success. It also made them utterly unrealistic and ruined them for those readers for whom the illusion of reality is a requirement for the enjoyment of fiction.

  If you are trying to write realistic fiction and you people it extensively with overdrawn characters, you're working against yourself. You can occasionally get away with filling books and stories with grotesques, but unless your name's Carson McCullers it gets tricky.

  A less obvious form of caricature consists of giving an otherwise ordinary character a trait or attribute or mannerism on which the reader may focus his attention. The waitress with her beehive hairdo is an example. If she figured more prominently in the book than she does, and if we had that hair-patting reported constantly, it could get to be a bit much. As a quick snapshot it's fine.

  In Time to Murder and Create, I've got a character in the first chapter named Spinner Jablon. He got his sobriquet because of his habit of spinning a silver dollar on the table as he talks. Well, by the end of the chapter old Spinner's dead as a lox, and it's a damn good thing, because I couldn't have endured his spinning his way through the next sixty thousand words. As it stands, I'm afraid Spinner verges on caricature.

  Sometimes the work you do on casting pays off in the plotting area. As I write this column I'm at work on a novel about a burglar who's recruited by a friend to filch something from the apartment of the friend's ex-wife. (While he's doing this the woman gets killed, the friend gets jugged for the killing, and the heroic burglar comes to his aid and investigates the murder.)

  I tried to figure out who this friend should be. I decided he could be a poker buddy of the burglar's, but I wanted them to have some other connection as well. I decided that the friend ought to be the burglar's dentist, and I imagined a scene where Bernie the Burglar is in the chair getting a tooth drilled, all those things hanging out of his mouth and all, and the dentist is laying this whole riff on him.

  And I decided the dentist wanted the something-or-other filched because he wants to remarry, and the girl he wants to marry is his dental hygienist, who'd be introduced cleaning Bernie's teeth, and later in the book the two of them could get involved, and the murder weapon, hell, the murder weapon could be one of those fiendish dental implements that all dentists have a whole arsenal of, and the actual murderer could be?

  Sorry. You'll have to read The Burglar in the Closet to find that out. But all that plot business evolved from a casting decision.

  On the basis of that, I suppose I could say something about there being more than one use for the old casting couch. Or I could work up some sort of wordplay on casting pearls before swine, or bread upon the waters. Or aspersions.

  But I wouldn't do anything like that. Trust me.

  CHAPTER 44

  Name Calling

  HOW CAN you pick names for your characters? If there are tricks to every trade, what are the tricks in this one?

  Let's grant, first of all, that the success or failure of a piece of fiction rarely hinges upon the names of the characters. I've never heard of an editor buying or rejecting a story on this basis. Not consciously, at any rate; on another level, character names can certainly influence how he feels about what you've written, and thus can weigh in the eventual decision to accept or reject.

  What names to use is a decision you have to make every time you sit down to write a piece of fiction. And your decisions in this regard frequently have to be made spontaneously?no matter how thoroughly I may work things out in advance, any session at the typewriter will see the emergence of some unanticipated minor character, some bit player or spear carrier who needs to be named. One might as well learn how to do this sort of thing effectively.

  Here then, in no particular order, are some observations on the name game:

  1. AVOID CONFUSION. This might be too obvious to mention but for the fact that even published writers slip up from time to time, hurling Carl and Cal and Carol and Carolyn all into the same chapter, peopling a crowd scene with Smathers and Smithers and Dithers and Mather. Be conscious of this sort of thing and avoid it. The fact that such duplication occurs in real life makes no difference. True, you will often find yourself in the presence of four or five Johns at the same time. Well, that's one of the differences between life and fiction, after all. Fiction is supposed to make sense.

  Some writers try not to give any two characters the same first or last initials. Common sense should help you decide where this particular line ought to be drawn. Most readers probably won't confuse Al and Adrian, or Gooch and Gulbrandsen; many might be confused, or at least annoyed, by duplications like Hal and Mal, Gerry and Gary, Janet and Janice, etc.

  2. WATCH OUT FOR FALLING STARS. Sometimes a name will pop into your mind. It has such a nice feel to it and fits your concept of your character so perfectly that you don't realize you've heard the name before.

  Or even seen it in lights. When I worked for an illiterary agent some years back, a manuscript came in featuring a female character named Irene Dunne. A fine name, that, but I remembered mama, even if our client did not. When I pointed out that Irene Dunne was indeed the name of a rather prominent actress, he nodded thoughtfully. It had a nice ring to it, he said. But I couldn't quite think why.

  Even if you don't fill your stories with people named Clark Gable and Norma Shearer, it's very easy to use the names of prominent people with whom you yourself may be unfamiliar. This is not something you need agonize over. If you're in any doubt about a particular name, if it sounds as though it might be too good not to be true, check an encyclopedia and a copy of Who's Who. (And, when you've done that, use your own judgment. The lead in After the First Death, a mystery of mine, was named Alexander Penn. Before
the book saw print, I discovered there was a poet in the Soviet Union by that name. I thought about it for a while, and I realized how many changes I'd have to make, all the puns on the last name and everything, and I decided to let him change it.)

  3. PICK INTERESTING NAMES. I know there are a lot of John Smiths in the world, and I wish them well, but I certainly don't want to encounter any more of their number in fiction. And if I were an editor I would certainly not be much impressed by an author with so impoverished an imagination as to fasten such a name on a character of his. Names like Smith and Jones and Thompson and Miller and Williams and Johnson are so common in real life as to be colorless in fiction. You might ring one in now and then for a minor character, but tend to avoid them altogether. They're just not interesting enough.

  In this regard, let me furnish you with a piece of incidental intelligence. People who are rank amateurs at this business of inventing names, people picking an alias for a motel register or making up a false name on the spur of the moment, have a marked propensity to select as a last name an adapted first name. Richards, Peters, Johnson, Edwards?these are all common last names in their own right, but they're especially common as aliases.

  What constitutes an interesting name and how do you pick it? Interesting question. I've become increasingly fascinated by names over the past few years and have devoted more attention to the problem of naming characters than I once did. Personally, I've come to favor lengthy last names rather than short ones, and uncommon names rather than common ones.

  Some of the names I like best for characters are ones I've invented (which is not to say that they may not exist somewhere in real life). I've been doing a series of stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine featuring a criminous lawyer named Martin Ehrengraf, whose presumably unique surname is composed of two reasonably ordinary German words. My burglar, who's starred in two novels so far, is Bernie Rhodenbarr, and my friend Bill Pronzini wrote to ask if I'd created his name by combining those of two major-league pitchers, Rhoden and Barr. I hadn't; while trying to think of a name I recalled a relative of mine named Rodenberg, and I changed the ending, and I put the h in because it looked better that way, and a star was born.