Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

PART FIVE

Isn't That the Truth:

Fiction as a Spiritual Exercise

CHAPTER 47

A Writer's Prayer

LORD, I hope You've got a few minutes. I've got a whole lot of favors to ask You.

Basically, Lord, I guess I want to ask You to help me be the best writer I possibly can, to get the most out of whatever talent I've been given. I could probably leave it at that, but I think it might help me to get a little more specific.

For starters, help me to avoid comparing myself to other writers. I can make a lot of trouble for myself when I do that, sliding into a routine that might go something like this:

I'm a better writer than Alan, so why don't I have the success he has? Why don't I get book-club sales? Why wasn't my last book optioned for a TV mini-series? How come Barry gets so much more advertising support from his publisher than I do? What's so great about Carol that she deserves a two-page review in The New Yorker? Every time I turn on the TV, there's Dan running his mouth on another talk show. What makes him so special? And how come Ellen's in Redbook four or five times a year? I write the same kind of story and mine keep coming back with form rejection slips.

On the other hand, I'll never be the writer Frank is. He can use his own experience with a degree of rigorous self-honesty that's beyond me. And Gloria has a real artist's eye. Her descriptive passages are so vivid they make me aware of my own limitations. Howard's a real pro?he can knock off more work in a day than I can in a month, and do it without working up a sweat. Irene spends twice as much time at the typewriter as I do. Maybe she has the right idea, and I'm so lazy I don't deserve to get anyplace at this game. And as for Jeremy?

Lord, let me remember that I'm not in competition with other writers. Whether they have more or less success has nothing to do with me. They have their stories to write and I have mine. They have their way of writing them and I have mine. They have their careers and I have mine. The more I focus on comparing myself with them, the less energy I am able to concentrate on making the best of myself and my own work. I wind up despairing of my ability and bitter about its fruits, and all I manage to do is sabotage myself.

Help me, Lord, to write my own stories and novels. At the beginning I may have to spend a certain amount of time doing unwitting imitations of other people's work. That's because it may take me a while to find out what my own stories are and how to tap into them. But I'm sure they exist, and I'm sure it will ultimately be possible for me to find them.

Flannery O'Connor said somewhere that anybody who manages to survive childhood has enough material to write fiction for a lifetime. I believe this, Lord. I believe every human being with the impulse to write fiction has, somewhere within him or her, innumerable stories to write. They may not bear any obvious resemblance to my own experiences. They may be set in a land I never visited or at a time I never lived. But if they're the stories I am meant to write they will derive from my observations and experience in a significant way. I'll know the feelings, the perceptions, the reactions, for having lived them in some important way.

Of the traits likely to help me get in touch with these stories, perhaps the most important is honesty. Help me, Lord, to be as honest as I'm capable of being every time I sit down at the typewriter. I don't mean by this that I feel I ought to be writing non-fiction in fiction's clothing, that I think honesty entails telling stories as they actually happened in real life. Fiction, after all, is a pack of lies. But let my fiction have its own inner truth.

When a character of mine is talking, let me listen to him and write down what I hear. Let me describe him, not with phrases dimly recalled from other books, but as I perceive him.

It seems to me that a major element of writing honestly lies in respecting the reader. Please, Lord, don't ever allow me to hold my audience in contempt. Sometimes I find this a temptation, because by diminishing the reader I am less intimidated by the task of trying to engage his interest and hold his attention. But in the long run I cannot be disrespectful of my reader without my work's suffering for it.

If I cannot write for a particular market without contemning that market's readers, perhaps I'm banging my head against the wrong wall. If I can't write juveniles without being patronizing to young readers, I'm not going to be proud of my work, nor am I going to perform it well. If I can't write confessions or gothics or mysteries or westerns because I think the product is categorically garbage or the people who read it are congenital idiots, I am not going to be good at it and I am not going to gain satisfaction from it.