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

There are some writers who enjoy writing. Isaac Asimov, for one, seems to enjoy every minute of it, and there may be others similarly blessed. And everybody enjoys it now and then, when the words flow effortlessly and you feel plugged into the Universal Mind and the stuff on the page is worlds better than what you had in mind when you sat down. That doesn't happen very often, but I'll tell you it's a kick when it does.

Sometimes I think the Sunday writer enjoys a great advantage over those of us who have to do this stuff to put bread on the table. What constantly mitigates his enjoyment is his desire to give up his amateur standing and turn professional. I don't know that every foot soldier carries in his knapsack the baton of a marshal of France. I do know that, when it comes to writing, everybody wants to get into the act, and every Sunday writer thinks his typewriter ought to be able to turn out a bestseller.

Maybe it just has to be that way. Maybe we can't put up with the hard work of writing in the first place unless we're goaded by the urge to publish.

I would certainly hope, though, that Sunday writers can avoid equating failure to publish with failure as a writer. If you are gaining satisfaction from writing, if you are exercising and improving your talent, if you are committing to paper your special feelings and perceptions, then you can damn well call yourself a success. Whether you wind up in print, whether you ever see money for your efforts, is and ought to be incidental.

No, I don't feel guilty for writing my column each month. It may well be that many of my readers will never publish anything, but so what? Perhaps some of you will write a little better for having read one of my efforts.

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You're just encouraging them in their folly.

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Am I indeed? That presupposes that writing stories which will not ultimately be published is folly, and that's an assumption I'm unwilling to grant. And the very word folly calls to mind a line of William Blake's?If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

I don't know that persistence on the part of the Sunday writer leads to wisdom. I don't even know that it will lead to publication. But it can definitely lead to satisfaction, and I'd regard that as no small reward.

CHAPTER 7

Dear Joy

Dear Joy,

By now I suppose you're pretty well settled in at college. When I talked to your dad recently he did some pardonable boasting about your scholarship, and I'd like to offer my congratulations.

He also said you were thinking about becoming a writer. On that score I don't know whether congratulations or condolences are in order. As an alternative, let me furnish you with a little unsolicited advice.

The first point that comes to mind is the question of what a future writer ought to study in college. When I went to school I automatically majored in English Literature; since I intended to write the stuff, it seemed fitting and proper to find out first what other people had done in that area.

I don't suppose this did me any discernible harm, but neither am I sure it did me much good. I don't think there's any question that writers ought to be readers, and I've never known a professional writer who wasn't a virtually compulsive reader, but studying literature and reading are not the same thing. As in most academic disciplines, the student of literature undergoes a course of study which most prepares him to become a teacher of literature. This is not a bad thing to be, nor are teaching and writing mutually exclusive; a lot of writers who don't make the grade, or are emotionally unsuited to life as a free-lancer, find teaching a comfortable occupation.

The only reason not to major in English is that it might keep you from studying something else that you're more interested in. The most important single thing you can do at college is pursue your own interests, whatever they might turn out to be and however remotely they might appear to relate to a career in writing. I don't honestly think it makes a bit of difference what you study?just so long as it's what you want to study. Humanities or hard sciences, history or botany or philosophy or calculus, whatever excites you intellectually at the time is the most useful thing for you as a student and, ultimately, as a writer.

As a corollary to the principle of following your own interests, you would do well to find out who the most provocative professors are at your school. Then contrive to take at least one course from each of them, whatever the hell they're teaching. The specific facts learned in a classroom, the content of the required reading, rarely lingers in the mind too long after graduation. But the stimulation of intellectual interchange with an exciting and exceptional mind is something which will be with you forever.

Nobody can teach you to write, not on a college campus or anywhere else. But this doesn't mean that writing courses are a waste of time.

On the contrary, they're a source of time?and this may very well be their most important function. They provide you with time and academic credit for your own experimentation at the typewriter. You might be doing