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

with an interest in writing commonly get involved in these areas. They can be very rewarding, but only if you're interested in them for their own sake. I'd recommend that you choose your extracurricular activities the same way you choose your courses, for their intrinsic interest to you.

The time I put in editing the college paper was valuable to me in several ways. It helped me learn to write to space requirements, taught me to work against the pressure of a deadline, and assured me that I did not want to spend my life on a newspaper. But the most important extracurricular activity for me was hanging out. The college I attended, like the one you've chosen, was a small innovative liberal-arts college with a bizarre assortment of students and a comfortingly eccentric faculty. The personal growth and expansion I achieved through contact with all of these madmen and crazy ladies was far more useful to me over the years than anything I ever acquired in a classroom. And that's been the experience of every writer I've known?and most non-writers too, as far as that goes.

It may occur to you that, while writing is certainly what you want to do eventually, it would be nice to be able to make a living after you graduate. You may think, and may be advised, that you ought to make specific preparations for a career so that you can support yourself while you're getting established as a writer.

Don't waste your time. You may indeed wind up holding any number of jobs after college, but they'll take care of themselves when the time comes. Planning now for a non-writing career when you actually want to become a writer is no more than preparing for failure. Spend the present growing, and learning, and writing, and enjoying yourself. And let tomorrow take care of tomorrow.

Have fun, Joy. I don't expect you to believe this, but there will come a time when these four years will be the good old days. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself?and thanks for providing me with this month's column.

Love,Larry

CHAPTER 8

How to Read Like a Writer

WHILE LEADING a writing seminar at Antioch College, I had a chance to renew my friendship with Nolan Miller, in whose writing workshop I made some of my first attempts at fiction right around the time Teddy Roosevelt led the lads up San Juan Hill.

We talked of students, then and now. They all want to be told whether they have talent, Nolan said. Talent's no guarantee of success, of course. The most talented writer in the world won't get anyplace if he lacks the discipline to exploit his talent. But they always want to know if they have it or not, and I never tell a student he lacks talent.

Why's that? I wondered.

Because I simply can't tell. I may be able to detect talent on occasion but I can never be certain of its absence. I can't know that a man or woman lacks the capacity to grow, to develop, to improve. Besides, he added, I don't think it does them any harm to try their hand at writing. If nothing else, it makes them much better readers.

Years ago I heard the perhaps apocryphal story of the great violinist. I've recounted his approach in Chapter 12, It Takes More Than Talent. Nolan's is gentler, and I very much prefer it.

But do we actually become better readers by virtue of our efforts at writing? That would certainly seem to be a logical assumption. Personal knowledge of how a thing is done ought to give one a finer appreciation of that same thing when it is done by someone else. I am well aware, certainly, that my musician friend hears music very differently than I do, that my mother has a fuller experience in an art gallery as a result of the years she's spent painting.

This principle applies outside of the arts as well. There's a reason beyond their celebrity value for employing retired athletes as sports announcers. Having played the game, they know it better than you or I.

When it comes to reading, I'd have to say that most of us are pretty good at it to begin with. The one common denominator I've observed among writers of my acquaintance is a longstanding appetite for the printed word. Most of us have been well-nigh compulsive readers all our lives. Don Westlake once admitted that if there's nothing else in the house, he'll go read the ingredients label on the bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Over the years I've met a couple of writers who are not like this, but their number's so few as to qualify them for the endangered species list.

While I've always read voraciously, the nature of my reading has changed considerably over the years. In my college years I went through books like bluefish through a school of menhaden, chewing up and bolting down everything that came within my reach. In a sense, I read a great many books with the determination of a smoker breaking in a new pipe, as if each book I read would somehow season and improve me. When I didn't like a book I simply lowered my head and bulled my way through it anyway, as if setting it aside half-finished would be somehow immoral.

Alas, no more. I don't finish half the books I start nowadays, and a good many get hurled across