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

bunny rabbits on the other? Won't you be better off doing the juveniles as Hillary Everbright, the rough stuff as Studd Bludgeon?

I'm not sure it matters. Most readers won't even notice what you're doing in fields they themselves don't read, and won't hold it against you if they do. But this maintenance of different literary identities for different kinds of writing is a time-honored principle.

4. THE AUTHOR IS TOO PROLIFIC. Some writers use several names because they publish several books a year. They feel that neither the bookselling industry nor the reading public will take them seriously if all these books are identifiable as the produce of a single writer.

I don't know how valid this is. On the one hand, I've seen reviewers take a shot at this latest potboiler cranked out in nothing flat by Writer X. On the other, over the long run your books help each other. Fans want to read everything you've written, and have an easier time of it if they know what to look for. I don't think Isaac Asimov is hurt by having published so many books of so many different sorts, all under his own name. Yet I could name other writers who have lost credibility with critics in this fashion.

5. THE AUTHOR WANTS TO LOOK LIKE AN EXPERT. Years ago, I wrote a series of books that purported to be case histories of various anonymous souls. The subjects of these case histories were indeed rather more than anonymous. They were fictional, made up out of the whole cloth, with their sexual histories displayed for the reader's education and/or titillation. I used a pen name on these books?you bet your bippy I used a pen name?and the pen name had an M.D. (In this particular instance, the publisher knew the name was a phony but thought the author was a legitimate physician operating under an alias. Ah, what a tangled web-)

It is quite lawful, I was told, to use a doctor's pen name so long as one does not usurp the prerogatives of a doctor. Since I neither diagnosed nor prescribed, I was presumably within my rights. As far as the ethics of all of this may have been concerned, I'm not sure there's any good sense in imposing questions of ethics upon a profession which has muddled along for centuries without any.

More recently, I used a female pen name on a novel written from a woman's point of view, thinking that the book would be better received for my doing so. I don't think I would take this particular position now.

6. THE AUTHOR IS NOT PROUD OF WHAT HE HAS WRITTEN. Here, finally, is the strongest single reason for using a false name. When one is well aware that one is publishing trash, one can salvage at least a modicum of self-respect by refraining from publishing it under one's own name.

An objection comes quickly to mind. If it's tripe, why publish it at all? Why not limit oneself to the publication of work one is proud to see printed under one's own name?

This is a good argument, logically unassailable, but I don't know that it is too closely grounded in reality. This is no easy business for the neophyte, and to publish anything, trash or treasure, is very much an accomplishment. The beginning writer must make it his first priority simply to write and get paid for it. In the greater majority of cases, he cannot expect to be doing so at the top of his form. Someday he may write first-rate work for first-rate markets, but that may take a while.

In the meantime, he may write and publish a lot of lesser work. He may not be actively ashamed of this work, may indeed take a professional's pride in it, but may still recognize it as unworthy. Why shouldn't he reserve his own name for work of which he is altogether unashamed?

There's a thin line here. A person's reach does exceed his grasp, after all, and if you wait for perfection you'll wait forever, publishing your entire life's work under one pseudonym or another. Similarly, there are books I liked well enough when I wrote them but regard as inferior work now; ought I to regret having published them under my own name? I do not regret having done so, any more than I regret being a better writer now than I was twenty years ago.

As I started to say earlier, I've come grudgingly to the position that a pen name ought not to be used unless it seems necessary. I am able to see now that I used pen names as a way to avoid taking responsibility for my own work, not in the eyes of others as much as in my own.

By the same token, I got a kick out of the element of deception that is inherent in pseudonymous writing. Pen names provided me with a vehicle for escaping the prison of self. The lure of a false identity always appealed to me, and there was a time when I traveled around the country under a pen name, acting out in a rather bizarre fashion. I had two of my pen names carrying on an affair, dedicating books to one another. It was all a touch schizoid, now that I think back on it.

I don't know that I would go so far as to say I regret it. Pen names hurt me professionally