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

stands alongside, and they discuss and come to agreement on every sentence before it gets typed. Curiously, I find this perfectly comprehensible as a means of producing work for stage or screen, and the image of a pair of sitcom writers swigging coffee and tossing gags back and forth strikes me as quite the way that sort of thing ought to be done. Yet I simply cannot imagine writing a short story?or, God help us, a whole novel?in this fashion.

There are, however, any number of other ways for fiction writers to share the work. A few years back Donald E. Westlake and Brian Garfield decided to collaborate on a book called Gangway!, a comic thriller (Westlake's forte) set in the Old West (Garfield's milieu).

Here's Westlake's description of the process: First we sat down and discussed the whole thing at length. Then I wrote a fifteen-page outline of what we had discussed. I gave this to Brian, and he expanded it to forty pages, putting in all the historical context and everything. Then he gave it back to me and I cut it back down to twenty-five pages. At this point we were thinking screenplay, and this version was shown around as a treatment. When it didn't fly, we decided to do it as a novel first.

I wrote the first draft, limiting myself to action and dialogue?not where they were or what they were wearing, just what they did and said. My draft ran about thirty thousand words. I gave it to Brian and he doubled it, turning each of my pages into two pages, putting in all the background and such. Then he gave me his sixty-thousand-word version and I edited it, and I gave it back to him and he edited it, and then we gave the whole mess to an editor.

It sounds, I ventured, like five times as much work as sitting down and writing a book.

Yes, he agreed, and about a quarter as much fun, and for half the money.

Two writers I know collaborate frequently on short stories, discussing a plot at length before one of them sits down and writes it. Since they live three thousand miles apart, one or the other of them does the actual writing unassisted. Even so, the leading profitmaker on many of their joint ventures is Ma Bell.

Years ago, I wrote some novels in collaboration, including three with Don Westlake and one with Hal Dresner, who has since gone on to write screenplays. At that time we were all earning a curious living writing softcore sex novels, a medium that lent itself tolerably well to the collaborative process.

These collaborations could hardly have been simpler. There was no prior discussion of plot, no careful development of outline. One of us sat down and wrote a first chapter and gave it to the other, who wrote a second chapter and gave it back. The book loped along in this fashion until ten chapters had been written and it had come, as all things do, to an end.

It was all great fun. Don and I tended to leave one another with impossible cliff-hangers, killing off one another's chief characters at will. Hal and I devised a La Ronde form that made sex-novel collaboration almost effortless?i.e., the viewpoint character in the first chapter had, uh, a carnal connection with someone, who went on to become the viewpoint character in the second chapter, wherein he or she got it on with the person destined to star in Chapter 3. And so on.

These collaborative experiments led in due course to the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, the Great Sex Novel Poker Game. This ill-advised venture consisted of half a dozen of us, all writers of this sort of trash and all fond at the time of nightlong poker sessions. Operating on the premise that any of us could produce a chapter in an hour or so, we met for a night of poker during which five of us sat around the table while one of us at a time went upstairs and wrote fifteen or twenty pages of The Book. By the time the night was done?or the following day, or whatever?we would each have contributed two chapters, the book would be finished, and a division of the spoils would make us all winners, even those of us who had proved unlucky at cards.

This well-laid plan went speedily agley. After five more or less successful chapters, one of our number, his brain an object-lesson in the folly of amphetamine abuse, wrote his two chapters back to back and went home. Unfortunately, his contribution turned out to be absolute gibberish, and the writer who followed him, instead of proclaiming as much, spent hours trying to write a sensible sequel to it all. The book, in short, did not turn out well. I don't remember how I did at the card table.

Since then, I've used collaboration?or the prospect of collaboration?largely as a means of avoiding work. If there's something. I really want to write, I'll probably sooner or later sit down and write it. If, on the other hand, there's something I recognize as a good idea but don't really want to mess with, I can propose it as a subject for collaboration, secure in the knowledge that I'll never have to have anything further to do with it.

We ought to collaborate on this, a friend and I will agree, and then we'll spend a jolly hour tossing