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

had your self-discipline is that anyone with my self-discipline could do what I do, that a persistent chimpanzee could match me book for book if he could just sit still long enough and work the space bar with his non-opposable thumb. My ego doesn't much like to hear this sort of thing.

And yet I have to admit that there are times when I think these people are onto something. It strikes me now and then that talent may be one of the least important variables in the writing business. People without a super-abundance of talent succeed anyhow. People with tons of talent never get anywhere. It happens all the time.

And it happens, I guess, in every field of creative endeavor. For years I subscribed to the popular myth that talent will out sooner or later, that all people with genuine ability in a particular field will ultimately achieve success in that field. I'll tell you, you'd be better off believing in the tooth fairy. All over America there are singers and actors and painters and composers and sculptors and, yes, writers, blessed with a sufficiency of talent but born, as Thomas G. would put it, to blush unseen, and waste their sweetness on the desert air.

If talent's not the answer, what else does it take? Why do some of us succeed while others do not? Is it just a matter of luck?

I'll tell you this much. Luck doesn't hurt. And simple luck has a great deal to do with the fate of an individual submission. When you mail off a story to a magazine, elements that have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of that story will play a part in determining whether or not it sells. The editor's mood when he reads it is a factor, and one you have no way of controlling. The state of the magazine's inventory is another. Competition being what it is, I'd go so far as to say that every time you manage to sell an unsolicited submission to a magazine, you've been lucky.

But I also think that luck tends to average out over a period of time. The writer who sells his first story to the first editor who sees it is a lucky writer indeed, but that first sale provides no guarantee of a second sale. Luck runs hot and cold, and nobody's lucky all the time.

Ê

What does it take, then, to be successful at free-lance writing? What, besides talent and luck, helps determine who makes it and who doesn't?

It seems to me that will is enormously important. There are any number of jobs a person can pretty much fall into, but I don't believe writing is one of them. Every once in a while somebody does become a writer apparently by accident, but such persons rarely remain writers for very long. In order to get into this business and in order to stay in it, you generally have to desire it with a passion bordering on desperation.

And the intensity of that desire doesn't seem to have anything to do with talent. A couple of summers ago I taught a seven-day seminar at Antioch College. One of my students was head and shoulders above the others. She was a middle-aged woman who had spent all her life on a farm, raising children and helping her husband with the farmwork, and she had as good an eye and ear for rural settings as I've yet encountered. Her prose was clear and clean, her dialogue was excellent, and her stories and sketches absolutely sparkled. It was immediately evident to me that she was the one person in the seminar who had more than enough ability to succeed as a professional writer.

She also had something to write about. She knew that she wanted to write fiction that derived from what she knew?life in the rural midwest. Some of us know that we want to be writers without having the faintest idea what we shall write about?I was certainly in that category?but this woman had no problems on that score.

What she did want was reassurance. Could I assure her that her prospects were good? Could I tell her it was not unrealistic to hope to make sales writing the sort of stories she had in mind? Because if such expectations were unwarranted, she explained, then she didn't want to go on wasting her time writing.

I spent quite a bit of time telling her how good she was, but even as I did so I wondered if perhaps I was wasting my time. Oh, she had the talent, all right. And there were any number of ways in which she could ultimately exploit her background and turn it into successful and commercially viable fiction. But her question suggested to me that she would never achieve her goal because she didn't want it badly enough.

Because for almost everyone the road to writing success goes through some very rocky territory indeed. If she was that worried in advance that the time she spent writing might turn out to have been wasted, how could one expect her to rise above the inevitable rejections and disappointments that just plain come with the territory?

Perhaps I should not even have encouraged her. There's an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote