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

go to. That structured his days somewhat, but it didn't really help because he couldn't take the solitude. He gave up the hotel room and rented space in an office so that there would be other people working around him. He enjoyed that more but it cut into his productivity because he preferred interacting with the other people to concentrating on his own work. He stopped freelancing and got a job, and he's been gainfully employed ever since. He's published books now and then, writing them at night and on weekends, and periodically he tells me how much he hates his job and how he longs to quit it and write fulltime, but that's nonsense. He'd go nuts without a job to go to.

Even if you're the sort who finds solitude comfortable, I think it's very important for writers to make sure they have sufficient human contact when they're not working to compensate for the lack thereof during their working hours. We can't be alone all the time, nor can we expect our families to fill our needs in this area. The isolated writer loses touch with the world. He forgets what people are like. He uses up his writing source material and fails to replenish it.

In my own case, I've found that I need the occasional company of other writers. There are things about writing which people who are not in the business simply cannot share. The company of my fellows is stimulating. There's a certain amount of cross-pollination in such social intercourse, and a few hours in another writer's company serve to reinforce my own perception of myself as a writer.

At the same time, I definitely require the company of people who are not writers. An exclusive diet of shop talk is an unbalanced one. Besides, one wants to be occasionally exposed to reality, if only in small doses. As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, People who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange.

And that's the final requisite of the writer's temperament. We're every last one of us a little strange, a wee bit different.

And vive la difference.

PART TWO

Nose to the Grindstone, Shoulder to the Wheel:

Fiction as a Discipline

CHAPTER 13

Writer's Hours

I'VE FOUND over the years that the mechanics of writing appear to be endlessly fascinating to writers and non-writers alike. Perhaps because the creative process is so utterly incomprehensible, even to those of us who are personally involved in it, it is easier for us to focus on more tangible aspects of writing. Do we write in the morning or at night? At the typewriter or in pencil?or with a crayon, for those of us who are not allowed to use anything sharp? Do we outline in advance or plot things out as we go along?

Somewhere in the course of this sort of conversation, one is apt to be asked just how many hours a day he tends to put in. The answer, whether it's two or twelve hours a day, is apt to be followed by a qualification. Of course that's just time spent actually writing. Of course that doesn't include the time I devote to research. Of course, that doesn't include the time I devote to research. Of course, when you come right down to it, a writer is working from the instant the alarm clock goes off to the moment when he goes to bed. For that matter, the process doesn't stop when I'm asleep. The old subconscious mind takes over then and sifts things around and sets the stage for the next day's work. So I guess it's safe to say that I actually practice my craft twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

I suppose most of us deliver some variation of that speech at some time or other, and I suppose some of the time we even believe it. A certain part of me, however, does not buy this load of pap for a minute. As far as that stern writer's conscience of mine is concerned, I'm only really working if I'm sitting at my desk tapping my typewriter keys and turning out pages of finished copy. Thinking about writing isn't work, and research isn't work, and reading proof isn't work, and meeting with publishers isn't work, and talking on the phone isn't work, and not even rewriting and editing are work. Unless I can actually see a manuscript of mine getting further from the beginning and closer to the end because of what I'm doing, I'm not entirely capable of regarding the task I'm performing as work.

Understand, please, that I know better. I realize intellectually that the non-writing chores I've enumerated above are directly related to my profession, that they take time and energy, that I can't slight them without adversely affecting the quality and/or quantity of my writing. But this knowledge doesn't seem to help me much. Unless I've put in my daily stint at the typewriter, and unless I've got something to show for it, I feel as though I've played hookey.

This attitude probably serves a purpose. My mind is sufficiently fertile that I can almost always dream up some worthwhile occupation which will keep me away from my desk. There's always a book it would pay me to read, a neighborhood I could profitably explore, a person