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

good story if it doesn't get into the paper. If the courthouse burns down tonight, my story had better be in tomorrow's paper. It may not be a great story, it may not have the last word on the subject, and it may not be so written as to make Hemingway eat his heart out, but it's got to be in print. Otherwise it's no good to anybody.

Any daily newspaper contains innumerable stories that might have been better if their authors could have devoted more time to them. But they do their job. Sometimes awkwardly, sometimes incompletely, and almost always imperfectly, they deliver the news while it's news.

Deadlines are considerably more elastic for the free-lance fiction writer. Often the only ones that exist are of his own making. Even when all of our writing is done entirely on speculation, it's common procedure for most of us to set little deadlines, to plan to finish a particular story by a particular date. Empires will not fall if we fail to do so. More often than not, nobody but us will know.

Of course that's generally punishment enough. Most of us who manage to function productively as free-lancers tend to be quite hard on ourselves, demanding rather more than a boss would dare to demand, and beating ourselves up whenever our grasp falls short of our reach.

Thus when we set arbitrary deadlines for ourselves, we generally work mightily to meet them. However we can usually keep a saving sense of proportion on the matter. If I've decided to finish a piece of work on Tuesday, and if that's going to be achievable only at jeopardy to the quality of the work, or the state of my health, or the considerable inconvenience of others, I'm flexible enough to extend the deadline to fit the circumstances.

When our deadlines are not arbitrary ones of our own making, and when the time for flexibility has come and gone, then it's time to Do It Anyway.

A couple of observations make this particular task a little easier. First of all, let's examine the single most paralyzing element in this sort of bind, the conviction that what one is writing is beneath contempt. How can we force ourselves to go on writing when we know that what we're writing is no damn good?

It helps me to recognize that I am by no means the best judge of my own work?especially when I've just written it. There have been times when I've thought a piece of writing was coming along very nicely, only to find out when I'd finished that there was something wrong, most often a lack of tension overall that had not been apparent page by page as I was writing it.

More often, though, it's the other way around. Writing that seems unutterably labored while it's coming out of the typewriter turns out to be perfectly adequate.

Certain experiences have even left me suspecting that how I feel about what I'm doing may be the least important variable in my fiction. Some fifteen years ago I once wrote two-thirds of an adventure novel while living in marital harmony in a New Jersey city. Then my life turned abruptly and dramatically upside down, I lived through a car wreck and a capsized marriage and other trauma the report of which I'll spare you, and some weeks later I found myself in a bed-and-breakfast in Dublin with a deadline approaching.

And so I went to work. Everything was different, including my rented typewriter and the long narrow sheets of paper they sell over there. Certainly my view of everything was different. But I did manage to realize that it was more important that the book be finished than that it be perfect, and I whacked away at it every day until it was done. The publisher accepted it without revisions and published it as Tanner's Twelve Swingers, and when I read it for the first time after its publication I couldn't determine where the break had come. There was no seam. My life had a seam in it, all right, that was a long time smoothing out, but the book was all of a piece from first page to last.

Even when the circumstances of a book's production are less dramatic, it's a rare book that doesn't have a spot of slow going in it. Once in a while I'll write something and it'll flow like water from a well all the way to the end, but more likely there'll be occasional days?and hence occasional chapters?that come like dental extractions.

Long-distance runners say that every race has a bad patch in it. Everything hurts and the whole process seems unendurable and the runner wants nothing so much as to drop out of the race. At this time, what one has to do is call upon his previous experience, recognize that what he's going through is a bad patch, and get through it with the foreknowledge that things will get better shortly.

Books have bad patches of just that sort. The important thing is to get through them, to get the words down however ill-chosen they may seem. For myself, I find more often than not that what I write on a bad day isn't demonstrably worse than what I write on a good day, though it seems so at the time. But when I'm going through a bad patch I could type Hamlet's soliloquy and deem