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

it stilted and wooden. I have to discount my feelings about what I'm doing and just go on doing it.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or ten pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing?writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off, and I'll have avoided guilt and at least kept my fingers limber.

Once in a great while I do wind up tearing up the day's production, but even at those times I'll have gained by testing and working through one approach to the material. Almost all the time, though, what I write (and loathe) one day looks just fine the next. I may not love it, but I can recognize it as adequate. Sometimes it may need slight revision. Often it can stand exactly as written.

When I'm really having trouble with a particular piece of writing, I can marshal extraordinary arguments against going on with it. Like my friend, I can tell myself that it's the wrong sort of thing for me to be writing, that my talent is not equal to the task, that I'm just beating my head against the wall, and that I ought to abandon the thing, cut my losses, and turn my talents in a more appropriate direction.

All of this is generally translatable as I-don't-wanna-write-this-thing-cuz-I'm-scared-I'll-screw-it-up. This kind of fear of failure is paralyzing, and there's no way to tell in its course whether or not it's justified. Sometimes it may be. My talent, such as it is, is certainly not equal to everything I aim it at. Now and then my reach exceeds my grasp by more than a couple of furlongs.

I can only find this out, though, if I get the thing written. I sometimes sustain myself by pitting one fear against another and reminding myself that not finishing the thing at all is far more to be dreaded than finishing it poorly. This seems to be a way I can acknowledge fear and harness it to my benefit.

As I said, sometimes the fear is justified. A couple of years ago I contracted to write a book, and once I started writing it I found myself very much at a loss. It was manifestly not my sort of book. I was uncomfortable with the kind of characters indigenous to such a book. I was at sea in the plot and unfamiliar with the sets. I regretted having had the idea for the book in the first place, and wished I'd let it wither on the vine.

But I'd signed a contract, and I'd taken an advance which I could not afford to repay, and for all I knew my fear was coloring my view of things. Perhaps I could indeed write the book. I lowered my head and charged forward, five pages a day, come hell or high water, and although I kept having one bad patch after the other, I got the thing done.

And it was not good. Let there be no mistake about it; my effort was as bad in the whole as it had looked in part. But it was done. And that, in and of itself, was better than if I'd left it unfinished.

There's even a happy ending. I was able to enlist a collaborator, adventure novelist Harold King, and turned the book over to him. Our joint effort, Code of Arms, was published by Richard Marek and is doing very nicely, thank you. The triumph I feel on its behalf is of an odd sort. There's been nothing equivocal, though, in my having seen that first draft through to completion. If I hadn't been willing to Do It Anyway, to get the thing written no matter how much I hated writing it, there would have been no book and I would have learned none of the lessons the experience provided. And that, I submit, is in itself the most important of those lessons.

CHAPTER 18

F U CN RD THS

YOU'VE PROBABLY seen the ads on buses and subways. f u cn rd ths, they proclaim, u cn gt a gd jb & mo pa. The message is as attractive as it is succinct. Who, given his druthers, wouldn't prefer a gd jb? Who, in the face of double-digit inflation, couldn't make use of mo pa?

What they're selling, of course, is instruction in Speedwriting, an alternative to shorthand employing ordinary letters and taking the form of verbal arcana of the sort quoted above. The implication is that if you can read that sort of thing you can in due course learn to write that sort of thing and to do so at such a pace as will enable you to take dictation, with ensuing improvement in your employment, your salary, and, one assumes, your posture and your love life.

Did you have a question, Rachel?

Ê

I was just wondering what all this had to do with writing, sir.

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We'll get to that, Rachel.

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Because if you're seriously suggesting that we'll be better writers by leaving out vowels and stuff?

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Don't get your vowels in an uproar, Rachel. What I'm getting at is the whole question of increasing one's writing speed. The faster we produce our books and stories, it would stand to reason, the more books and stories we'll be able to write