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

4. DO YOUR FIRST DRAFT IN YOUR MIND. I've written a lot of things, from short stories to full-length novels, without knowing where the hell I was going. Sometimes I've begun a short story without knowing anything more about it than the first paragraph. This sometimes works out fairly well, but it's no way to produce finished copy.

Lately I find that the time to rush to the typewriter is not at the moment of inspiration but the following morning, or perhaps the morning after that. In the meantime I'll play the story idea through my mind any number of times, and I'll have one or two nights to sleep on it. I may even dream about it, as a happy alternative to my usual dream about being naked at the Annual Bake Sale of the Jamestown (N.D.) Grange. By the time I actually get around to writing it, I'll know a whole lot more about it than I knew at the beginning, so that what comes out of my typewriter isn't really a first draft at all. It's a second or third draft and it's a lot less likely to need revision.

5. DON'T GO OVERBOARD. This last point is a necessary counterbalance to the preceding four. Don't go crazy striving to avoid the need for revision. Don't be so intent on getting it right the first time that you never do get the first draft written. Don't back and fill so many times that the manuscript ceases to get longer and merely gets older. Don't be so intent on getting the story right in your mind that you never get around to writing it at all. Don't read your stuff over and over to the point where you're all bound up in what you've done and can't think about what you're going to do.

In other words, moderation. Moderation in all things, including moderation.

When Stanley Ellin was writing short stories almost exclusively, he was almost compulsive about rewriting. And he liked to do it as he went along. He couldn't move on to page two until page one was perfect. Once, he recalls, he rewrote page one upwards of forty times before moving on to page two. And so on, page by page, through the story.

Now that's madness. But so are most of our approaches to rewriting?or, for that matter, to writing itself. If we weren't at least a little bit mad we'd probably have found our way into a saner line of work altogether. In the final analysis, my suggestions for avoiding revision are just suggestions, and I offer them only because they work for me, just as other approaches may prove more useful for other writers.

One thing, though. I'd hate to have to tell you how many times I've washed the particular piece of garbage you've just finished-.

CHAPTER 20

On Being Read

SOME YEARS ago, when we were both comfortably ensconced at a small midwestern college, he presumably teaching and I presumably studying, Judson Jerome declared that there were two varieties of undergraduate writers to be found upon a college campus. The first sort, he explained, grew a beard and cultivated an intense scowl and told everyone who asked (and almost everyone who didn't) that he was a writer?but never went so far as to write anything.

The other sort, he went on, was apt to dash off any number of fitful little poems and rush about pressing them upon people like urine specimens, crying out, Look at this! It is a part of me!

I had, as I recall, a foot in both camps. I did have a beard and a scowl, both of which were destined to endure for twenty years, and I certainly told the world that I intended to be a writer when I grew up. But at the same time I also wrote a great deal, fitful poems and feckless short stories and whatever else recommended itself to me, and I did indeed force these schoolboy efforts on my friends, my mentors, and indeed virtually anyone who had not yet learned to duck out of sight when he saw me coming.

The beard's gone, and the scowl's a seldom thing. I don't write many short stories these days and I haven't perpetrated a poem in donkey's years.

But some things don't change. I still want very much to be read. Not merely by the reading public, upon whose reception of my work my income and professional standing ultimately depend, but as well by that handful of close friends to whom I still scuttle like an Antioch sophomore, urging my work upon them and demanding that they read it and report to me as soon as possible.

For a great many of us, I suspect the urge to be read is inherent in the urge to write. Some of us are exceptions, writing only for the inner satisfaction of transforming our experience into an orderly and artistically successful entity; once we've done so, it matters not a whit whether anyone ever looks upon our work and says yea or nay. God alone knows just how many such private writers exist, keeping notebooks of poetry and fiction in locked drawers, telling no one of their efforts, and leaving instructions that their work be destroyed unread upon their demise. I rather doubt that many writers of this sort are regular readers of Writer's Digest; the magazine's concentration upon such matters