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

as improving one's communicative ability and increasing one's chances of publication very likely strike such a writer as irrelevant.

The rest of us want to be in print, and while the desire for publication embodies as well a desire for money and recognition, at its core is the pure and simple desire to be read. Bishop Berkeley posited that the tree falling where no human ear hears it fall makes no sound, that vibrations only constitute sound when they are heard. Similarly, most of us regard our works as silent screams unless someone somewhere hears us.

Are there real advantages to having friends and associates read one's work? And whom can one best press into service in this capacity? And what attention ought one to pay to the response one receives?

In my own case, I only rarely show unfinished work. More often I'll wait until I've completed a story or a novel before handing it around. I then tend to select as readers persons who have liked my work in the past, and who strike me as apt to like this present piece of writing in particular.

I suspect I do this because what I really want is praise and adoration. Most of us claim that what we want is criticism, and most of us, I'm afraid, are terrible liars. While I may claim to want criticism, and while I may indeed be grudgingly grateful for advice on how to improve something I've written, I no more want criticism than does the proud parent holding up an infant for one's inspection. When I show you my child, the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, don't tell me the little bleeder's head's too big. Tell me rather that he's the most beautiful baby who ever drew breath, with the wisdom of Solomon shining in his unfocused eyes, and I'll love you and treasure you as a sage.

The need for praise, or at least for enthusiastic acceptance of one's work, is quite real for many of us. Writers, after all, work very much in a vacuum. A nightclub comic knows how he's going over; his audience laughs or doesn't laugh, and he lives or dies, succeeds or fails, with every punch line. We don't have this kind of mechanism available to evaluate our work even as it is composed.

Those of us who are established in our profession will have our work read in due course by our agents and editors, and their professional opinions are enormously valuable, but there is a special value, too, in the specifically less professional opinions of trusted friends. Those of us who submit our efforts over the transom can wait months for nothing more responsive than a form rejection slip or a stock letter explaining that Your present effort does not meet our needs.

Most of us have big egos to begin with. We have to in order to sit down and make up stories in the expectation that other people will want to read them. But at the same time we are generally insecure about our work. We need to be reassured, and this need doesn't seem to wane in the presence of critical and commercial success.

When I attempt something different from my usual work, I require someone's assurance that I haven't struck out in the wrong direction or bitten off beyond my masticatory capacity. Conversely, when I write a new volume in an established series, I need to be persuaded that I have not fallen off from my previous standards, that I have not merely repeated myself, that I have not lost the touch, and that the world will not gaze upon my work and yawn.

The most useful readers of my work are those people who give me something beyond this praise and reassurance. They may call to my attention weaknesses which I can then attend to. They may spot errors of fact which, uncorrected, might damage my credibility in an editor's eyes. They can tell me whether a particular scene works as I'd hoped it would, whether they found a particular character sympathetic or noxious, whether a surprise development in my fiction struck them as insufficiently foreshadowed or altogether too obvious.

In The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza there were three surprise elements at the end, two of them having to do with the discovery of the murderer. Of the book's several readers, almost everyone anticipated one or another of these developments, while no one saw all three of them coming. I found this reassuring.

When an editor at Savvy found the ending of a short story of mine ambiguous, I went to a friend who had read the story. She had noted this ambiguity, although she'd not much objected to it; her perspective helped me see that the editor's objection was not unwarranted, and I was able to revise the ending accordingly.

Some years ago, I dashed off an erotic novel with the intention of publishing it pseudonymously as a paperback original. There were things I liked about it, and I began urging it upon friends for a reading. They were all so enthusiastic about it that I withdrew it from the paperback house and submitted it to hardcover publishers, the second of whom elected to publish it as Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man. There's no whirlwind ending to this story?the publisher did not promote the book effectively, the critics did not pay it