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

much attention, and it sold like ice in the winter, but the point is a simple one; but for the reactions of my friends, I would never have thought to publish it in hardcover under my own name in the first place.

Other writers make the best audience, and most of the friends to whom I show my work are either writers themselves or at least peripherally involved with the business of writing. As such, they're better equipped to appreciate matters of technique, and I'm more inclined to value their reactions. I'm similarly concerned to have the reactions of non-writer friends, whose opinions are at least as important; after all, the mass of one's audience consists of non-writers. But I'm more likely to wait and let them read the work after it's published.

Sometimes I think the main function of writer's clubs is to provide unestablished writers with a peer audience for their work. People commonly organize themselves into such groups with the expectation that the criticisms they receive from one another will have a salutary effect upon their writing, and sometimes this may be true. But I suspect it's more important to have a fellow writer read your work than that he say anything particularly incisive about it.

Something even more useful, incidentally, is not what one learns from another's reaction so much as what one perceives by noting the strengths and weaknesses in the other's work. It is easier to detect the mote in a fellow's eye than the beam in one's own, as I am scarcely the first person to point out, and by observing what does and does not work in a friend's story, I have often been able to sharpen my own technical skills.

A couple of suggestions:

1. DON'T LEAD WITH YOUR CHIN. Some people are going to have a vested interest in tearing your work apart. For one reason or another, they are not going to like what you write and are going to delight in telling you so. That's their problem. If you persist in showing your work to them, you make it your problem.

2. DON'T SHOW UNFINISHED WORK. If you can avoid it, don't make people read work in progress. Especially avoid doing this if the work is going along well. You merely give yourself an excuse to interrupt your progress on the work, and you risk throwing yourself off-stride.

3. IF YOU DO SHOW UNFINISHED WORK, BE CAREFUL. Sometimes my insecurity about a novel is sufficient to make me break Rule # 2. If I'm paralyzed by self-doubt, a quick reading and a reassuring word can loosen me up and enable me to continue. When this is the case, I try not to take chances. I try to pick someone who's reasonably sure to like the thing and unlikely to express serious reservations even if he has them?unless there's something so inescapably wrong that it cannot be overlooked, in which case I'm probably better off knowing about it then and there.

4. DON'T KILL THE MESSENGER. The genuinely useful reader supplies something beyond simple praise. He furnishes an honest response. While he is presumably sympathetic, and favorably inclined toward your work generally, he is not going to be uniformly and unequivocally nuts about everything you write. Sometimes his reaction will be lukewarm. Sometimes it'll be downright chilly. And, because nobody's perfect, he may dislike something of yours not because of its intrinsic worthlessness but because it's just not his kind of thing, or because he read it on a bad day.

Don't react by hating him, or deciding he wouldn't know a good story if it bit him, or suggesting an anatomically impossible course of action he might profitably pursue. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. If you don't want the peaches, leave off shaking the tree. And if you can't bear disapproval, keep the stuff in a locked drawer.

CHAPTER 21

Burning the Raft at Both Ends

IMAGINE, IF you will, a chap adrift upon a huge wooden raft in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In order to keep from freezing to death, he periodically chops off chunks of the raft and burns them for warmth. As the days pass, the raft grows smaller.

Sooner or later, this guy's gonna have a problem.

I submit that we writers are in much the same situation. For each of us, the capacious raft is the background and life experience we bring to our writing, and we burn up pieces of it every time we roll a fresh sheet of paper under our typewriter platen. We consume our past in order to fuel our writing. Day by day, the raft shrinks.

Sooner or later, we're treading water.

This is a common problem, very nearly a universal one, for writers of fiction. Interestingly, its effect is particularly noticeable upon the most successful practitioners of our profession. It has been said for several generations now that success in America is frequently devastating, and devastation of one sort or another is commonplace for successful American writers. Even if one (to prolong the nautical metaphor) steers one's ship between the Scylla of alcoholism and the Charybdis of suicide, the successful author is left with the very real prospect of running out of things to write about, of writing more and more about less and less. Increasingly isolated by his success, both from his own past and the world around him, the writer has an audience