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

You don't have to be a great success to find yourself on the same raft, or up the same creek, or whatever. Some years ago I first became aware of the way this particular dynamic was operating in my own life. I had begun writing early, dropped out of college (albeit at the dean's suggestion) to practice my own profession, and but for a year's interval in the mid-sixties never did anything but write for a living. My pre-writing past hadn't amounted to much in the first place, and every year's passage made it that much more remote. As time went by, my circle of friends tended to be composed more and more of other writers, agents, publishers, and sundry persons in the industry. While one could not ask for a warmer, brighter or more interesting group of people, and while the shop talk of such a circle is something I have come to regard as indispensable, this represented yet another way in which the raft was shrinking.

The effect of this shrinkage of the past was less dramatically evident in my own case because my work has never derived directly and obviously from my experience. Some writers, like Thomas Wolfe, produce their novels by fictionalizing their own lives. Others can do their best writing only when they concentrate on a particular subject; James Jones, who only wrote at the top of his form when dealing with World War II, comes quickest to mind.

While most of my work, like all valid fiction, is in one way or another a distillate of my experience, I have rarely drawn directly from life. Still, I could see a pattern in the making. One way or another, I was running out of things to write about.

I was throughout these years a highly productive writer?burning the raft at both ends, if you will?and I was a fulltime writer, unable to draw input from a job situation. Yet I suspect parttime writers and weekend writers face very much the same dilemma. The office worker, after all, goes every day to the same office, performs essentially the same tasks, interacts with the same people, and very likely travels to and from the office by the identical route day after day. Even if the job itself is interesting?even if it's fascinating?it can provide limited input at best for future writing.

Looking back, I don't recall making any specific attempt to create additional input. As it happened, I wound up doing the right things?or some of them, anyway?for the wrong reasons.

Like many people who wind up writing, I've always tended to be interested in a great many things. I'm given to intense if short-lived enthusiasms, taking up hobbies and areas of interest with a passion, reading everything I can get my hands on about them, pursuing them relentlessly for three months or so, then shelving them and moving on to something else. I used to regard this fickleness as a character defect, but have come instead to view it as a useful aspect of my personality in that it has enabled me to learn a fair amount about a curious mix of subjects.

This tendency, combined with general dissatisfaction with my living situation at the time, led me to wander down various paths during the hours I spent away from my typewriter. One example should suffice. Nine years ago I had the temerity to open an art gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania. To say that it was less than a commercial success is vastly to understate the case. Mine was a veritable Titanic of art galleries. Nor was the business of running it the exhilarating experience I'd hoped it might be. On weekends it was so mobbed with tourists and their small destructive children that customers couldn't have bought anything if they'd wanted to?which none of them did. And on weekdays it was deserted; you could shoot deer in the place.

All of this notwithstanding, owning and operating the art gallery was of enormous direct benefit to me as a writer. During the single year of its existence, I met innumerable people in New Hope. My circle of acquaintances included artists, tradespersons, tourists, hippies, freaks, druggies, and assorted area residents. I learned quite a bit about both the artistic and the commercial sides of painting. I learned a lot, too, about the manner in which potential customers responded to art. While I certainly can't say I learned to paint, I did turn out some geometrical abstracts, if only to have something to do on deer-shooting afternoons. In this fashion I learned something of what it's like to be a painter, and when some of my efforts actually sold, I learned again that anything's possible in this universe, and that Barnum was right.

The most obvious result of my year as an art dealer manquŽ was a long novel set in New Hope and drawn almost entirely upon my experiences and observations. Understand please that I had no intention of writing such a book when I opened the gallery. I was not doing research. I was pursuing another end entirely, but my year's experience turned out after the fact to be input for a novel.

But it amounted to much more than that. Long after the novel has vanished from print, my whole frame of reference remains changed and enriched by my experience. Aspects of