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

the people I met during that year have taken shape as characters in any number of other books. In short, my experiences added new planks to that tedious metaphorical raft I sail on.

Since then my life has taken innumerable curious twists and turns, and sometimes it has seemed to me that my circuits have been so overloaded with input that I might blow a fuse at any moment. For the past couple of year, however, I've lived in the same place and with the same person?and, I God willing, both my landlord and my consort will pick up my option for the foreseeable future.

This stability has not diminished my writing input, perhaps because I've found a few ways to increase the flow. They work for me, and I suspect they'd work as well for anyone.

Here are some of them:

1. STAY OUT OF RUTS. Easy as it is to get into a rut, it's by no means inevitable, and I think it's worthwhile to make a deliberate effort to avoid ruts. There's a place eight blocks from my house that I walk to at least once a day, and I make it a point not to follow the same route every time. In fact, whenever I have to get from one place to another, I deliberately select an unfamiliar route, even if it takes me a slight distance out of my way.

May I urge you to reread Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken? I always try, both literally and metaphorically, to take the road less traveled by?and have found it makes all the difference.

2. LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING. Some routes are ruts because we stop paying attention; overfamiliarity keeps us from noticing even those things we haven't noticed before. I've found that if I keep myself open to new experience, if I use my senses, I walk every path as if for the first time and invariably see something I've never seen previously.

3. DON'T STOP LEARNING. Recently I've noticed that I seem to respond to architecture in a way I never have in the past. I find myself paying attention to the shapes of buildings and various architectural details. I deliberately fueled this interest by picking up a copy of The City Observed, Paul Goldberger's enchanting guide to the architecture of Manhattan, and before long found myself looking around me with sharper and more knowledgeable eyes. The book has changed my way of seeing my surroundings, so much so that I've decided to continue the process by taking a course at the New School on New York architecture.

And how will that course benefit my writing? Most importantly, by changing my way of seeing, by enlarging and enhancing my perspective. Perhaps my increased awareness will be reflected in what I write. Perhaps something I learn will lead directly to a plot or a scene or the development of a character. Perhaps, serendipity being what it is, I'll meet someone else taking the course, or at the water fountain in the corridor, who will tell me something which will serve to springboard a future novel. I don't know how the course will benefit my writing, and I don't have to know, because input is a different thing altogether from research. The latter looks for answers where the former isn't even aware of questions.

4. HANG OUT. Art Spikol, Writer's Digest's non-fiction columnist, raised a few eyebrows a while back by telling housewives to try hanging out in bars as a means of augmenting input. For my own part, I found over the years that the time I spent in saloons tended to decrease input by shutting me off from the world around me, but I think Art's general point is well taken. I can't be certain that anything's going to come along to broaden the base of my experience if I spend a few hours riding around in the squad car with my cop friend, or go sit on a bench in St. Vincent's emergency room, or rub elbows with the drug dealers and three-card-monte hustlers in Washington Square, or take in the scene at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. But I can be fairly sure nothing much is going to happen if I stay home and watch reruns of I Love Lucy.

Travel's broadening. I try to keep the fresh-eyed awareness of the traveler, not only when I'm out of town but when I walk the familiar streets of my own neighborhood. The rafts we all float upon need never be consumed. We can burn their planks for fuel indefinitely, secure in the knowledge that new boards will replace them. The possibility for experiential input is infinite?as long as we remain open to it.

CHAPTER 22

Creative Plagiarism

SOME MONTHS ago I got a call from a writer friend of mine, whom I'll call Brian Garfield. He mentioned that he'd recently read a novelette of mine in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and that he thought it was a nice piece of work. It will very likely not surprise you to learn that this news pleased me greatly.

What he said next was faintly unsettling, however. I liked it so much, quoth he, that I managed to figure out a way to steal it.

Steal it? said I. Steal it?

Oh, it's a legitimate sort of theft, he assured me. You'll see what I mean when it comes out.

I countered by quoting Oscar Levant. ÔImitation,' I pointed out, Ôis the sincerest form of plagiarism.'

Couldn't agree with you more,