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

constitute a sufficient improvement, so that I'll go ahead and write a story of my own.

I've come up with other plots by trying to figure out the endings to somebody else's stories. Television is handy for this sort of thing, and the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents program was ideal. Every once in a while I'd see the trick ending halfway through?but some of the time I was wrong, and my version was completely different from what the writer of the teleplay had come up with. A couple of times I sat down and wrote out my version, since it amounted to a completely different story from what I'd seen.

I have known some authors who, when stuck for an idea, will specifically set out to steal a story. I used to know a science-fiction writer, for example, who would systematically read through back issues of S-F mags, looking to find a story that he could alter enough so that he could feel free to steal it. I've made occasional attempts at this sort of thing with crime stories, and it never seems to work out for me.

With one exception, which I guess I'll tell you about.

Twenty years ago, I read a story of Fletcher Flora's in Manhunt. The plot ran something like this: a friend of the narrator's had been arrested for committing a series of homicides, having strangled half a dozen young women with identical shoelaces. (He used identical shoelaces to strangle various young women, that is. He didn't seek out women wearing a particular variety of shoelace and wring their necks. Just wanted to clear that up.)

The narrator visits his friend in jail, sees that the case against him is over-powering, then returns home where there's another shoelace that he found in the friend's closet. Not only does he not turn this evidence over to the cops, but, with his friend safely alibied by being in prison, he goes off to use that shoelace to commit murder, all as a way of freeing his friend.

For twenty years I had a yen to steal that story. I guess there was something I really liked about it, but what the hell, Fletcher Flora wrote it first, so I didn't do anything about it. But often when I was stuck for a plot the idea would come to mind and I would put it regretfully aside.

Then, a little less than two years ago, I happened to reread the story in an old copy of Manhunt. And I began to play with the plot idea, trying to find a way to change it enough so that I would feel sanguine about stealing it.

I changed the shoelace to a necktie, which didn't amount to much of a change. Then I made the man in jail not a multiple murderer but a rejected suitor who strangled his former fiancŽe with his old school tie. I had his mother seek the help of a criminal lawyer I invented for the occasion, a very unusual lawyer who collected fees only when he succeeded in winning his clients' freedom.

And I made the lawyer a criminal?i.e., I had him, operating offstage and inferentially, fly over to England to purchase a batch of ties identical to the murder weapon and then commence strangling a slew of women similar in appearance to the original victim, so as to transform her death from a motivated murder to the first episode in a multiple homicide.

By the time I was finished, I don't know that Fletcher Flora himself would have spotted the theft. And the little lawyer?I named him Martin H. Ehrengraf?emerged as a sufficiently compelling character to appear in half a dozen stories to date. The series has been running in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine over the months and I've greatly enjoyed writing the stories.

And Fred Dannay, editor of EQMM, commented that my man Ehrengraf had obviously derived from Randolph Mason, the creation of pulp writer Melville Davisson Post. Mason, you see, was a lawyer who used criminal methods to get his clients off the hook. Fred didn't think I was stealing from Post, but that Ehrengraf had obviously been inspired by Randolph Mason.

Well, I'll tell you a secret. I never heard of Randolph Mason, never read any of those stories. If I had, I'd probably never have dared come up with Ehrengraf. Interesting, don't you think? Because Ehrengraf grew out of creative plagiarism, but not the creative plagiarism people have assumed.

Some notes, finally, on what does not constitute creative plagiarism. It's not CP to steal an element from each of half a dozen stories, put them all together and pass them off as your work. It's not CP to turn a western into a piece of science fiction, or a Shakespearean play into a modern story, if you do no more than change the costumes and external trappings. (West Side Story is CP, for example, but in a recent short-story contest I judged there were three or four S-F versions of western gunfights, with the principals riding blue dragons and drawing blasters, and they were all just awful.)

Finally, it's not creative plagiarism when you're writing non-fiction. In fact, it's not plagiarism at all.

They call it research.

CHAPTER 23

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

IN THE past fifteen years I have established two incontrovertible if unrelated facts. One: glass-topped coffee tables can really hurt your shins if you're not careful. Two: admit you're a writer and someone will immediately ask you a foolish question.