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

I avoid glass-topped coffee tables insofar as possible, and for a time I stopped admitting I was a writer, generally attempting to pass myself off as a gentleman jewel thief. I stopped this when I found that the questions they ask jewel thieves are even more unsettling than those they ask writers.

Questions, questions, questions! Have I read anything you've written? I wouldn't know, sir. I'm a writer, not a mentalist. Have you had anything published? Why, no, madam. As I've told you, I've been doing this for fifteen years, and have written somewhere in excess (oh, wretched excess!) of a hundred books. And not a one of them published, madam. I am a compulsive masochist, you see, and I live in the woods upon roots and berries. How long does it take to write a book? Long enough to get from the beginning, sir, to the end. Like Mr. Lincoln's legs, don't you know.

Say, where do you get your ideas?

Indeed.

There, to be sure, is the rub. Because for all the banality of the question, it is one every writer asks himself often enough, one which ought to be answerable, and one which evidently is not. The writer clearly requires ideas. Precious little gets written without them. In many types of writing, once a certain level of professional competence is granted, it is the strength or weakness of the idea itself which determines the success or failure of the finished piece of work. It is this absolute need for ideas which one generates onself that makes the process of literary creation wholly incomprehensible to a great many people not engaged in it. The writer is not buying widgets from Mr. A and selling them to Mr. B. He is making something out of nothing, out of thin air. He is getting ideas, and it would seem to follow that he must be getting them somewhere.

But where?

Or, more important for our purposes, how?

Because every writer knows what it's like when the mind is as fertile as a field of Illinois bottomland, with ideas sprouting at every turn. And sooner or later every writer knows the other side of the metaphor, wherein he languishes in a vast Dust Bowl of the mind, barely able to type his name at the top of the page. I've been rich and I've been poor, Sophie Tucker said, and believe me, rich is better. I believe her, and you may believe me that ideas are better than mental stagnation.

Where does one get one's ideas? I had a friend once who told askers of this particular question that there was a magazine published twice a month called The Idea Book, or some such nonsense. It's loaded with excellent plot ideas, he said. I have a subscription, of course, and as soon as I get my copy I write in and select half a dozen ideas and get clearance on them, so that no other subscriber will go ahead and write them. Then I just work up stories around those ideas and Bob's your uncle.

An encouraging number of oafs bought this premise, and of course they all wanted to subscribe to the magazine. You have to be a professional writer, my friend said, dashing their hopes. Have to be a member of Author's League and have a dozen sales to your credit. But keep plugging away by all means.

Enough. Let us address ourselves to fundamentals. Obviously, a substantial number of ideas spring from the subconscious, lodged there by means of various phenomena from the trauma of birth onward (or back into the collective unconscious of the race, if your outlook is Jungian), and liberated therefrom and directed along creative lines by other processes impossible to understand.

I submit, though, that enough ideas turn up in less abstruse ways, and that a look at them might help us to encourage the development of ideas.

So where do I get mine?

Bits of fact can fit together. Almost all of the successful fiction writers I know share a tendency to retain odd scraps of data to no apparent purpose. Sometimes these orts prove useful, sometimes they do not. I know, for example, that in 1938 the state of Wyoming produced one-third of a pound of dry edible beans for every man, woman and child in the nation. I should be roundly surprised if I should ever build a story around this nugget of information.

But perhaps a dozen years ago I read an item in one of the newsmagazines about a handful of people in the world who seemed to exist without sleep. I digested this item, and went on to study a bit about sleep, and then I set it aside. Shortly thereafter I was reading about the British House of Stuart in the encyclopedia and learned that there was still a Stuart pretender to the English throne, though he certainly didn't work at it very hard. Happily enough, he seemed to be a Bavarian. I now had the notion of a permanent insomniac with a madcap scheme to restore the House of Stuart, and that didn't add up to a story, either, so after some more speculation on the sort of life a sleepless man would lead, I found other things to think about.

Two years later I spent an evening doing some moderately serious drinking with a numismatic journalist who had recently returned from Turkey, where he'd spent a couple years earning a very precarious living smuggling