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

So I wrote a book about an ex-Green Beret, a burnt-out case turned down for employment by CIA, who just can't get it together and can't think of a reason to do anything at all, who finally winds up all by himself on an island in the Florida Keys, fishing for his meals and living a rigidly controlled life. Then somebody from Central turns up and gets him involved in an operation, but by that time the character's set and the book virtually wrote itself. (It was published as Such Men Are Dangerous, by Paul Kavanagh.)

Ideas turn up on television. I suspect television is a great source for story ideas. I'd use it more often if I could bear to watch it, but I generally can't.

I don't mean that you take what you see on television and write it down. That's called plagiarism, and it's a no-no. What you do?and you can't set out to do it, it just happens now and then?is you rewrite what you see on the screen. You improve on it, which, given the state of the art, is not by any means a Herculean task.

I probably did this several times unconsciously, but there is one time I recall when I knew just what I was doing. (Which is rare for me in any area of human endeavor.) I was watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents and there was this man who was not getting along with his wife, and he seemed to be having episodes of madness.

Ha! said I to my future ex-wife, I see how they're going to end it. He's pretending to be mad, establishing a pattern, and after he's got a mental history he'll kill that bitch he's married to, and he'll get off easily on a temporary insanity plea, while actually he's been planning it from the beginning.

Wrong. Dead wrong.

I don't remember how the silly thing ended, but I wasn't even in the ballpark. He wasn't pretending to be nuts. Maybe his wife was making him think he was nuts, or making other people think so, or something. I don't remember. Actually, I didn't pay too much attention to their ending. I was busy working out mine.

I didn't even wait for Hitch to come out at the end and explain that the criminal didn't really get away with it. I went straight to my typewriter and wrote the story my way, tagged it If This Be Madness, and sold it first shot out of the box to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I figured they deserved first crack at it. Fair is fair.

That brings up a point. I wrote that story immediately upon getting the idea. In that instance it worked out fairly well because I got the whole story in mind in the course of the program. But I've written a lot of stories that way, getting to the typewriter as soon as I have the idea, or shortly thereafter, and I've come lately to the conclusion that it's a great mistake.

One idea may carry a short story, but for the story to be at its best it should be played out in the right setting by a cast of well-realized characters. The sort of alchemy that gets place and background and characters to the right spot at the right time will occasionally take place while you're at the typewriter, and certainly some of the creativity that makes a story work will happen during the writing of it.

But I have found that, if I take a couple of days to mull a plot notion over, other ideas will spring to mind to complement what I've started out with. I'll get characters, I'll get plot complexities, I'll get whole slabs of dialogue. I may not use all of this, but I'll have it in mind so that I can sift through it all while I'm at the typewriter doing the actual writing.

My present routine lends itself to this practice admirably. I don't live anyplace, but spend my time traveling from place to place, following the sun around and endeavoring to leave a town before I'm asked to. I get up in the morning, put in a couple of hours at the typewriter, then either drive a couple hundred miles or, if I'm going to stay in the same spot another night, wander around looking at things, talking to people, and fishing. All that time with myself for company lets plots and situations develop so that they're well-formed by the time I tackle them in my morning's stint. And all those new places and new people are productive of ideas.

Ideas come out of conversation. I was in a gift shop on the North Carolina Outer Banks a couple weeks ago. The woman whose shop it was and I got into a rap about recycled jeans, which she sells a great many of at six dollars a pair. What I wondered was where they came from, and I learned that she ordered a hundred pair at a time from a firm which is one of the nation's chief suppliers of this commodity. I learned, too, that all the jeans thus supplied were just at the broken-in stage.

Now where does the company get them from? Who on earth sells jeans that have just reached the comfy stage? And what can the company pay for them if they retail at six dollars? A buck a pair?

Curious.

So