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

we talked, and I said maybe I'd write a story about an agent of the firm murdering young people for their jeans, and we laughed over that, and I went on my way. Now here's a good argument in favor of giving an idea time to develop. If I'd written the story right away it would have been thin, and there was also the fact that it's hardly worth murdering someone for jeans that will retail for six dollars. But by the time the story got written, the jeans-recycling operation was just a sideline for the company; their major business, you see, is the manufacture of dog food.

Well, I might not sell that one. It's a little grisly. But I like it.

When I lived in New Jersey, my neighbor's father ran the local animal shelter. They had an incinerator for disposal of dead animals, and my neighbor told me how a couple of local cops were eyeing the machine longingly. That dope peddler we can never make anything stick on, one said. Just pop him in there one night and there's nothing left but a little envelope of ashes, and nobody'd ever know, would they?

And, said my friend, they were dead serious.

I almost turned that into a story but it was missing something so I forgot about it. Quite a while later my friend's dad had to close the outdoor animal compound where he kept farm animals penned up for kids to feed and play with. For the nth time, vandals had come over the fence at night and slaughtered animals for the thrill of it. So he closed up.

And now I had a story. In my story, the operator of the shelter traps a kid who has slaughtered a sheep, gives him a tour of the place, then pops him in the incinerator and cooks him. Hitchcock's magazine published it as The Gentle Way and Al Hubin selected it for Best Detective Stories of 1975, and neither plot component would have been worth dust without the other.

Ideas, ideas, ideas. An idea doesn't do you much good if it's not right for you, however good it may be in and of itself. The idea of casting Dashiell Hammett as the detective in a period murder mystery is nothing less than brilliant, but how many people besides Joe Gores, himself a San Franciscan and ex-private eye, could have begun to do the book justice? (It doesn't hurt a bit either that Joe writes like a dream.) Why, if I'd had that idea I'd have given it away?or more likely simply forgotten about it.

On the other hand, when Brian Garfield told me a book idea of his some time ago I had an overwhelming urge to knock him over the head, lock him in a closet, and not let him out until I'd stolen his idea and written the book. But I suppressed the urge and Brian wrote the book and decided he'd call it Death Wish.

I should have locked him in that closet. Where did he ever get that idea, anyway?

Ê

Brian got the idea one night when he found his convertible top slashed; he turned his own righteous rage into the raw material of fiction. This chapter, I might add, was my first piece for Writer's Digest, written somewhere in the Carolinas. About a year later I sat down with John Brady and proposed a column on fiction. Meanwhile, A Pair of Recycled Jeans did sell to a magazine and was in due course anthologized.

PART THREE

Oh, What a Tangled Web:

Fiction as a Structure

CHAPTER 24

Opening Remarks

ANYONE WHO starves in this country deserves it.

Relax. The above is not this author's sociopolitical opinion. It is, rather, the opening sentence of the first short story of mine to see print, published in Manhunt just a year or two after Grant took Richmond. The story wasn't a bad one, but no one could call it the greatest ever told. I suspect its opening lines had a great deal to do with its acceptance for publication.

Well, openings are always important. Writers of non-fiction are well aware of the importance of getting things off to a good start. In a straight news story, the lead is literally everything, embodying in a sentence or two the who-what-where-when-why-how of it all. In a magazine article the lead is no less vital, although there may be less urgency about jamming all the facts at the reader right off the bat. In any event, the lead has the job of catching the reader's attention, involving him in the story, and establishing that the paragraphs to follow will be sufficiently useful and interesting to warrant his reading them.

Short stories and novels have leads, too, and their openings perform much the same functions. It's said that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and that old bromide is as valid in fiction as it is in life itself. And, in fact as in fiction, a good first impression is essential.

I think this is even more the case for the beginner than for the established professional. When an old pro submits a story, the editor who reads it knows who wrote it. It's brand-name merchandise. Even if the first paragraph's a wee bit blah, the editor knows the story's likely to get better as it goes along. He may well wind up rejecting it?old pros get rejected left and right, just like everybody else?but at least he'll probably read