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

it did improve the book immeasurably. By beginning with Chapter 2, I opened the book with things already going on. There was action. There was movement. There was tension and suspense. The reader had no idea who Ed London was or why this young lady was wrapped up in her Bokhara like cheese in a blintz, but the reader had plenty of time to learn this later on. After he'd been hooked.

I'll tell you something. As far as writing is concerned, I've learned a tremendous amount from reading what other people have done. And I've learned quite a bit from my own work. But over the years I've rarely been told anything about writing techniques that has done me much good. The outstanding exception is this one precept, which I'm going to say again to lessen your chance of forgetting it.

Don't begin at the beginning.

In the suspense novels I've written since I saw the light, I've followed that advice far more often than not. At the risk of doing an And Then I Wrote number, let me page through some books to give you an idea of how all of this has worked out in practice.

After the First Death concerns a college professor who is sentenced to a life term for murdering a prostitute during an alcoholic blackout. He goes to prison, his wife divorces him, and after a couple of years he gets released on the grounds that his confession was improperly obtained. He returns to a drifting kind of life, and one morning he wakes up in a Times Square hotel room and finds he's not alone. On the floor is a hooker with her throat cut. He thinks, God, I've done it again, and bolts. Later, threads of memory return and he becomes convinced he didn't commit this crime and sets out to discover who framed him.

The book opens with him waking up in the hotel room. I think it's the most effective first chapter I've ever written.

The Girl With the Long Green Heart concerns a retired con man who's euchred into going back to his trade for one last operation. It's a caper book; the con job goes through until a wheel comes off and various people betray one another and so on. I opened the book with the lead and narrator arriving in Olean and setting the job in motion, then flashed back and said who he was and how he got there. If I were writing this book today, I'd have opened the book a little further along in the story.

I wrote seven books about a whimsical adventurer and secret agent named Evan Tanner, and every last one of them followed this pattern. Each book began with Tanner involved in some kind of tense situation, then paused to explain how he'd managed to get into such a bind, generally out of friendship or as a result of his penchant for championing lost causes.

In The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, Tanner starts out in a Turkish jail. In The Canceled Czech, he's on a train in Czechoslovakia, where he's the most non grata of personae, and a cop asks him for his papers. Two for Tanner opens with our hero suspended in a bamboo cage like some giant canary bird; he's about to be informed that they're going to lop his head off come sunrise. Tanner gets buried alive in the first chapter of Me Tanner, You Jane. He slips through the Iron Curtain in Tanner's Twelve Swingers.

In Tanner's Tiger he's prohibited from entering Canada. And in Here Comes a Hero-

Enough. You get the idea. Sometimes I've simply opened with a chapter with Tanner in a tight spot, then flashed back to a chapter of explanation. In other books the action has gone on for two or three chapters before the explanatory material is provided. In these books, a secondary purpose was served by this technique. The opening chapter or chapters generally left Tanner up against the wall to a greater or lesser extent, and this tension was maintained and even heightened by forcing the reader to pause for a flashback.

This business of beginning after the beginning is a natural for novels of suspense, for novels of adventure and action in general. But it also works very well in an altogether different sort of novel. Innumerable examples of mainstream fiction of the highest order are structured along these lines. They open with a scene that is dramatic or revealing or in some other way serves to get things off to a good start. Indeed, I've read a slew of novels in which the first chapter poses a crisis, the ensuing thirty chapters recount the hero's entire life up to that crisis, and the final chapter resolves it. (The Enemy Camp, by Jerome Weidman, is a vivid example of this approach.) By and large this strikes me as too much of a good thing; if the problem can be stated and resolved in ten thousand words, what's the point of wading through another hundred thousand words of background?

Ahem. I've also written quite a few suspense novels which do not follow the pattern I've described. While I think it's a wonderful way to structure a book, I certainly don't think it's the only way, and there have been many occasions when I've deliberately begun at the beginning.

For example:

Deadly Honeymoon features a honeymoon couple. On the first night thugs kill a man at a nearby cabin. Almost as an afterthought, they beat up