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

the husband and rape the bride. The two do not report this to the cops; instead they hunt down the villains themselves. Here the rape is of paramount importance. It supplies the motive for everything that follows and makes their vigilante activity acceptable and even praiseworthy. There are no flashbacks in this book.

Such Men Are Dangerous is about a burnt-out case on the verge of a breakdown who hies himself off to an island in the Florida Keys and lives a hermit's existence. Then a CIA type drops in and involves him in a caper. This would have been a natural for the second-chapter-first approach but I was more interested in establishing the lead's character at the beginning since that to me was the most important single element of the book.

The Sins of the Fathers, the first of three books featuring ex-cop Matthew Scudder, opens with Scudder hired by a murdered girl's father. The action which follows is gradual and I felt the book would build most effectively if events were dealt with in chronological order. Flashbacks are a component of the other two Scudder books, however.

The Specialists is a caper book, a crew of ex-Green Berets and their legless colonel banding together to right wrongs and make money by doing in the evil-doers. I elected to open it with what the movie people call a pre-credit sequence: a hooker in Vegas is abused by a hood and she goes to one of the guys in the group and tells him about it. That's set off as a prologue and then the action begins.

(And I'll insert a confession here. Some books have spun themselves out in chronological order because I didn't know where they were going when I started writing them. Their plots just growed, Topsy-style. And occasionally topsy-turvy style. When the resulting narrative seemed natural enough I left it alone.

But whether your novel ought to begin at the beginning or not, just how and where it does begin is vitally important. All article writers know the importance of getting the lead paragraph absolutely right, and short-story writers know that a lead is every bit as important in fiction. (I think it's more important: a reader may stay with an article because the subject matter's interesting to him, but a weak lead will make him skip a short story nine times out of ten.)

Well, your first chapter is the lead paragraph of your novel. Mickey Spillane has said more than once that the first chapter sells the book and the last chapter sells the next book. I wouldn't dream of arguing with that.

A novel, as we've all heard far too often, ought to have a beginning and a middle and an ending.

No question about it.

But not necessarily in that order.

CHAPTER 26

Spring Forward, Fall Back

ONE, TWO, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven-

Well, if you were going to take the numbers one through eleven and put them in order, that's probably the order you'd put them in?unless you happened to be perverse, ignorant, psychotic, or wildly original. Most of us, however, while a wee bit perverse, ignorant, psychotic, and original, tend to arrange things in their natural order. When it comes to arranging events in a prose narrative, fictional or otherwise, the order we select is chronological order. We relate events as they happen, one after another.

I suspect human beings have always told stories in this fashion, ever since the first cave dweller embroidered the truth a bit in describing a hazardous altercation with a sabre-tooth tiger. By relating the events in the order in which they took place, the storyteller best holds the attention of his audience and maintains the highest possible degree of suspense. Will the tiger sense the man's approach? Will the beast attack? Will those keen fangs draw blood? Will the hunter's skill prevail? These questions become substantially less urgent if the narrator begins by describing the process of gutting and skinning the tiger, because by so doing he answers them before they can be asked.

There are other risks involved in departing from straightforward chronological narration. A major one is confusion. When you play games with the temporal order of things, you run the risk of leaving the reader wondering just what the hell is going on. In Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print I discussed two works that skipped artfully to and fro in time, Sandra Scoppettone's novel Some Unkown Person and Stanley Donen's film Two for the Road. While both gain something aesthetically from this reshuffling of time, both lose some of their audience in the process.

A story, it has been said far too many times, has a beginning, a middle and an ending. I think it's high time I admitted that I for one don't understand what this particular sentence means. One might as well announce that a story has a first page, a last page, and some pages in between the two. Or that a football game has a first half, an intermission, and a second half. Or that a golf tournament has a first round, two middle rounds, and a fourth round. Or that?

Enough. It might be more useful to point out that a story has two beginnings, its beginning on the first page and its chronological beginning. Sometimes they coincide. Sometimes they do not.

The chronological beginning of the chapter you are now reading lies in a memo from John