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

long enough to slobber all over my pants, but when I didn't give him any beer, he slunk over behind the door. Rosie wouldn't look at me, though, not when I came in, not even when I told her the news.

I'm sorry, I said, but she's dead.

This business of springing ahead and falling back is a timesaver, but Crumley could have handled the material in the same number of words without this mini-flashback. The chapter might have begun After a quick visit to the emergency room and covered the trip to Rosie's in the same abbreviated form. Instead, Crumley jumps directly into the scene at Rosie's. We want the scene to go on, want to know what will happen next in it, and thus are glad to receive the recapitulated material in the summary fashion in which it is presented.

The technique's a useful one in all manner of fictional narrative. In a long novel spanning many years, a jump into action can bridge a gap neatly and effortlessly. In a story with continuous action, like The Last Good Kiss, the same technique helps establish the novel as a collection of vivid scenes.

Spring forward, fall back. A good maxim to remember. If you don't get to apply it in your writing, at least it'll help you remember how to reset your clock when the country goes on or off Daylight Savings Time.

CHAPTER 27

Don't Take the D Train

IN AN early novel, written in my salad days (they were mixed and green, heavy on the oil and vinegar), I wrote, after intense deliberation and painstaking research, a passage that read something like this:

I hung up the phone, thought for a moment, then got my topcoat from the hall closet. I let myself out of the apartment and used the key to lock the door after me. The elevator took me down six flights. I walked through the lobby to the street and headed west on 77th Street.

At Broadway I turned downtown. There was a newsstand at the entrance to the subway station at 72nd and Broadway. I bought a paper and read it while I waited for the train. I took the downtown local to Columbus Circle where I walked through a passageway to the IND platform. I caught a Brooklyn-bound D train and rode it to DeKalb Avenue where I transferred to a local. At the Avenue M stop I got off the train and walked up a flight of sooty steps to?

Enough!

I trust you get the idea. The passage is imperfectly recalled, as well it might be, but the point is that I used to do this sort of thing all the time. Like the biography that told the high school girl more than she cared to know about Queen Victoria, I was telling my readers considerably more than they cared or needed to know about something that was neither germane to my story nor interesting in and of itself?i.e., the subway system of the city of New York.

Now this sort of detail might have been relevant in, say, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, where the action of the story specifically concerns the hijacking of a subway train, but my narrator was using the train solely to get from Point A to Point B. So all I had to do was write something like this:

I hung up the phone, thought for a moment, then got my topcoat from the hall closet. Forty minutes later I stepped off a subway train in Brooklyn and walked up a flight of sooty steps.

Ah, those sooty steps-.

Well, transitions are tricky. Getting your characters in and out of the room is as complicated a problem for the novice fiction writer as shuttling them on and off the stage is for the neophyte playwright. While an increase in skill and confidence at this sort of thing does come with experience, transitions continue to demand that the writer make a choice, deliberate or intuitive, as to just how and where he will interrupt the narrative action and how and where he will pick it up again.

In multiple-viewpoint stories, this is just a matter of closing down one scene and skipping across space and time to open up another. The author still has choices to make as to just how much must be reported to the reader, but he's rather less likely to spend eternity on the subway. But in single-viewpoint narratives, whether told from the first or the third person, there's a natural tendency to account for every moment of the lead character's time and to tell the reader far too much.

Sometimes, of course, you'll want to tell the reader a great deal. Even the subway sequence at the beginning of this article might be appropriate, for instance, if you wanted to convey a sense of the tedious passage of time, the monotony of dragging oneself here and there beneath the city streets, and the dogged persistence of the narrator in carrying out his task, whatever it may be.

If, on the other hand, you want to stress action and pace, you might prefer to make your transitions as abrupt as possible. No one does this better than Mickey Spillane. His detective, Mike Hammer, just never spends any time getting from one scene to another. In one sentence he's stuffing some chap's head into a men's room toilet; a sentence later he's clear across town shooting a girl in the