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

stomach. He may waste time now and then at lovemaking or thinking aloud but he never wastes it getting from place, to place from one piece of action to another.

Spillane started out writing comic books, and I think that's where he learned to make fast cuts. While I'd personally rather read the label on the little bottle of Worcestershire sauce than check out Mike Hammer's adventures, there's no getting around the fact that Spillane, especially in his early books, had an immediacy and a gut instinct for the dramatic that won him a large and genuinely loyal readership, and there's a little more to his success than sex and sadism.

In Spillane's books and writing of that sort, the story's action is all more or less continuous. Fast abrupt transitions are easy enough because what is skipped is pretty much routine. In stories that cover a great deal of time, though, you have to skip over days or weeks or months or years, and when you do the transitional passage sometimes reads like this:

Summer mellowed into fall and fall into winter. The days grew shorter and the nights colder. The holidays came?Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day. Then, as the days lengthened again and the sun's rays once more began to warm the receptive earth-.

Years ago filmmakers used to do this sort of thing by showing us hands spinning merrily on a clock or months flipping by on a calendar. Or they'd hurl a montage of newspapers on the screen, their headlines advancing history from, say, Armistice Day to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Without flipping calendar pages, you can make faster cuts and still give the reader a sense of the passage of time. You might simply take up your character in the middle of a new scene and add a sentence somewhere along the way to establish the scene, like so:

Susan slipped out of bed, moving silently to avoid waking Howard. She put on a robe and hurried downstairs, mindful of the board two steps from the bottom that would groan if you stepped in its center. It was January now, they'd been in the house for three months, and he still hadn't found the time to fix the creaking stair.

The transitional information here?that it is January and they've been in the house for three months?is slipped in here in a quick sentence that lets Susan whine to us about Howard's procrastination and perhaps tells us something about their relationship. We've advanced the action and told the reader what time it is in unobtrusive fashion.

Here's another way to cover a lot of time quickly, in this case through a long-range weather report:

The next two winters were mild ones. Then, when the boy was four years old, frost came the last week in September and the first snow fell before Thanksgiving, and it was well into April before the ground was warm enough to plow.

Suppose your story involves a relationship between the narrator and another character. You might have a transition along these lines, simply bridging the gap between two wide-spaced meetings of the two:

I shook his hand and smiled. I'll see you, I said, but in fact it was nearly three years before I saw Waldo Gordon again. I thought of him from time to time, though not too intently or too often. Then one May evening on the way home from my club I turned a corner and there he was. The first thing I noticed about him was that he'd put on weight. He was jowly and he'd taken on a bit of a paunch, and my eyes registered this before I happened to note that his right arm was missing from the elbow down. Indeed I had already reached out to shake his hand when-

But let's go back to the D train for a moment. One reason that it's permissible, and indeed desirable, to skip all that garbage is that nothing much happens in its course. It's no real challenge to get from place to place by subway?at least it's not supposed to be?and this particular passage is uneventful.

It's a temptation for novice writers to over-report such subway rides because they're easy to write about while skimping on more important scenes which are trickier to write. When that subway ride's important?when the hero gets beaten up in its course or shinnies up the third rail or whatever, that's when you can't cheat. You've got to write about it.

Here's a good example of the way prose differs from film. A film, unlike a book, moves at a predetermined pace. The viewer has to put up with the cuts that the director has made. He can't set the film aside for a moment and frown, then pick it up again, back it up a few frames, and examine it for inconsistency. As a result, films can be wildly inconsistent and illogical, and their cuts can get the characters in and out of unexplained trouble.

But you can't get away with that in a book or story.

Some years back I wrote a book called The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, about a sort of whimsical adventurer who played hopscotch all over the map of Europe in the course of chasing down some long-buried treasure. A lot of the plot business was devoted to his crossing borders surreptitiously through diverse stratagems abetted by various odd characters. While I never got a Pulitzer Prize for this, it worked well