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

A while later, after many a summer had melted into fall and the Jets won the Super Bowl, it became my job to transform this book into a screenplay. (Of which, sadly, nothing ever came.) Well, a lot of those border crossings, amusing enough on the page, clearly would not work on film. Too slow, too talky, not enough happening visually. So, having previously established the resourcefulness of the character, I took to showing his achievements. I had him cornered in an alleyway in France, wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase. Then I cut to an interior shot of a busful of Italian workmen in Milan, laughing and singing and eating their lunch, and the camera moved in to reveal that one of their number, dressed like them and behaving like them, was our hero. No explanation, because this was film and how he dunnit didn't matter much.

Film and television techniques have made readers more sophisticated. We don't have to have things spelled out for us as thoroughly as we once did. But this still doesn't mean you can cheat in prose, and that cut to the bus in Milan is something I'd never dream of doing in cold print.

Transitions are interesting. It can be instructive to see how other writers handle them, for better or worse, and you might want to take special note of this sort of thing in your own reading. But whatever you do, don't take the D train. Mr. Ellington says you should take the A train instead.

It's still the quickest way to get to Harlem.

CHAPTER 28

The I's Have It

SOME TWENTY years ago, when I was earning a dishonest living criticizing manuscripts for a schlock agent, a stock paragraph in my letters of rejection cautioned hopeful writers against the use of first-person narration. The first person, I was quick to point out, was fraught with pitfalls for the inexperienced writer. It served as a barrier between the reader and the story itself, limited the scope of the narrative, and, as I recall, caused dental caries in children and skin cancer in laboratory mice.

Now this admonition to shun the first person was by no means my own private aberration. It still seems to be part of the conventional wisdom of writing courses to inveigh against this narrative form. I recall hearing all these warnings at an impressionable age and thinking what a shame it was that the first person was such a bad thing, since it was at the same time the most natural way to write.

Hmmmmm.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if this bias against the first person isn't very much a part of our Puritan tradition. Mencken defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy, and I don't think he'd mind our amending the definition to include the fear that someone somewhere may be doing what comes naturally. After all, if something's easy to do, if it comes naturally and simply and works like a charm, there must be something wrong with it. It'll give you hair on your palms, or make you blind, or something.

About the same time that I was telling people not to write in the first person, I came upon a how-I-do-it piece by David Alexander, a reporter for the old Morning Telegraph and the author of a series of excellent private eye novels featuring Bart Hardin, a Broadway type who lived upstairs of a flea circus, wore flamboyant vests, drank nothing but Irish whiskey and never took a drink before four in the afternoon. In order to give his writing a feeling of immediacy, Alexander explained, he wrote all his first drafts in the first person. But, in order to avoid hairy palms, he then rewrote them start to finish in the third person.

Mr. Alexander's no longer around so I'll never be able to ask him whether he really did this. I've a hunch he was having us on. Any man who deliberately writes a book in one voice with the intention of rewriting it in another is a man who makes government projects look like the invention of an efficiency expert. But it hardly matters what Alexander actually did. The fact that he could even conceive of this approach points up the two significant aspects of first-person narration?it provides a sense of immediacy, and it's somehow considered reprehensible.

Well, I myself may have joined the club and warned other clods not to use the first person, but that doesn't mean I was fool enough to take my own advice. My own first novel was written in the first person, and most of my mystery and suspense novels, including all those books involving series characters, have been so written. At the beginning I felt I was running grave risks, and that I was at the same time taking the easy way out, but I decided I'd just write this way, so to speak, until I needed glasses.

I haven't gone blind yet, although I've moving into the foothills of Bifocal Country. And over the years I've received support in my addiction to the first person from sources as diverse as Somerset Maugham and the Ogallala Sioux (and I'll bet you a nickel no one ever put them in the same sentence before).

Indians first. An acquaintance who was raised on a reservation told me how Indian oral history, involving the repetition over