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

The window wasn't locked. I opened it, let myself in, closed it after me. An hour later I went out the window and back up the fire escape-.

Now what Scudder found in the apartment is important, and a couple of chapters later he lets the reader know about it. But it would have slowed things down to report on his discoveries when he made them, so I postponed the revelations accordingly. More important, in the same book, there's a point where he figures out what Really Happened?but that explanation's postponed until a confrontation with the evil-doer rather than disclosed by having Scudder think aloud.

There is one long-term hazard in first-person writing, and I had that brought home to me when I gave a writer friend a manuscript of mine called The Triumph of Evil. He reported that he liked it. Of course I knew how it was going to end, he said, but I don't think anyone else would have known.

Why, I asked, had he known?

The book wasn't multiple viewpoint. But you wrote it in the third person.

So?

So I figured the only reason you didn't use first person was the lead character was going to die at the end, so I wasn't exactly awestruck when he did.

Hmmmmm.

CHAPTER 29

The Plot's the Thing

DEAR MR. BLOCK,

I read your column in Writer's Digest regularly and can't understand your statement that the plot is the single most important element of a story or novel. Either you're wrong or the cards are truly stacked against the beginner in this writing game. Many's the time I've put in long, hard hours writing a story to have it rejected. Agents will criticize the story as trite and explain to me what's wrong with the plot. Then a matter of months or years later I'll see a story with the identical plot published in a major magazine, but with the byline of a name writer. So I don't think plot is as important as you claim it is. Maybe it's a question of writing style. Mine may not be as smooth as some people's, although Lord knows I try. Or maybe, as I strongly suspect, it's largely a question of who you know-.

For myself, I've always felt that it's not who you know, it's what you've got on 'em. But that's by the way. The letter quoted above is a fabrication, although it certainly echoes any number of letters in my files. It also echoes thoughts of my own that have come to me over the years. Ages ago, when I labored in the vineyards of a literary agent, my job consisted of criticizing the efforts of amateur writers who had submitted them with reading fees. I was under instructions to stress in each instance that the story's plot was at fault, so as to avoid reflecting adversely upon the client's writing ability and to encourage him or her to send us more stories?and more reading fees.

I felt at the time that this was palpable nonsense. Here I'd be reading the effort of someone who couldn't write his name in the dirt with a stick and instead of telling him as much I'd talk about the fundamental inadequacies of the story's plot?knowing all the while that O. Henry once wrote a story with the identical plot and did just fine with it, thank you. I began to suspect that plot was the least important component of a story, that the only real question was whether the writer could write.

Basic writing ability is essential, to be sure. Facility with prose and dialogue is vital, and when it is lacking one knows on the very first page that a story is not worth finishing. I was made freshly aware of this while judging entries in Writer's Digest's recent short-story contest. It was not necessary for me to scan more than a page of half or more of the entries in order for me to determine that the writing ability of the entrant was insufficiently high to rank the story among the prizewinners.

Some writers fooled me, however. They had the ability, and there was a spark in their prose and dialogue that kept me reading all the way through, nearly certain I held a winner in my hands. Then, like as not, I wound up shrugging and sighing or ranting and raving?and in any event shredding the story and moving on to the next entry. Because, time and time again, the plot would prove to be a washout. No impact! I'd rant. No conflict! I'd rave. No story! I'd lament, and tear the offending manuscript in half.

As this happened in story after story, I was struck anew by an old truth. The plot is the most important single element of a story. Indeed, the plot is the story. Unless it works, all you've got is words.

But wait a minute. Isn't there a contradiction here? We've all seen writers succeed with plots with which we've failed, and it's not always a matter of style?or of who or whom you know. What gives?

What gives, I suspect, is a confusion of plot and idea. An idea, as I see it, is the premise of a story. A plot is the structure by means of which that idea is transformed into a work of fiction.

Sometimes an idea, if it's good enough, will make a story successful in and of itself. This is especially likely to be the case with short-shorts,