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

it; moreover, you can visualize yourself writing it. For one reason or another you've decided you want to become a writer of confessions, or science fiction, or gothic novels, or mystery stories.

Now what?

The next step, it might appear, is to sit down to the typewriter and get on with it?and it's possible that you're ready to go ahead and do just that. Perhaps, now that you've chosen a fiction category, your unconscious has obligingly coughed up enough fully developed story ideas to keep your typewriter humming for months. If so, more power to you?and why aren't you busy writing instead of reading this book?

For many of us, however, there's an interim step between deciding what sort of thing to write and setting out to write it. It consists of subjecting one's chosen field to a detailed analysis. The analytical process is such that the writer winds up with both an ingrained gut-level understanding of what constitutes a successful story in the field and a mind trained to produce and develop the ideas for such successful stories.

I can't think of a better name for this process than market analysis, yet something in me recoils at the term. It's too clinical, for one thing, and it seems to imply that writing can be approached scientifically, that the problem of selling to Mind-Boggler Science-Fiction Stories lends itself to a case study a la Harvard Business School.

Besides, the process I'm talking about constitutes less a study of the markets than of the individual stories themselves. Our object is to learn what makes a story work, not what makes a particular editor buy it.

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Okay?whatever you call it, I want to do it. What do I do first?

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Good question.

What you do is you read.

Last chapter we established that the category of story you elect to write had better be one you enjoy reading. Now that you've picked a category, you're going to have to do some really intensive reading.

In my own case, I pretty much backed into writing for the crime-fiction magazines. But once I had made that first sale to Manhunt, I proceeded to study that magazine and all the others in the field more intently than I ever studied anything before or since. I bought Manhunt and Hitchcock and Ellery Queen and Trapped and Guilty and a few other magazines whenever they appeared on the stands. In addition, I made regular visits to back-magazine shops, where I picked up every back issue of those publications that I could find. I carried lists in my wallet to avoid buying the same issue twice. And I carted them all home and arranged them in orderly fashion on my shelves, and then I read every last one of them from cover to cover.

I still remember quite a few of those stories that I read twenty years or so ago. Some of them were very good. Others were not very good at all. But by reading hundreds and hundreds of those stories over the months, the good and the bad and the indifferent, I learned what constituted a successful crime story in a way I could not have learned otherwise.

Understand, please, that I did not learn any formulae. I don't know that such a thing exists. What I did learn, in a manner I cannot entirely explain, is a sense of the possible variations that could be worked upon the crime story, a sense of what worked and what didn't.

Of course I didn't just read and read and read for months on end. Throughout this period I occasionally came up with an idea and took the time to hammer out a story. Nor did this habit of reading voraciously in my chosen field come to a halt once I was regularly turning out and selling stories of my own. I still read a great deal of suspense fiction, short stories and novels. I do so because I enjoy much of what I read, but I also do so because I regard it as part of my work as a writer.

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That's it, then, this market-analysis business? You just read a lot?

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Sometimes it's enough. But there's something else you can do that may increase the effectivness of your reading.

It's simple enough. You outline what you've read.

I don't mean that you take apart a story as if it were an exercise in literary criticism. You can do so, of course, and you might or might not find the process rewarding. But this method of outlining has nothing to do with criticism, with how you feel about the story, with whether the story works or doesn't work. Having read the story, you simply write down a summary of the plot, relating in a few sentences just what happens in the story.

For example:

Two brothers are on their way to commit a big-time robbery when they run low on gas in the middle of nowhere. The service-station operator keeps telling them their car needs additional work and they sense they're being conned, yet they don't want to take chances. They let the man make more repairs than they have cash to pay for, finally robbing the station at the end because there's no other way out.

Or:

Narrator and his wife come home from vacation to find their house torn inside-out by burglars. Narrator goes off to work with his partner, complaining about what happened, the damage the burglars had done, the mess they made, etc. Turns out the two men are professional burglars on their