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

marriage. And the perils along the way need not be of the lashed-to-the-railroad-track variety; they are whatever incidents complicate the story, render its successful outcome in doubt, and force the hero to overcome them in order to survive.

When I first started writing fiction, just a couple of months after the boys made it back to Ithaca, I had trouble with troubles. I might be able to limn a suitably heroic hero, and I might confront him with a sufficiently dire problem, but then I tended to let him go ahead and solve it cleverly and expeditiously and lickety-split.

I knew what I was doing wrong but I didn't seem to be able to do anything about it. I knew there was no real tension if a character fell into a pit and then hopped back out again. I knew that things had to get worse before they could get better, that my hero's efforts to solve his problem had to lead him deeper and deeper into trouble before he could finally win through to glory. I knew all that, and knowing helped me a little, but I still tended to make things easy for my hero. The result of this was two-fold; my stories rarely went on for more than fifteen hundred or two thousand words, and they rarely developed much in the way of tension. When they sold, it was to minor markets.

Well, time passed, as it tends to do, and my writing developed, albeit slowly. For a couple of years I turned out a soft-core sex novel every month, and those potboilers certainly taught me how to keep the pot boiling. While my lead characters may not have been getting into hot water in every chapter, they were at least getting into something, or vice versa.

My early suspense novels, now that I think of it, suffered from a lack of ever-heightening tension. In Deadly Honeymoon, for example, a bride and groom join together to hunt down and kill the thugs who raped the bride. There's tension, and they have problems along the way, but I can see now that the book would have been stronger had there been an increasing threat to them developing even as they contended with these problems.

The seven books I wrote about Evan Tanner were faintly similar in structure to The Odyssey, in that my ardent insomniac played a sort of global hopscotch in the course of solving a problem or two and finding his way back home. In a typical novel, Tanner would cross half a dozen international borders illegally, confronting pitfalls in seven languages before he was back home again on the Upper West Side.

Detective novels have a more confined structure. They don't ramble around so much, and the story is essentially over when the main problem?the identity of the murderer?is solved. This notwithstanding, the more effective books are generally marked by pitfalls and stumbling blocks which the lead keeps encountering, developments which he is unable to anticipate, and any number of elements which make the problem more difficult and its solution more urgent and imperative. A suspect turns out to be innocent. A key witness turns up dead. A murderer strikes again. The detective finds himself framed for the killing. An important item?money or jewelry or a Maltese falcon?disappears. One way or another, things get worse before they get better, and they hold the promise of getting even worse, and of not getting better at all.

To do this sort of thing effectively, you have to be your lead character's best friend and worst enemy all at the same time. You send your hero on a walk through the woods. Then you have a bear chase him. You let him climb a tree. You chop the tree down. The bear chases him into the river. He grabs onto a log. It turns out to be an alligator. He grabs a floating stick and uses it to jam the beast's jaws open. You give the bear a canoe and teach it how to paddle?

Well, you get the idea. At least I hope you do, because I'm not going any further with a bear in a canoe.

Although he has not yet to my knowledge placed a bear in a canoe, Robert Ludlum is a master at keeping things hot for his lead characters. A typical Ludlum novel?insofar as the books run to type?has his hero confronting a shadowy conspiracy of monumental proportions. From the onset, even before he's more than peripherally involved, Ludlum's hero is in Deep Trouble. Cars leap curbs at him. Safes fall from high windows and crash at his feet. Bullets whine overhead. Before he even knows who's doing what or why, the Ludlum lead has to do something in order to save himself.

And this sort of thing keeps happening. Some of it, in the final analysis, may not make absolutely perfect sense. You might finish a Ludlum novel, properly breathless and ready for bed. A couple of hours later you might wake up hungry, and on the way back from the icebox it might occur to you that there was no reason for the Estonian nationalists to put cyanide in the hero's peanut-butter cookies. That kind of icebox thinking may make it hard for you to get back to sleep, and it might even move you to write the author a letter demanding a full and proper explanation. But