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

This method of outlining, of writing out plot summaries of what you have read, serves to pare away the writer's facility with prose and dialogue and characterization and reduce each story to its basic plot. In this fashion you can see after the fact just what it was that you've read. I don't know that there's any specific value in studying these plot summaries after you've written them, as a paleontologist studies dinosaur bones, but I do think that the simple act of stripping the stories to the bones will give you an intuitive understanding of what holds them together that you could not readily obtain just by reading them.

Outlines are an even more effective tool in learning how longer fiction works. When you take an outline you have read and reduce it to a chapter-by-chapter summary of its plot, you are in effect reversing the process the author followed in writing the book in the first place. Although they're often easier to write, novels are generally more difficult to grasp than short stories. So much more happens in them that it's harder to see their structure. Stripped down to outline form, the novel is like a forest in winter; with their branches bare, the individual trees become visible where once the eyes saw only a mass of green leaves.

If you plan to prepare an outline for a novel of your own some day, there's yet another advantage in outlining. Quite simply, you learn in this fashion what outlines look like. In order to feel comfortable in any form of writing, I have to know what it looks like on paper. Before I could write a screenplay, for example, it was not enough for me to go to the movies and see how films worked on the screen. I had to get a sense of how they worked on the page?because I was going to be writing a screenplay, not a film. When an outline, too, becomes something you can look at in typescript instead of merely sensing it as the invisible skeleton of a bound book, it becomes a good deal easier to outline your own as-yet unwritten novel.

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Question?with all this reading and analyzing and outlining, all this mechanical crap, aren't we stifling creativity? I have a feeling I'll be trying to duplicate what's been written rather than writing my own stories.

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That's not how it works. If anything, a bone-deep knowledge of your field helps you avoid unwittingly writing those stories that have been written already.

What every editor wants?and every reader, for that matter?can be summed up in four paradoxical words: the same only different. Your story must be the same as innumerable other stories so that it may provide a similar kind of satisfaction to the reader. Yet it must simultaneously differ sufficiently from all of those other stories so that the reader will not feel it's something he's read over and over in the past.

We achieve this same-only-different quality not by borrowing bits and pieces from a variety of other stories, not by synthesizing and amalgamating what we've read, but by so imbuing ourselves in our chosen field that the requirements of the field soak into our subconsious minds.

I don't believe anyone knows enough about the mind to say just how story ideas are produced. It may not be necessary to know this, any more than you have to understand electricity to turn the light on. I do know that a basic understanding of how a particular kind of story works, acquired by the process described above, seems to make things a good deal easier for the mind.

I don't know about you, but my mind needs all the help it can get.

CHAPTER 3

Decisions, Decisions

COUPLE OF months ago I was chatting with a fellow at some sort of symposium on suspense fiction. He was writing his first novel, or getting ready to write his first novel, or thinking about getting ready, or whatever, and he had a lot of questions. And, since he'd artfully positioned himself between me and the cheese and crackers, I had little choice but to answer him.

Did editors, he wanted to know, prefer novels in the first or third person? Did editors prefer books where a murder occurs right away? Did editors prefer books with an urban or a rural setting? Did editors prefer multiple viewpoint or single viewpoint? Did editors prefer?

Look, I said, that's now how I write. I don't try to imagine just what sort of book some editor is going to fall in love with and then set out to produce it. For one thing, editors are individuals. They don't share a single set of preferences. For another, what any editor prefers most is a book that turns him on, and that he has reason to believe people will buy, and his judgment ultimately hasn't got too much to do with questions of first or third person, single or multiple viewpoint, or urban or rural setting.

Anyway, I went on, I myself am pretty much of an intuitive writer. I try to write the sort of book I would want to read if I hadn't happened to have written it myself. The more I write to please myself, the more likelihood there is that I'll please other people in the process. But when I deliberately set out to please other readers, I usually turn out