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

full-length novel and even a writer with Hunter's technical facility can't make it work.

3. WHO'S SURPRISED? When the whole story's a build-up to the surprise at the end, you've got a real investment in that surprise. If the reader has seen it coming a mile away, the story's in serious trouble.

The example that comes quickest to mind is not a story but a film. A few years back Dustin Hoffman played the title role in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying All Those Terrible Things About Me? Seems that one Harry Kellerman was phoning up everybody in Hoffman's life to spread dreadful rumors about him, and Hoffman spends the whole movie trying to find out the answer to the titular question, and have you guessed it yourself yet? Yeah, Dusty himself was Harry K., doing the dirty on himself in some sort of split-personality number, and nothing could have come as less of a surprise to the viewers. Most everybody tumbled to the secret ten minutes into the film, and some clever types guessed the ending without even entering the theater.

How do you know whether a surprise ending is going to work or not? Tricky point. I guess you just have to develop, from your own analysis of what works and what doesn't work in the things you read over the years, a sense of what is and what is not genuinely surprising.

Here again, the importance of a solid reading background is evident. Originality is an essential quality of a successful surprise ending, and how can you know whether your gimmick's original if you haven't read widely in your field?

4. A SURPRISE?PLUS A NEW PERSPECTIVE. The best surprise endings don't merely surprise the reader. In addition, they force him to reevaluate everything that has preceded them, so that he views the actions and the characters in a different light and has a new perspective on all that's he's read.

Consider Mark Hellinger's The Window. Three bedridden women share a room at a sanitarium. One, by right of seniority, has her bed next to the window. Day after day she recounts to the others what she sees through the window?little daily dramas in the lives of children playing outside, lovers quarreling and making up, the changing seasons, birds flying south, and so on.

Then she dies. The woman who's been there the longest after her inherits her spot, and the other woman moves up one, and a new woman is moved into the room, and the woman who's got the window now is very excited to see what she's been hearing about for years, and she looks out the window, and?surprise!?it opens on a blank wall. And surprise! she looks at it for a couple of seconds and then proceeds to tell what she sees, the children playing, the woman sweeping her porch steps, the buds on the trees, making up stories for her roommates' entertainment just as her predecessor did.

Now that's a surprise ending. I could tell you some others, but?surprise!?I'm out of space. But read John Collier, read Gerald Kersh, read Saki, read the stories in the current magazines. See what works and what doesn't, and keep on reading and rereading until you see why and how. Write your own stories and make your own mistakes. Send out your stories if they turn out well. Send 'em out again when they come back.

And, when what you get back is a small white envelope instead of a big brown one, congratulations. That's the best surprise of all.

PART FOUR

One Damned Word After Another:

Fiction as a Craft

CHAPTER 36

Never Apologize, Never Explain

ONE THING I've noticed in reading the work of new writers, published and unpublished, is a tendency to explain too much. It seems to me that this generally stems from one of two things?a desire to control the reader's interpretation of what one has written or a reluctance to trust the reader's ability to make sense out of what is going on.

It takes considerable self-confidence and monumental ego to write fiction in the first place. In order to put one word after another, we have to be able to believe that the plots and characters we invent, spun like spider webs out of our own innards, and couched in the particular words we arbitrarily select and arrange on the page, will be grippingly interesting and involving to some faceless reader whom we have never met and of whom we know nothing.

This same ego quite naturally makes us want to take charge utterly, to control and direct everything with the fervor of a kid playing traffic cop. This desire can manifest itself in any of a number of ways. Here's an example:

Don't talk to me like that, Margo shouted. She was really angry. You can't talk to me like that!

I'll talk to you any way I want, Roy flared. He couldn't stand the way she was acting.

I mean it, she said, furious. I've had enough.

Oh? He drew back, worried at the new quality he could detect in her voice. What will you do about it, then?

I'll do something, she said. But even as she spoke she could feel the determination draining from her-

Do you see what the author's doing here? He's stepping right up onto the stage with his characters, leaning in over their shoulders and explaining why and how they're reading the lines he's given them. Instead of letting them reveal their feelings by what they say and