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

possible, even down to details which could never possibly be apparent to the audience. If there was a desk on stage, for example, there ought to be papers and pencils and such in its drawers, even if those drawers were destined to remain shut throughout the performance.

I don't suppose there are many set designers nowadays who devote much time to filling up unopened desk drawers, but I think the principle is a sound one. I know it works at the typewriter, and at root the reason is as basic a one as you can get.

Fiction, let us never forget, cannot work properly without the reader's voluntary suspension of disbelief. He knows it's just a story but he elects to discard this knowledge. While he reads its, he chooses to believe in it.

But first is it not essential that the writer suspend his own disbelief? He more than anyone knows it's just a story?after all, he's the one who's inventing it. To the extent that he visualizes it first, to the extent that he has the experience of his fiction himself before he puts it on paper for someone else, his work acquires an essential reality in his own eyes. He suspends his own disbelief and makes it easier for the reader to go and do likewise.

I hope I haven't succeeded only in taking a rather simple process and making it unbearably complicated. I can only suggest that you reread the exercise and give it a try. See it first, and then write it. It works.

CHAPTER 41

Hum a Few Bars-and Fake It

IRATE NEIGHBOR: Do you know your bleeping piano is driving me crazy?

PIANIST: No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it.

When I told a friend the theme of this chapter, she treated me to a look of moral reproach. Telling writers how to fake, she said, is like teaching children how to steal. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I should indeed be ashamed of myself, and I often am, but not this time. For fakery is the very heart and soul of fiction. All our novels and short stories are nothing but a pack of lies.

Unless your writing is pure autobiography in the guise of fiction, you will continually find yourself practicing the dark arts of the illusionist and the trade of the counterfeiter. In order to foster the voluntary suspension of disbelief which fiction demands, you must give the reader the clear impression that you know a great deal more about things than you in fact do. If your story is set in some exotic clime, you want the reader to think your passport has more stamps than the Post Office. If an important character is an auto mechanic, you've got to look as though you know a camshaft from a hood ornament. Otherwise the reader is forcibly made aware of the fact that he's reading something somebody made up, that it's all a story, that it didn't really happen?that there's no life in it, no reality.

One way to make your writing seem authentic is to write about the things you know. Sometimes, though, plots may suggest themselves which cannot be situated in your home town or peopled with your friends or neighbors. When this is the case, you create the illusion of reality through a combination of research and verbal sleight-of-hand.

Shall I hum a few bars?

1. FAKING LOCATIONS. I once wrote a con game novel set in Toronto and Olean, New York. I was living in Buffalo at the time and spent two days in Toronto and one in Olean, jotting down the names of streets and restaurants and otherwise doing research. It was fun, in a way; I was young and felt professional as all hell doing what I assumed writers were supposed to do.

A couple years later, when I wrote a series of spy novels that hopped all over the globe, I discovered it wasn't necessary for me to go to Yugloslavia just because I was sending my lead character there. And if I didn't have to go to Belgrade, I certainly didn't have to go to Olean. The only place you really have to go is the library.

Travel guides are an obvious source. Telephone directories, usually accessible at the phone company, often contain rudimentary city maps. The Yellow Pages help you salt your work with references to hotels and restaurants and local landmarks in some unknown-to-you town.

I've found novels similarly useful. Before a spate of moves decimated my library, I kept every book I ever bought. If I wanted to drop a little local color into something I was writing, I could almost always put my hand on a book with the appropriate setting.

Sometimes it's easier and just as effective to avoid research altogether and bluff your way through. For example, I wrote a book a few years ago loosely based on the Starkweather murders in the midwest. I wanted a Nebraska locale, and decided against creating a town and making up a name for it. Instead I selected Grand Island, a city I have never visited and knew no more about than the Encyclopaedia Britannica could tell me, which was very little indeed.

I made up street names, neighborhoods, stores, everything. I didn't brother worrying what the real Grand Island was like because in the context of the novel it did not matter. Perhaps one reader in a thousand would know there's no Kleinhans Mens Wear in Grand