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

Island, and the odds are good that he'd simply think I had described a specific store and changed the name to avoid a lawsuit.

2. FAKING EXPERTISE. Bernie Rhodenbarr is a gifted man; he could pick his way into Fort Knox with a hairpin. Since he made his appearance, any number of people have asked me somewhat apprehensively how I know so much about the ins and outs of burglary.

I've told them, honestly enough, that I studied up on the subject a couple years ago when it looked as though I'd need a second career. (It's a natural for writers?you work alone and set your own hours.) What I didn't add is that Bernie knows more about the business than I do. For example, he talks very knowledgeably about the merits of the Rabson lock. Now there's no such brand; I used the name because Archie Goodwin always used to praise Rabson locks in the Nero Wolfe books.

3. EASY DOES IT. When you try too hard to look as though you know what you're talking about, the reader may be able to tell that you're protesting too much.

I have a tendency to overcompensate when I'm setting a scene in unfamiliar territory. In an effort to prove I know what I'm writing about, I take all my guidebook research and hurl it in the reader's face. On such occasions, I can't send my hero across a bridge without quoting the cornerstone inscription, all the way down to reporting who was mayor when the span was completed. If somebody drives crosstown through streets unfamiliar to me, I'll chart the route on a map and report every left and right turn to the reader.

What I have to keep reminding myself is that the purpose of my fiction is not to convince the reader that I've been a lifelong resident of Wall, South Dakota?or whatever setting I've chosen. The test, of course, is a simple one: Would I put in all this crap if I were more sure of myself? Would I include as much information if the scene were set in my own neighborhood? If not, I'm probably overdoing it.

4. WATCH OUT FOR SHARP MULETAS. Ages ago I wrote a short story in which a wise old ex-bullfighter kills a neophyte by stabbing him in the throat with his muleta. Now this would have been a neat trick because the muleta is the cloth, not the sword, and that's the sort of thing I really ought to have known. The story would have been unpublishably bad regardless, but that certainly didn't help my cause.

5. TAKE CARE OF THE PENCE. Just as a misbegotten muleta can utterly destroy credibility, so can a well-chosen detail endow a whole book with an air of authenticity.

In Tanner's Twelve Swingers, the hero at one point teaches some Latvian to a Lithuanian child, and we have the following passage:

Runatsi latviski, I said. You will speak Lettish. I took her hand. You see how the words change? Zale ir zalja?the grass is green. Te ir t?vs?here is father. T?vs ir virs?father is a man. Mate ir plav??mother is in the meadow.

Mate ir plav? zalja, said Minna. Which meant that mother was in the green meadow, and which also meant that Minna was getting the hang of it-.

All that was painstakingly faked with the aid of a book called Teach Yourself Latvian, a volume I may have been the only person ever to buy and peruse. The response I got from various Latvian-Americans more than justified the time I spent on research. A couple of years later, when I was keeping company with a young lady born in Riga, Tanner's Twelve Swingers was a great help in establishing good relations with her parents.

One never knows, does one? Get a few little details right and people begin to think you know what you're doing.

Sometimes phony details work just as well. Another of Tanner's adventures took him to Bangkok. When I read galleys I was startled to learn that a CIA agent pointed out drops and meeting places and fronts?a travel agency, a tobbo shop, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant-.

What on earth was a tobbo shop?

I checked my manuscript. I'd written a tobacco shop and a creative linotypist had vastly improved on it. I decided a tobbo shop would be the best possible CIA front, adding a crackerjack bit of local color. Yeah, a tobbo shop. Why not?

So I left it like that.

And now I look forward to the day when I spot in someone else's fiction a reference to the notorious tobbo shops of Siam.

And who's to say? If enough of us write about tobbo shops, sooner or later some enterprising Thai will open one. Life does imitate art, after all.

CHAPTER 42

Character Building

I JUST finished reading an English mystery set in turn-of-the-century Paris. The author knows a lot about French history and conveyed a good deal of his knowledge in his novel. The plot, while not remarkable, was adequate. The writing, if occasionally clumsy, was no great drawback. What kept me from getting caught up in the book was my inability to respond greatly to the characters. They lacked the spark of life, and the detective, an inspector of police, never came alive for me.

I've commented before, in this space and elsewhere, on the importance of characterization. In order for a piece of fiction to work, its characters must fulfill three requirements. They must be plausible, they must be sympathetic, and they must be original.

When characters are implausible, the