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

With Tanner, my first series character, I had a handle on his personality and lifestyle years before I had a book to put him in. By the time I came up with the plot of The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, I already knew a great deal about Evan Tanner. I was to find out a great deal more in the course of writing the book, as Tanner's character and narrative style defined itself on the page, and before I finished the book I knew beyond doubt that I wanted to learn?and to write?a great deal more about the man.

Other volumes followed in due course, and Tanner books established a pattern, if not a formula. Chronicling Tanner's adventures became very nearly a fulltime occupation, until after having written seven books I stopped abruptly and went on to other things.

Why the sudden halt? Well, while the books were not drugs on the market, neither did they set any sales records, and I'm sure this influenced me. If the series had ever really taken off commercially I might have sustained enthusiasm for a longer run. Then too, changing times made Tanner's world rather less amusing. All the lost causes he'd embraced were suddenly blossoming in the real world, with wars breaking out and bombs going off. What had been quaint had turned suddenly nasty, and I felt it was time my sleepless knight lay down for a nap.

But far more important a reason was that there was a sameness about the books that made them increasingly tedious for me to write. Tanner's fans?a small but ardent band?were never put off by this sameness. Nor, to be sure, am I as a reader ever angry at a series writer for mining the same vein repeatedly. Richard Stark's Parker novels are all of a piece; I not only take comfort in this but am delighted when a remembered character returns from an earlier volume. Rex Stout's books about Nero Wolfe have a sameness to which I have never objected, and those atypical volumes in which Stout takes his hero away from the 35th Street brownstone and onto terra incognita have always seemed the weaker for it. Similarly, I want to meet Agatha Christie's Jane Marple on her own turf, in the stifling little village of St. Mary's Mead. When Christie broke the pattern by transplanting Marple to London or the Caribbean, I felt cheated.

Series fans, then, want each book to be the same only different. But Tanner's fans were spending six or eight or ten hours a year reading about their hero while I was devoting that many months a year to writing about him, and I was accordingly more affected by what I perceived as repetition.

I suppose, too, that I was ready to outgrow Tanner as a vehicle for self-expression. I had not yet finished developing as a writer and needed other books, other sorts of stories, in order to facilitate this growth.

Some writers handle this by allowing the character to grow. The most striking example that comes to mind is Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, who was not a whole lot more than a wisecracking carbon copy of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in his earliest appearances. As Macdonald grew, so did Archer, and by the time The Galton Case was published in the late fifties, Archer had undergone a radical change. This evolution has continued over the years, and I reach for each new volume as it is published, wondering what Archer's up to now.

I don't think I could have done anything like this with Tanner. To change him would have been to lose him utterly. Better to lay him to rest, or put him out to pasture, or let him go his own way while I went mine.

Chip Harrison, on the other hand, did change dramatically so that I might continue writing about him. He made his debut in No Score as a seventeen-year-old virgin with a desperate yearning to change his status. The book was episodic, with Chip traveling around and getting into various scrapes and never managing to get it together with an acquiescent young woman until the final chapter, when his efforts were crowned with success.

I never expected to write more about Chip. But No Score did exceptionally well on the newsstands, and it occurred to me that I would enjoy spending a month or so seeing the world through Chip's innocent eyes. I sent him roaming in Chip Harrison Scores Again, which was essentially the mixture as before, and it worked fairly well.

That made two books but it didn't make a series, and I found I wanted to do more with the character. So I thought up Leo Haig and put Chip to work for him, retaining his character pretty much intact as a sort of lecher in the rye but making an apprentice detective out of him.

I'm certainly not the first person to turn an unintentional series character into a detective. In The Name of the Game Is Death, Dan Marlowe created as his lead a hardened professional criminal named Earl Drake. The book worked well and was well received, and in the course of writing further about Drake, Marlowe gradually turned him from a criminal into a problem-solver, working (as I recall) at the behest of some national security agency. I stopped reading the books when Drake stopped pulling heists and became just another