Lawrence BlockLawrence Block20051-0000-0000-1enHarperCollinsHardcopyTelling Lies for Fun & Profit
Telling Lies FOR FUN & PROFIT Lawrence Block Introduction By Sue Grafton
A Manual for Fiction Writers
For HAL DRESNER COLLEAGUE, COMPANION, AND CORSICAN BROTHER
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION by Sue Grafton PREFACE PART ONE THE LIAR’S TRADE: Fiction as a Profession 1. SETTING YOUR SIGHTS How to discover your options as a writer. Using your reading preferences as a selection mechanism. Deciding what to write via identification with another writer. 2. STUDYING THE MARKET The mechanics of market analysis. Reading with a purpose. Defining a category through plot summaries. How to write stories that are the-same-only-different. 3. DECISIONS, DECISIONS The question of slanting for an editor’s taste. How to maintain integrity as a writer without making things hard for yourself. The Stepmother—a case study in decision-making. 4. NOVEL APPROACHES The disadvantages of short fiction. Why not write a novel? Plots and outlines. The first novel as a learning experience. 5. NOTHING SHORT OF NOVEL A further discussion of the book-length work of fiction. The power of writing one page a day. Overcoming fear of failure. More questions and answers on the novel. 6. SUNDAY WRITERS Writing as an avocation. Is eventual publication essential for success? The special rewards of unpublished fiction. 7. “DEAR JOY” Advice to a college writer. What courses to take. The values and limitations of writing classes. Sidelines and extracurricular activities. Becoming a pro. 8. HOW TO READ LIKE A WRITER How writing improves one’s reading. Mental rewriting as a literary exercise. Improving your writing skills through analytical reading. 9. ROLLING WITH THE PUNCHES
How to handle rejection. The importance of submitting manuscripts relentlessly. Rejection as a part of the process of writing. What it does and doesn’t mean to you. 10. BIC, SCRIPTO, PARKER AND CROSS The uses and abuses of pen names. Six reasons to use a pen name. Why not to use a pen name. Making your own choice. 11. WRITING WITH TWO HEADS Teaming up with a collaborator. Collaboration vs. ghostwriting. “Five times the work for half the money.” The joys of collaboration. How different author teams work together. 12. IT TAKES MORE THAN TALENT Other requirements for writing success. The importance of luck. The role of the will. The one-book author. Living with financial insecurity. You have to like the work. PART TWO NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE, SHOULDER TO THE WHEEL: Fiction as a Discipline 13. WRITER’S HOURS Do writers work all the time? Writing, research and the guilt trap. Knowing when enough is enough. Starting early. Working regularly. Postponing routine work. 14. THE CARROT AND THE STICK The art of self-discipline. Giving writing top priority. Setting goals for yourself. Staying in the now. Getting the job done. “Listen, it’s only a book.” 15. CREATIVE PROCRASTINATION Coming to terms with the thief of time. Developing fictional ideas through procrastination. Creative use of the back burner. “And Miles to Go Before I Sleep”—a case study in Creative Procrastination. 16. TIME OUT Writer’s block and creative sloth. Coping with indolence. What to do when the words won’t come. Learning to regard stretches of inactivity as part of the creative process. 17. DO IT ANYWAY What to do when the words have to come. Giving yourself permission to write badly. Learning to override your own critical instincts. Getting through bad patches. 18. F U CN RD THS Writing faster without sacrificing quality. Fast writers vs. slow writers. How to find your own natural speed.
19. WASHING GARBAGE The pleasures and pains of rewriting. How revision can drain a story of its freshness. How to minimize the need for extensive revision. Rewriting as you go along. Doing mental first drafts. 20. ON BEING READ The importance of sharing your work with others. Making use of readers’ reactions. Why fellow writers make the best audience. Ways to avoid disappointment. 21. BURNING THE RAFT AT BOTH ENDS How to keep having something to write about. The relationship of input and output. Remaining open to new experience. Four ways to stay out of ruts. 22. CREATIVE PLAGIARISM When stealing is legitimate—and when it isn’t. Improving on what you read. Working variations on a theme. “The Ehrengraf Defense”—a case study in Creative Plagiarism. 23. “WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?” How to generate fictional ideas. Putting bits of fact together. Getting ideas from writers and publishers. The hazards of other people’s ideas. Harnessing the creative power of your own frustrations. PART THREE OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB: Fiction as a Structure 24. OPENING REMARKS The importance of strong openings. Getting the story moving. Setting the tone. Establishing the problem. How to get your story off to a good start. 25. FIRST THINGS SECOND The trick of not beginning at the beginning. Switching Chapters 1 and 2. When not to use this approach. Case studies. 26. SPRING FORWARD, FALL BACK Skipping around in time. Taking a stitch in time in transitions. The art of starting in the middle. Mini-flashbacks. 27. DON’T TAKE THE D TRAIN How to avoid getting bogged down in detail. The perils of over-explaining. Fast cuts—the difference between film and prose. 28. THE I’S HAVE IT Traditional warnings against writing in the first person. The special advantages of first-person narration. Its strengths as an aid in characterization and identification. Withholding information from the reader. 29. THE PLOT’S THE THING
The central importance of plot. Distinguishing between plot and idea. “Last Wishes”—a case study in plotting. 30. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY The necessity of strong character motivation. Why it cannot be taken for granted. Motivating your characters through strong plot development. Wilderness—a case study in effective motivation. 31. THINK YOU’VE GOT PROBLEMS? The problem as the core of a plot. Making things hard for your hero. How to be your own worst enemy. The perils of icebox thinking. When to bring in a bear in a canoe. 32. JUDGING DISTANCES How to draw the reader in close. Some reasons to keep him at arm’s length. First names vs. last names. Using a Watson. Regulating distance through dialogue. 33. IT’S A FRAME The frame device as a distancing mechanism. Adding dimension to a story through a frame. The story within a story. 34. DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE Telling a story in letters or diary entries. Early examples of documentary fiction. The possibilities of verisimilitude. 35. SURPRISE! The value of surprise endings. Why some work while others don’t. Withholding information from the reader. Surprises that fall flat. Surprise endings that give a story a whole new perspective. PART FOUR ONE DAMNED WORD AFTER ANOTHER: Fiction as a Craft 36. NEVER APOLOGIZE, NEVER EXPLAIN The perils of explaining too much. The author as stage director. How to get out of the way. When to keep the reader in the dark. The reader’s role in fiction. 37. HE SAID SHE SAID Letting dialogue stand alone. Adding verbs for accent value. Alternatives to said. Special options in first-person narration. The rules and when to break them. 38. VERBS FOR VIM AND VIGOR Strengthening your prose with stronger verbs. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves—a case study in imaginative verb use. The Sour Lemon Score—a case study in vivid action verbs. 39. MODIFIERS FOR MOOD-SWING Minimizing modifiers to create lean prose. Adding them to sharpen the focus. Factual vs. judgmental modifiers. Avoiding empty adjectives. Moby Dick—a case study in the use of adjectives.
40. WRITING WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED How to enhance your scenes by visualizing them. Some exercises to develop visualization techniques. Suspending your own disbelief. 41. HUM A FEW BARS…AND FAKE IT Shortcuts to time-consuming research. Faking locations. Feigning expertise. How not to overdo it. The importance of details. 42. CHARACTER BUILDING Creating plausible, sympathetic, and original characters. Character vs. character tags. Drawing upon one’s own self. Matthew Scudder—a case study in characterization. 43. CASTING Creating memorable minor characters and bit players. Highlighting character vs. caricature. Casting as an aid to plot development. 44. NAME CALLING How to pick apt and memorable names for your characters. Avoiding confusion. Keeping a notebook. Watching out for cuteness. Shortcuts in research. 45. REPEAT PERFORMANCES AND RETURN ENGAGEMENTS Special problems in creating and developing a series character. Writing a series one book at a time. How to keep from going stale. Letting a character grow and evolve. 46. WE CAN ALWAYS CHANGE THE TITLE What makes a good title? Coming up with memorable titles. Titles that fit their stories. Using your imagination. How titles get changed. PART FIVE ISN’T THAT THE TRUTH: Fiction as a Spiritual Exercise 47. A WRITER’S PRAYER SEARCHABLE TERMS OTHER BOOKS BY LAWRENCE BLOCK COVER CREDITS COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION by Sue Grafton SO HERE’S how this went. I was struggling with the storyline for K is for Killer, which had just about wrestled me to a standstill. I knew it was time to launch into the first chapter, but
my psyche was reacting. I’d spent the day half-sick, staggering from my bed to the word processor and back. Nothing seemed to work. I knew the illness was stress-induced, but the symptoms were sufficient to muddy my thinking. I tried an opening or two, but I couldn’t hit a vein. Naturally, I did what any sensible writer in my position would do. I went out to the mailbox. There, among the fascinating personal messages addressed to OR CURRENT RESIDENT, was a letter from Lawrence Block indicating that Morrow would be publishing a new edition of Telling Lies for Fun and Profit and asking if I’d contribute the introduction. Thrilled at so legitimate a reason to avoid my work, I went back to my office and plucked my well-worn copy from the shelf. I began to leaf through the pages, purely with an eye to preparing this foreword. Soon, I was sprawled in a comfy chair reading every chapter in sequence. Midway, I sat up, amazed to find that in the chapter called “Opening Remarks,” Lawrence Block had written about the very frustration I was experiencing with K. Furthermore, his advice about openings was right on the money. I set the book aside and went back to my word processor, looking at my problem with renewed interest and a tiny flicker of hope. I began to pick my way through the rubble, and suddenly I found myself in business again. I knew Lawrence Block’s work long before I knew the man. For many years before our first meeting, I’d been intrigued not only by his fiction, but by his advice about writing. In the early years of the Kinsey Millhone series, I made a point of reading Telling Lies for Fun and Profit before beginning each new book. I still find it essential to my peace of mind. Telling Lies for Fun and Profit is the equivalent of a house call from the family doctor. Whatever my condition, whatever the nature of my creative symptoms that day, I know I can count on a sympathetic ear and an effective remedy. Whether he’s talking about plot, character motivation, point of view, or revisions, his suggestions are practical and his guidance is dependable. I remember asking him once how he could be so generous. Every theory about writing, every trick he’d discovered, he was willing to share. Wasn’t he worried about revealing trade secrets? Wasn’t his advice to other writers the same as aiding and abetting his professional competition? He seemed amused by the question. “So what if someone else does well? That doesn’t affect me or my work.” He felt that writing about his own experiences forced him to crystallize his thoughts and allowed him new insights that were invaluable to him. In rereading Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, I’ve been startled to realize how many of the tenets I’d thought were my private revelations really came from him: his advice about writing to please yourself, about putting writing first; his counsel about page-count quotas as a way of fulfilling the work commitment from day to day. For years now I’ve been happily passing these off as my personal epiphanies, and perhaps they were; I’m sure many working writers eventually arrive at the same conclusions. But what a comfort it is to come across them in print. Reading Lawrence Block’s opinions has reinforced my own. There’s consolation in knowing our experiences are so similar. After all, if he has survived, then maybe I will, too. Most valuable to me is the fact that he takes me behind the scenes, making me a part of his process, privy to the struggles he has endured over the course of his long career. He, too, has suffered resistance, bewilderment, occasional lapses in faith. He has begun and abandoned manuscripts, been blocked, given up all hope, has returned to half-finished books with puzzlement about why he broke off the writing, turning them then into some of his most accomplished published works. He’s candid about his failures and refreshingly modest about his numerous successes. His wisdom, his munificence, his warmth, and his down-to-earth admonitions about the craft of fiction are the equivalent of a home-study program.
I would urge other writers, at whatever point in their careers, to take the time to read this indispensable handbook. In it, Lawrence Block addresses with humor and common sense the issues that every writer faces. His ruminations about his fictional destinations, his recognition of the myriad obstacles along the road, and his suggestions about how to cope with every aspect of the journey have made me a better traveler. Telling Lies for Fun and Profit should be a permanent part of every writer’s library. Certainly, the book holds a treasured place on my shelf. At the moment, I’m hoping another quick read will give me the solution to my current crisis. And on it goes. Santa Barbara, California
PREFACE IN THE summer of ’75 I hit the road. I gave up my New York apartment, sold or gave away most of the possessions of a lifetime, packed the remainder into the back of a diseased station wagon, and set out for Los Angeles. It took me about eight months to get there. I followed the coast down to Florida, then drifted west. I would linger in a spot for a couple of days or weeks, then pull up stakes on a whim. Once I checked out of a motel and drove five miles down the road because the television set at the first place wouldn’t pick up a football game I wanted to watch. During this time I continued writing. I had, after all, done virtually nothing else since college. I wrote the first draft of a novel which ultimately became Ariel. I wrote several books that withered and died after fifty or sixty pages; when I think of them now I imagine them as mummified fruit on a tainted tree. I wrote short stories, too, something I hadn’t done in years. And I wrote an article which I called “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” I did a mental first draft in the car heading west from Wilmington, North Carolina, typed it the following morning in a motel room, and mailed it the next afternoon from a branch post office in Greenville, South Carolina. And had not the slightest idea what I was getting into. Half a year later I was living at the Magic Hotel in Hollywood. One day I remembered that article I’d sent to Writer’s Digest. I’d never heard from them. I wrote, asking wha hoppen, and got a phone call in reply from WD’s editor John Brady. He’d been attempting to buy the piece for months but some secretary had garbled my address and the correspondence had gone awry. We discussed a couple of changes he wanted me to make. I mentioned I’d be driving east sometime in August, and he invited me to say hello if I got within hailing distance of Cincinnati. By August I decided Writer’s Digest needed a fiction column. I made a point of stopping in Cincinnati on my way back to New York, and after a hearty lunch continued east with an assignment to write a column every other month on the techniques of fiction. After I’d done five or six columns there was some editorial reshuffling and my column went monthly. I’ve been at it ever since. Looking back, I found myself wondering what ever prompted me to write that piece on the genesis of fictional ideas in the first place. I can think of a couple of factors. I’d been deprived entirely of the company of other writers for a few months at that point, and I guess I was feeling the isolation; it must have concentrated my mind upon the nature of my work and its underlying processes. For another thing, I was writing short stories again after a long
layoff, and my mind was serving up plot ideas one after the other. I found the process interesting enough to write about. I certainly never suspected that a few pages on the development of ideas would eventually transform me into someone who spent a significant amount of his time writing about writing. But that is what has happened, and it has had interesting effects above and beyond my monthly check and the ego gratification of a regular column. It’s a commonplace in the profession that writers work twenty-four hours a day. (See Chapter 13, “Writer’s Hours.) I don’t know about that, but I do know that my column keeps me working far more than the time I devote to its actual composition. Everything I read is potentially grist for this particular mill. Does a particular author foreshadow a coming plot development in an interesting way? Hmmm. Should I consider a column on foreshadowing as a literary device? What other examples come to mind? Examples, say, of ineffective foreshadowing as well? Similarly, I’ve become more interested than ever in what other writers have to say about writing, whether they’re discussing their writing methods, offering tips, or commenting upon the nature of the profession. I’m forever clipping things—and, more often than not, losing the clips. Once or twice a year WD’s capable Rose Adkins writes me a plaintive note asking for a list of my prospective column topics for the next however many months. Once or twice a year I try to make her understand that I could more easily supply maps of the far side of the moon. More often than not, I complete each column convinced I’ll have to give up the job, that I’ll never again be able to come up with a viable theme for a column. Somehow within the next thirty days a topic suggests itself and I find a way to approach it. I’ve learned to take it on faith that this will happen. Even more than writing in general a monthly column is a two-way street. From the column’s inception I have received letters in a steady stream—letters offering suggestions, letters seeking advice, letters thanking me or calling me to task for something I did or didn’t say. Both the volume and the fervor of this correspondence continually impress me with just how important all of this business of stringing words together is to all of us who do it. Whatever our degree of commercial or artistic success, whether we be fresh as paint or older than rust, writing appears to be an imperative. Letters from readers often furnish me with ideas for future columns. Equally important, the feedback they constitute keeps me in touch with my audience and with my material. I read every letter I get, and I reply to most of them. I almost always reply to those accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope. A word to the wise… This present volume had its origin in correspondence. Any number of readers have written suggesting that my columns might be collected and published in book form. While I have to admit that the very same idea did occur to me all by itself, the letters helped assure me that a market for such a book existed. It has been an interesting experience editing four years’ worth of columns for book publication. I have done relatively little editing, largely confining myself to changing “column” to “chapter” now and then, and deleting occasional duplications from one column to the next. I have, too, been able to correct mistakes, both grammatical and factual, although I don’t doubt for a moment that I have unwittingly left numerous examples of both sort uncorrected.
Sometimes, rereading this material, I’ve been struck by a tendency to say the same thing over and over. At other times it seems to me that I give conflicting advice from one month to the next. Ultimately I’ve decided not to apologize for either the redundancy or the contradictions. They strike me as inescapable in material written at various times and from various perspectives. Several persons deserve my thanks in this venture. The good people at Writer’s Digest, especially John Brady, Rose Adkins, Bill Brohaugh, and publisher Dick Rosenthal, have been unfailingly helpful and supportive since the column’s inception. Book publication might not have happened but for the encouragement and enthusiasm of Don Fine of Arbor House; I know no one in the industry who cares more about fiction, or publishes it with greater conviction and respect. Jared Kieling, my editor at Arbor House, is responsible for the book’s scheme of organization. It was he who was able to see that the columns grouped themselves naturally into four general areas—fiction as a profession, as a discipline, as a structure, and as a craft. I embraced this plan wholeheartedly, finding it potentially more useful to the reader than the two organizational modes which had occurred to me—viz., chronologically and alphabetically. When I write a column, it’s impossible for me to know if anyone will find it useful. The nutsand-bolts columns of Part Four seem to me to offer the most real help to a writer, and yet it is almost invariably the more general inspirational columns which draw the heaviest reader mail. Of course what’s helpful and what prompts one to respond may not be the same thing. In any event, it’s similarly impossible for me to know how valuable readers will find this book. I know that it’s been enormously valuable to me to write it, column by column, and I have all of you who read it to thank for the opportunity. New York City March 9, 1981
PART ONE
The Liar’s Trade: Fiction as a Profession
1 Setting Your Sights CHAPTER
A COUPLE of months ago I returned to Antioch College to teach an intensive week-long seminar on fictional technique. One of the first things I remembered as I crossed the campus was a cartoon which had been displayed on the English Department bulletin board during my first year as an Antioch student. The cartoon showed a sullen eight-year-old boy facing an earnest principal. “It’s not enough to be a genius, Arnold,” the man was saying. “You have to be a genius at something.”
I recall identifying very strongly with Arnold. I had known early on that I wanted to be a writer. But it seemed that it wasn’t enough merely to be a writer. You had to sit down and write something. Some people receive the whole package as a gift. Not only are they endowed with writing talent but they seem to have been born knowing what they are destined to write about. Equipped at the onset with stories to tell and the skills required to tell them, they have only to get on with the task. Some people, in short, have it easy. Some of us don’t. We know that we want to write without knowing what we want to write. How are we to decide what to write? By chance, I suspect, more often than not. Yet there seem to be some steps one can take in order to find oneself as a writer. Let’s have a look at them. 1. DISCOVERING THE OPTIONS. When I was fifteen or sixteen years old and secure in the knowledge that I’d been born to be a writer, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder what sort of thing I would write. I was at the time furiously busy reading my way through Great Twentieth Century Novels, Steinbeck and Hemingway and Wolfe and Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and all their friends and relations, and it was ever so clear to me that I would in due course produce a Great Novel of my own. I’d go to college first, naturally, where I might get a somewhat clearer idea of what constituted a Great Novel. Then I’d emerge from college into the Real World. There I would Live. (I wasn’t quite sure what Capital-L Living entailed, but I figured there would be a touch of squalor in there somewhere, along with generous dollops of booze and sex.) All of this Living would ultimately constitute the Meaningful Experiences which I would eventually distill into any number of great books. Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this approach. Any number of important novels are produced in this approximate fashion, and the method has the added advantage that, should you write nothing at all, you’ll at least have treated yourself to plenty of booze and sex along the way. In my own case, my self-image as a writer was stronger than my self-image as a potential great novelist. I began reading books about writers and their work. I became a sporadic student of Writer’s Digest. I loved the success stories and identified with their subjects. And, reading the market reports, I became aware that there was a whole world of professional writing that lay outside the more exclusive world of significant literature. I came to realize that, whatever my ultimate goals, my immediate aim was to write something—anything!— and get paid for it and see it in print. I began reading a great many different kinds of books and magazines, trying to find something I figured I could write. I didn’t care whether it was significant or artistic or even interesting. I just wanted to find something I could do. 2. YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO READ IT. When I was starting out, confession magazines were generally acknowledged to constitute the best and most receptive market for new writers. They paid fairly well, too. I think I understood what a confession story was, the basic structure of its plot, and what made one story good and another unacceptable. During the year I spent working for a literary agent, the two confessions I pulled out of the slush pile both sold on their first submission, and the author of one of them came to be a leader in the field.
On several occasions, I bought or borrowed confession magazines and decided to read my way through them. I never made it. I could not read one of the damned things all the way through without skimming. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. And I couldn’t shake the conviction that the entire magazine, from front to back, was nothing but mindrotting garbage. Nor, consequently, could I produce a confession story. The ideas my mind came up with were either numbingly trite or at odds with the requirements of the market. I never did turn any of these ideas into stories, never wrote a confession until one bizarre weekend when I wrote three of them to order for a publisher with a couple of holes to fill and a deadline fast approaching. Those stories were awful. I wrote them because I’d taken the assignment, and the publisher printed them because he had to, and that was the hardest money I ever made. I know other writers with similar experience in other fields. The moral is simple enough. If you can’t stand to read a particular type of story, you’re wasting your time trying to write it. 3. IDENTIFYING WITH THE WRITER. As a lifelong compulsive reader, I had little trouble finding categories of stories I could read with enjoyment. What I learned then, and have confirmed on many occasions since, is that just because I can read a particular story doesn’t perforce mean I can write it. For example, there was a time when I read a great deal of science fiction. I liked most S-F stories, and I liked the good ones a lot. Furthermore, I used to hang out with several established science-fiction writers. I found them a congenial lot, and I liked the way they grabbed hold of ideas and turned them into stories. But I couldn’t write science fiction. No matter how much of the stuff I read, my mind did not produce workable S-F ideas. I could read those stories with a fan’s enjoyment, but I could not get the sort of handle on those stories that left me thinking, “I could have written that. I could have come up with that idea, and I could have developed it the way he did. I could have been the writer of that story.” One of the things that makes a story work is that you identify with the characters. Well, one of the things that makes a story writable, if you will, is when you read it and identify not only with the characters but with the writer. I remember the first time that happened. It was the summer after my freshman year at Antioch. I picked up a paperback anthology of short stories entitled The Jungle Kids. The author was Evan Hunter, who had recently made a name for himself with The Blackboard Jungle. I read the dozen or so stories in the book, all of them dealing with juvenile delinquents, virtually all of them originally published in Manhunt, and I experienced a shock of recognition. I identified, not so much with the characters in the stories, but with Evan Hunter himself. I can still remember how excited I was when I got to the end of the book. Here was someone writing and publishing well-written stories that I could respect and enjoy—and I could see myself doing what he had done. I felt it was something I could do and I saw it as eminently worth doing. Had I known then what I know now, I would have immediately gone to a back-magazine store and purchased every available copy of Manhunt. This never occurred to me. I did check one newstand, and when they proved to be out of the magazine I forgot all about it. I went on to write a couple of stories about juvenile delinquents, but they were lousy and I didn’t try submitting them anywhere.
Some months later, I wrote a story about a young criminal. It had nothing in common with the Hunter stories, and I had indeed forgotten about them when I wrote it. A couple of months after that, I read the listing for Manhunt in a copy of Writer’s Digest, remembered the magazine as having published Hunter’s stories, and sent them mine. It came back with a note from the editor criticizing the ending. At that point I finally took the trouble to locate a copy of Manhunt, read it from cover to cover, and rewrote my story with a new ending. It was not, however, a very good ending, and it came back by return mail. I kept reading Manhunt, however, and a month later I saw how to make the story work, and rewrote it once again, and they bought it, and I decided crime fiction was my metier. I can’t say I’ve never regretted the decision, but I do seem to have stuck with it over the years. Now, as then, I’m sustained by the hope that, if I just keep at it long enough, sooner or later I’ll get it right. That shock of recognition, that identification with the writer, is difficult to describe but impossible to ignore. A similar epiphany preceded the writing of my first novel. At that point I’d been writing and publishing crime stories for a year and felt it was time to write a detective novel. I’d read hundreds of them, liked them very much, and had made a couple of attempts at writing one of my own. For one reason or another, however, I couldn’t get a handle on a novel. During this time I had read perhaps a dozen lesbian novels. The sensitive novel of female hom*osexuality was a popular category in the fifties and I suspect I read the books more for information and titillation than anything else. I didn’t know any lesbians then, and all I knew about the subject was what I read in these dumb books. But I did find the books compulsively readable, and one day I finished one and realized that I could have written it. Or one quite like it. Possibly, by Georgia, one a shade better than what I’d read. In the name of research, I promptly read every other lesbian novel I could lay my hands on. Then one morning the plot came to me, and I outlined it, and a few weeks later I sat down and wrote the thing start to finish in two weeks flat, finishing four days before my twentieth birthday. (This seemed highly significant at the time. I’ve no idea why.) It sold to Fawcett, the first publisher to see it, and I was a published novelist just like that. Deciding what you’re going to write is a major step on the road to discovering yourself as a writer. Once you’ve found your particular field of endeavor, there are some more steps you can take that will make it a little simpler for you to get into that chosen field. We’ll get to them in the next chapter.
2 Studying the Market CHAPTER
IN THE preceding chapter we had a look at the process of determining what kind of story to write, what area of the market to aim at. Let’s assume now that you’ve zeroed in on a category of fiction that seems suited to you. You enjoy reading it; moreover, you can visualize yourself writing it. For one reason or another you’ve decided you want to become a writer of confessions, or science fiction, or gothic novels, or mystery stories. Now what?
The next step, it might appear, is to sit down to the typewriter and get on with it—and it’s possible that you’re ready to go ahead and do just that. Perhaps, now that you’ve chosen a fiction category, your unconscious has obligingly coughed up enough fully developed story ideas to keep your typewriter humming for months. If so, more power to you—and why aren’t you busy writing instead of reading this book? For many of us, however, there’s an interim step between deciding what sort of thing to write and setting out to write it. It consists of subjecting one’s chosen field to a detailed analysis. The analytical process is such that the writer winds up with both an ingrained gut-level understanding of what constitutes a successful story in the field and a mind trained to produce and develop the ideas for such successful stories. I can’t think of a better name for this process than market analysis, yet something in me recoils at the term. It’s too clinical, for one thing, and it seems to imply that writing can be approached scientifically, that the problem of selling to Mind-Boggler Science-Fiction Stories lends itself to a case study a la Harvard Business School. Besides, the process I’m talking about constitutes less a study of the markets than of the individual stories themselves. Our object is to learn what makes a story work, not what makes a particular editor buy it. Okay—whatever you call it, I want to do it. What do I do first? Good question. What you do is you read. Last chapter we established that the category of story you elect to write had better be one you enjoy reading. Now that you’ve picked a category, you’re going to have to do some really intensive reading. In my own case, I pretty much backed into writing for the crime-fiction magazines. But once I had made that first sale to Manhunt, I proceeded to study that magazine and all the others in the field more intently than I ever studied anything before or since. I bought Manhunt and Hitchco*ck and Ellery Queen and Trapped and Guilty and a few other magazines whenever they appeared on the stands. In addition, I made regular visits to backmagazine shops, where I picked up every back issue of those publications that I could find. I carried lists in my wallet to avoid buying the same issue twice. And I carted them all home and arranged them in orderly fashion on my shelves, and then I read every last one of them from cover to cover. I still remember quite a few of those stories that I read twenty years or so ago. Some of them were very good. Others were not very good at all. But by reading hundreds and hundreds of those stories over the months, the good and the bad and the indifferent, I learned what constituted a successful crime story in a way I could not have learned otherwise. Understand, please, that I did not learn any formulae. I don’t know that such a thing exists. What I did learn, in a manner I cannot entirely explain, is a sense of the possible variations that could be worked upon the crime story, a sense of what worked and what didn’t. Of course I didn’t just read and read and read for months on end. Throughout this period I occasionally came up with an idea and took the time to hammer out a story. Nor did this habit of reading voraciously in my chosen field come to a halt once I was regularly turning out and selling stories of my own. I still read a great deal of suspense fiction, short stories and novels.
I do so because I enjoy much of what I read, but I also do so because I regard it as part of my work as a writer. That’s it, then, this market-analysis business? You just read a lot? Sometimes it’s enough. But there’s something else you can do that may increase the effectivness of your reading. It’s simple enough. You outline what you’ve read. I don’t mean that you take apart a story as if it were an exercise in literary criticism. You can do so, of course, and you might or might not find the process rewarding. But this method of outlining has nothing to do with criticism, with how you feel about the story, with whether the story works or doesn’t work. Having read the story, you simply write down a summary of the plot, relating in a few sentences just what happens in the story. For example: Two brothers are on their way to commit a big-time robbery when they run low on gas in the middle of nowhere. The service-station operator keeps telling them their car needs additional work and they sense they’re being conned, yet they don’t want to take chances. They let the man make more repairs than they have cash to pay for, finally robbing the station at the end because there’s no other way out. Or: Narrator and his wife come home from vacation to find their house torn inside-out by burglars. Narrator goes off to work with his partner, complaining about what happened, the damage the burglars had done, the mess they made, etc. Turns out the two men are professional burglars on their way to knock off a warehouse themselves. 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. 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. 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.
3 Decisions, Decisions CHAPTER
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 an inferior book. So I’d advise you to write the book your own way. Give it your best shot and then when you’ve finished worry about finding somebody who likes it enough to publish it.” I wheeled about and made my way to the refreshment table at this point lest I find myself in the middle of Polonius’s little spiel to Laertes, advising the poor man neither to borrow nor to lend. I hadn’t actuallysaid “To thine own self be true,” but that was certainly the thrust of my comments. Afterward, through the medium of what one might call sober reflection, I wondered if I hadn’t overstated the case. I hadn’t said anything I didn’t believe, but perhaps I had glossed over the fact that writing for certain markets demands a familiarity with the requirements of those markets. This is especially true for the neophyte writer who is aiming at one of the more accessible markets—gothics, let us say, or light romances, or confession stories. I devoted considerable space in Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print to a discussion of how to analyze the requirements of a particular fictional genre and how to write one’s own story within such a framework. Wasn’t I being inconsistent, saying this in print and then loftily advising this chap to go follow his own star? Years ago, when I worked for a literary agent, I had dealings with a would-be writer who was possessed of enormous energy, a serviceable way with prose and dialogue, and the survival instincts of a lemming. All he ostensibly wanted was to see his work in print, yet all he did was sabotage himself at every turn. Advised that confessions constituted a particularly receptive market for newcomers, he produced several, but insisted upon writing them from a male viewpoint. At the time, a confession magazine might publish one male-viewpoint story an issue, if they happened to run across one they really liked. By writing his confessions from a male point of view, the man was deliberately making things harder for himself. I had occasion to remember all of this just a few days ago when I began work on a new novel. The basic plot notion was one that had suggested itself to me some months ago—a girl’s mother dies, her father remarries, and the girl becomes convinced that her stepmother is trying to kill her. I hadn’t given the idea any conscious thought in months, but evidently my subconscious had been playing with it while I was at work on something else, and I found bits and pieces of the plot coming to me rapidly. I also found myself with decisions to make. Did I want an urban or a rural setting? Would I write the book in the first or the third person? Single or multiple viewpoint? I don’t always have to make decisions of this sort. Quite a few of the novels I’ve written over the years have recounted the continuing adventures of series characters, and in such a case a lot of these questions are predetermined. When I write a mystery about burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, for example, I know I’m going to use the first person. I know, too, who the character is and how he operates, where he lives, who his friends are, and so on. A series involves turning out books that are “the same only different,” and while that requirement presents problems of its own, it does eliminate certain decisions. A year ago I spent a week in Savannah, where I scouted locations with the intention of using the city in a novel sooner or later. When I first got the idea for The Stepmother, I felt it would fit quite neatly into that charming Georgia seaport.
Two factors changed my mind. First off, I recognized that there were already elements of plot and character in The Stepmother that were evocative of Ariel, a recent novel of mine. Ariel was set in an old house in Charleston, and while Charleston and Savannah are by no means indistinguishable one from the other, they do have points of similarity. This might not have kept me from setting the book in Savannah if I had been convinced it would work best there, but it did predispose me to look for another setting. As I thought further about the book, a second reason for getting away from Savannah came to mind. I decided I wanted to make the girl a New Yorker out of her element. I saw her as a child who has grown up in Greenwich Village, not so much precocious as sophisticated. Suppose the family moved to the country? Someplace fairly isolated, say. Delaware County, Schoharie County, one of those forgotten areas of upstate New York a few hours from the city and hence out of commuting range. With the choice of location, more of the plot immediately began to take form. Why would the family move from the Village out into the middle of nowhere? Maybe the father’s a writer who just made a lot of money and wants to play landed gentleman for a change. I began to get a sense of the house and grounds. I decided there would be an old overgrown cemetery on the property, and I saw a few ways this would fit into the plot. At this point I wrote out a few hundred words of notes, talking to myself at the typewriter, and a couple of days later I started actually writing the book. I wrote half a dozen pages and stopped, because I had another decision to make. First person or third person? I had automatically begun the book in the third person, writing the opening scene, in which the family first visits the country house, from Naomi’s point of view. (I had by this time selected a name for her). But was that the best choice? I stayed away from the typewriter for several days weighing the pros and cons. First-person narration comes very naturally to me, and I found the prospect seductive in this instance. I’m much better able to get inside the skin of my lead character when I write in the first person. It has always seemed to me the most natural voice for fiction, and I thought it might be particularly useful in The Stepmother for a couple of reasons. For one, I had a very good sense of Naomi and felt she would be a terrific character. The more effectively and compellingly I could present her to the reader, the more gripping and engaging the book would be. For another, I felt it might be difficult to get inside Naomi as well in the third person. Ariel was written in the third person, but there were two elements present which facilitated my getting inside the character and making her come alive. I used lengthy extracts from a diary she was keeping, which in effect constituted first-person sections within a third-person narrative. I also had quite a few scenes in which she conversed intimately with Erskine, a classmate of hers, and the relationship between the two kids was one of the more interesting elements of the book. I didn’t want to have Naomi keep a diary, partly because I didn’t want to write Ariel all over again, partly because I did not envision her as a diarist. Nor did I expect her to develop a close relationship with a classmate at the new school in the country; on the contrary, I saw her as essentially isolated, contemptuous of her new schoolmates and rejected by them in turn. So why not switch to first person? Well, that presented problems of another sort. For openers, I’d be limited to scenes in which Naomi was present. The reader couldn’t be privy to any
information that she didn’t know. It seemed to me that the sort of suspense novel I was writing worked best if the reader occasionally knew things the lead character did not know. It also seemed to me that the book would be more effective if the reader was never entirely certain whether the peril Naomi fancied herself to be in was real or imaginary. The use of first-person narration didn’t automatically rule out this ambivalence, but it made it more difficult to bring it off. One other thing. Suspense would be further heightened, I felt, if the reader didn’t know everything that Naomi knew, and if he wasn’t aware of everything she did. Perhaps there might be a point where suspicion was raised about Naomi’s having been responsible for her own mother’s death, say. While it’s possible for a narrator to withhold certain information from the reader—I’ve done that sort of thing in detective stories, certainly—I didn’t think it would work well here. So I decided to go with my original impulse and write the book in the third person. And, in the course of making the decision, I thought up bits of plot business that would enable Naomi to reveal herself to the reader through interaction with other characters. I decided there could be an old man who walks along that particular road every day, a rustic who’s a source of information on the area, and he and Naomi could develop some sort of friendship. I had already thought she might run off to New York and be brought back by a private detective, and I now saw how she could have further dealings with the detective. An occasional letter to her best friend in New York might serve a function similar to that of Ariel’s diary. And, in considering and rejecting the first person, I became increasingly aware of the need for writing the book from multiple viewpoint, and got a sense of some of the scenes that would have to be written, and of some of the characters from whose points of view they would be shown. One consideration, I must admit, was that novels of the sort I was writing are most commonly written in the third person. But I did not regard this fact as evidence of a requirement, or elect to go along with the majority out of a desire to make my publisher happy. Instead, I learned in the course of making my decision why third-person narration predominates, and found that it does so for very sound reasons. I thought it might be interesting to share the factors involved in making this sort of literary decision, and to show how the decision-making process itself sparks the invention of plot and character elements. I still think Polonius was quite right, and that “To thine own self be true” ought to be every writer’s first principle, but any number of decisions nevertheless need to be made in order to be true to one’s own vision, whether they are arrived at intuitively or through the sort of processes I’ve described. You’ll excuse me, won’t you? Now that I’ve made all these decisions, I’ve got to sit down and write the damned thing.
4 Novel Approaches CHAPTER
WHEN I first got started in this ridiculous profession, I wrote nothing but short stories. For a year after my first sale I hammered out crime fiction, a couple of thousand words at a clip. I
peddled some of it for a cent a word, some for a cent and a half a word, and watched much of it go unsold. After a year of this, I finally got courageous enough to write a novel. It took me two or three weeks to write it, sold to the first publisher who saw it, and brought me a vast sense of accomplishment and an advance of two thousand dollars. It did not make me rich and famous, but I was a youth of nineteen summers at the time and as callow as they come, and fame and fortune would have spoiled me for sure. I’ve recounted all this because I think my initial approach was typical for most beginning writers. We start out writing short stories because it certainly looks like the easiest way to break in. The short story is a compact and controllable form. One can grasp it all at once. It’s short—that’s how it got its name—and it won’t take a year and a day to write. A person can do a few dozen of them, learning as he goes along, in less time than it might take him to write a novel. These arguments sound logical enough, but they overlook some basic facts. Foremost of these is that the short story is infinitely more difficult to sell than the novel. The market for short fiction was minuscule when I was starting out twenty years ago. Since then it has consistently shrunk to the point of invisibility. Every year there are fewer magazines buying short stories and still more hopeful writers submitting manuscripts to them. The economics of the short-story business are discouraging at best. Hitchco*ck and Queen, my markets for short fiction, pay the same nickel a word they doled out twenty years ago. The confession mags pay a shade less than they did then, and are less eager to buy than they used to be. And each year it seems as though a few more of the top magazines have (a) gone out of business, (b) discontinued fiction, or (c) stopped reading unsolicited manuscripts. I don’t mean to talk anyone out of writing short stories. I wouldn’t go on writing them myself if I didn’t find them a great source of satisfaction. It’s more my intention to suggest that the novel is a much better place for the beginner to get started. But wait a moment. My vaunted writer’s imagination sees a lot of you waving your hands in the air. Ask your questions, then, and perhaps I can answer them. Isn’t it harder to write a novel than a short story? No. Novels aren’t harder. What they are is longer. That may be a very obvious answer, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It’s the sheer length of a novel that the beginning writer is apt to find intimidating. Matter of fact, you don’t have to be a beginner to be intimidated in this fashion. I’m writing this chapter during a momentary respite from a World War II novel which will ultimately run to five or six hundred pages. My suspense novels generally stop at two hundred pages or thereabouts, and I had a lot of trouble starting this book because its vastness scared the adverbs out of me. What’s required, I think, is a change in attitude. To write a novel you have to resign yourself to the fact that you simply can’t prime yourself and knock it all out in a single session at the typewriter. The process of writing the book is going to occupy you for weeks or months— perhaps years. But each day’s stint at the typewriter is simply that—one day’s work. That’s true whether you’re writing short stories or an epic trilogy. If you’re writing three or six or ten pages a day, you’ll get a certain amount of work accomplished in a certain span of time— whatever it is you’re working on.
I’d love to write a novel. But I don’t know how to begin. Page one’s as good a place as any. I’ll tell you a secret—nobody knows how to start a novel. There are no rules, because each novel is a case unto itself. Sometimes an outline helps. I’ve used outlines frequently and have mixed feelings about them. It’s comforting, certainly, to know where a book is going, and an outline spells all of that out for you in advance and saves you worrying that you’ll plot yourself into a corner. On the other hand, an outline can keep a novel from developing organically. There’s no way an outline can include absolutely everything, and the little elements of characterization and incident that crop up while you’re writing can change the shape and direction of your novel. If you’re tied to an outline, the book can’t grow as it wants to; its final form is as predetermined as a paint-by-number canvas. Of course you can always modify the outline as you feel the need, but that’s sometimes easier said than done. Even if you don’t use an outline, isn’t it necessary to know where the book is going? Not really. I know several writers who have written quite a few books by rolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter just to see what happens. My friend Don Westlake’s a good example. Some years ago he showed me a first chapter in which a surly guy named Parker stalks across the George Washington Bridge, snarling at a motorist who offers him a ride. When Don wrote that chapter, he knew no more about the character or his story than the chapter itself contained. But the book took shape and the character came to life, and Don’s since written sixteen books about Parker under his pen name of Richard Stark. The advantage of this particular novel approach, the Narrative Push method, is that you’re by no means locked into a formula. I think it was Theodore Sturgeon who argued that if the writer has no idea what’s going to happen next, the reader certainly won’t know what’s going to happen next. For my own part, I’ve come to prefer to know a little bit more about a book than how I’m going to open it. I’ve written too many books in recent years that ground to a halt somewhere around page seventy because I couldn’t think of anything to have happen on page seventyone. But I don’t have to know everything. I like to know where the book’s going and what direction it’ll take to get there, but I don’t need to have the whole route mapped out for me. Suppose I spend a year writing a novel and it proves unsalable. I can’t risk that much time —wouldn’t it be safer to stick to short stories? Would it? Let’s assume that you could write twelve or twenty short stories in the time it would take you to write a novel. What makes you think you’d have a better chance of selling them? And why would a batch of unsalable short stories feel less like a waste of time than an unsalable novel?
I think what keeps a lot of us from attempting a novel is simple fear. Fear that we’ll give up and leave the book uncompleted, or the greater fear that we’ll complete it and have produced something unpublishable. I don’t think these fears are justified even when they prove true. So what if a first novel’s unsalable? For heaven’s sake, the great majority of them are, and why on earth should they be otherwise? In every other trade I’ve ever heard of it’s taken for granted that one will put in a lot of work before attaining the level of professionalism. Why should we expect our writing to be instantly publishable? Writing a novel is an extraordinary learning experience. You have room in a novel, room to try things out, to make mistakes, to find your way. The writing of an unpublishable first novel is not a failure. It is an investment. A few years ago I read Justin Scott’s first novel in manuscript. It was embarrassingly bad in almost every respect, and hopelessly unpublishable. But it did him some good to write it, and his second novel—also unpublishable, as it happened—was a vast improvement. As I write this, his novel The Turning is Dell’s leader for the month, and his forthcoming book The Shipkiller is shaping up as a strong candidate for bestsellerdom. Do you suppose Justin regrets the time he “wasted” on that first novel? I’d like to write a novel—but I don’t have a good enough idea for one. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, you’re better off with a novel than short stories. Does that seem odd? You might think that a novel, covering so much more ground and so many more pages, would require more in the way of ideas. But it doesn’t usually work that way. Short stories absolutely demand either new ideas or new slants on old ones. Often a short story is little more than an idea polished into a piece of fiction. I like to write short stories—I get more sheer enjoyment out of writing them than novels, if less remuneration. But each one requires a reasonably strong idea, and the idea’s used up in a couple of thousand words. I’ve written whole novels out of ideas with no more depth to them than short-story ideas, and I’ve written other novels without having had a strong story idea to begin with. They had plot and characters, to be sure, but those developed as the book went along. Ed Hoch makes a living writing nothing but short stories—he may be the only writer of whom that’s true—and he manages because he seems to be a never-ending fount of ideas. Getting ideas and turning them into fiction is what gives him satisfaction as a writer. I sometimes envy him, but I know I couldn’t possibly come up with half a dozen viable shortstory ideas every month the way he does. So I take the easy way out and write novels. Hmmm. Time’s up, and I see a lot of you have your hands raised. Take a deep breath and go on to the next chapter.
5 Nothing Short of Novel CHAPTER
IN THE foregoing chapter we had a look at the advantages of writing a novel rather than limiting oneself to short stories. We noted that novels are easier to sell, more profitable for their authors, and constitute a considerable learning experience for the novice writer. Now let’s deal with a few more questions some of you have on the subject. I’m afraid to write a novel because I’m not that smooth a stylist. Don’t you have to be a better craftsman to make a novel come off? I don’t think so. Sometimes it’s just the reverse—a novelist can get away with stylistic crudity that would ruin a shorter piece of fiction. Remember, what a novel gives you more than anything else is room, room for your characters and storyline to carry the day. While a way with words never hurts, it’s of less overwhelming importance to the novelist than the ability to grab ahold of the reader and make him care what happens next. The bestseller list abounds with the work of writers whom no one would call polished stylists. I don’t want to name names, but I can think offhand of half a dozen writers whose first chapters are very hard going for me. I’m overly conscious of their style—writing does change one’s perceptions as a reader—and I find their dialogue mechanical, their transitions awkward, their descriptions vague. But twenty or thirty pages into their books, I’ll stop seeing the trees and begin to perceive the forest—i.e., the story grips me and I no longer notice what’s wrong with their writing. In shorter fiction, the storyline wouldn’t have a chance to take over. So perhaps you have to be a better craftsman for short stories and a better storyteller for novels, but both are equally important aspects of the writer’s art. Obviously, the finest novels are skillfully shaped, just as the finest short stories catch up the reader in their narrative spell. But I certainly wouldn’t avoid writing a novel out of lack of confidence in writing skills. All right, next question. Are you trying to raise your hand back there? You keep putting it up and taking it down. That’s because I’m uncertain. I have a good idea for a novel but I just can’t seem to get started on it. Somehow it seems pointless to begin something that’s going to take forever to finish. I know the feeling. I remember the first time I wrote a really long book. When I sat down to begin it I knew I was starting something that had to run at least five hundred pages in manuscript. I put in a good day’s work and wound up knocking out fourteen pages. I got up from the typewriter and said, “Well, just four hundred and eighty-six pages to go”—and went directly into nervous prostration at the very thought. The thing to remember is that a novel’s not going to take forever. All the old clichés actually apply—a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and slow and steady honestly does win the race. Consider this: if you write one page a day, you will produce a substantial novel in a year. Now writers who turn out a book a year, year in and year out, are considered to be quite prolific. And don’t you figure you could produce one measly little page, even on a bad day? Even on a rotten day?
Maybe it’s not the length, exactly. But when I write a short story I can hold the whole thing in my head when I sit down at the typewriter. I know exactly where I’m going and it’s just a matter of writing it down. I don’t have that kind of grasp on a novel. Of course not. Nobody does. There are a few approaches you might consider. One involves writing progressively more detailed versions of your outline until you have essentially fleshed it out into a book, having outlined each scene in each chapter before beginning the actual writing. Writers who use this approach say it makes the writing a breeze. I would think it would transform what’s supposed to be a creative act into a fundamentally mechanical process, but that doesn’t mean it might not work like a charm for you. As an alternative, you might come to realize that the control you seem to have over short stories is largely illusory. What you have is confidence—because you think you know everything about the story by the time you set out to write it. But, if you’re like me, you keep surprising yourself at the typewriter. Characters take on a life of their own and insist upon supplying their own dialogue. Scenes that looked necessary at the onset turn out to be superfluous, while other scenes take a form other than what you’d originally intended. As often as not, midway through the story you’ll think of a way to improve the basic plot itself. This happens even more markedly in novels, and that’s fine. A work of fiction ought to be an organic entity. It’s alive, and it grows as it goes. Maybe it would help you if I said something about the novel I’m working on at present, an extremely complicated thriller set during World War II. I’m about halfway through the book as I write this, and I’ve been able to get this far solely by taking it One Day at a Time. Whenever I project, whenever I start envisioning the novel as a whole, I’m paralyzed with terror. I’m convinced the whole thing is impossible and can’t conceivably work out. But as long as I can get up each morning and concentrate exclusively on what’s going to happen during that particular day’s stint at the typewriter, I seem to be doing all right—and the book is taking form nicely. One day at a time—that seems to work for me. And if you realize that you can only affect what you do now, things become a good deal more manageable. Maybe I haven’t started a novel because I’m afraid I wouldn’t finish it. Possibly so. And maybe you wouldn’t finish it. There’s no law that says you have to. Please understand that I’m not advocating abandoning a novel halfway through. I’ve done that far too often myself, and it’s not something I’ve ever managed to feel good about. But you do have every right in the world to give up on a book if it’s just not working, or if you simply discover that writing novels is not for you. As much as we’d all prefer to pretend our calling is a noble one, it’s salutary to bear in mind that the last thing this poor old planet needs is another book. The only reason to write anything is because it’s something you want to do, and if that ceases to be the case you’re entirely free to do something else instead. You know, it strikes me that we may all of us be too caught up in the desire to finish our work. That has to be our aim, obviously, but it’s easy to overemphasize that aspect of writing.
I do this myself. I became a writer because I thought I’d enjoy the process of literary creation, and in no time at all this urge transformed itself into an obsession with getting manuscripts finished and seeing them in print. I suspect the business of writing a novel becomes less a source of anxiety and more a source of pleasure if we learn to concern ourselves more with the writing process and less with the presumptive end product. The writer who does each day’s work as it comes along, enjoying it as activity and not merely enduring it as a means to an end, is going to have a better time of things. I suspect, too, he’ll wind up producing a better piece of writing for his efforts; his work won’t suffer for having been rushed, whipped like a poor horse to the finish line. All that’s required here is an attitudinal change. And if you manage it, I hope you’ll tell me how—I have a lot of trouble in this area, yearning less to write than to have written. You’ve got me convinced. I’m going to sit down and write a novel. After all, short stuff isn’t really significant, is it? It isn’t, huh? Who says? I’ll grant that commercial significance singles out the novel, and that long novels are automatically considered to be of more importance than short novels, and sell better. And I won’t deny that your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you’ve written a novel. (Of course if that’s the main concern, just go and tell them. You don’t have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don’t worry—they won’t beg to read the manuscript.) But as far as intrinsic merit is concerned, length is hardly a factor. You’ve probably heard of the writer who apologized for having written a long letter, explaining that he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. And you may have read Faulkner’s comment that every short-story writer is a failed poet, and every novelist a failed short-story writer. Well, now you’ve got me confused again. Maybe I’ll write a novel, maybe I’ll stick to short stories. One thing I know, though, and that’s that I’m not going to accomplish anything sitting on my duff. I’m going straight to the typewriter. No more putting things off. Congratulations. But I hope you’ll take time to read Chapter 15. The title’s “Creative Procrastination.”
6 Sunday Writers CHAPTER
A COUPLE of weeks ago a friend of mine was nice enough to compliment me on something he’d read in a recent column. While I was basking in the glow, he said, “It must bother you, huh? Sort of like taking money under false pretenses.” I asked what he meant. “Well, here you are writing this column,” he said, “and you know full well that the vast majority of your readers are never going to write anything publishable, and you’re in there
every month telling them how to improve their technique. Hell, you’re just encouraging ’em in their folly.” I was really annoyed with him, not least because he was calling my attention to doubts I’d had myself. I once turned down an opportunity to teach writing in an adult education program for reasons along the lines of what he’d said. But after my friend and I had gone our separate ways, I gave some further thought to the whole question—and I wound up grateful to him for raising the point. For one thing, he made me realize the extent to which we’re all hung up on publishing what we write. Now that may look painfully obvious at first glance, but when you look at the other forms of creative endeavor you can see the difference. Every writer I’ve ever known has written with the hope of eventual publication. Contrast that with all the Sunday painters daubing oil on canvas for their private enjoyment, all the actors whose ambitions have never strayed beyond amateur theatrical presentations, all the folks taking piano lessons without the vaguest dream of a debut at Carnegie Hall. Millions of people snap pictures without hoping to see them published. Millions more make jewelry and throw pots and knit shawls, free altogether from the craving to profit from their craft. I’ve known quite a few Sunday painters, including several in my own family. They’re quite accomplished and they get enormous satisfaction from what they do. Some exhibit in local shows, occasionally winning a little recognition. But they don’t sell paintings, they’ve never tried to sell paintings, and they don’t consider themselves failures. These painters are very fortunate—they don’t need to prove themselves in the marketplace in order to get a sense of accomplishment from their work. They can produce a painting and either give it to a friend or hang it on a blank wall. Their artistic struggles may be rewarding or frustrating according to whether they do or do not achieve what they aimed at artistically. But, once a painting’s finished, they don’t succeed or fail if it does or does not sell. Why aren’t there more Sunday writers? Why don’t those of us who write as a hobby find our work satisfying in and of itself? I think there are some good reasons. Foremost, I suppose, is that communication is absolutely implicit in writing. If a story is not to be read, why write it down in the first place? An unpublished piece of fiction is an incompleted act, like a play staged in an empty theater. We can’t effectively hang our manuscripts on the wall. Some of us do give them to friends— by having our work privately published. But that’s expensive, and in addition there’s a certain stigma that often attaches to it. If it’s really good, we and our friends wonder, why should we have to pay to have it published? And if it’s not of professional caliber, why don’t we keep it in the attic? Poets have an edge here. The prospect of making a living from poetry is so remote as to be nonexistent, and that’s very liberating. Since every poet’s a financial failure, no odium attaches to such failure. Only a minuscule proportion of skilled poets ever have their works published in book form, and they make no more than a pittance from such publication. So the poet who circulates his verses privately, or pays to have them printed, is less likely to feel qualms about it than the fiction writer who does the same thing. When all poets are essentially amateurs, one’s not ashamed to be less than professional. One’s friends and neighbors probably don’t know the names or work of many widely published poets. They’re not forever reading in the gossip columns of staggering sums paid for film rights to a sonnet sequence. Poetry, like virtue, is its own reward. Where’s the reward in unpublished fiction?
As far as I’ve been able to determine, it does not lie in the sheer joy of the act of writing. Because writing’s not much fun. I really wonder why that is. Again, comparison with other art forms is instructive. It’s been my observation that painters, both professional and amateur, love to paint. They get genuine enjoyment out of the physical act of smearing paint on canvas. Sometimes they’re blocked, sometimes they’re frustrated, but when they’re painting the very process of creation is a joy to them. Same thing certainly holds true for musicians. They only seem to feel alive when they’re performing. The jazz musicians I’ve known spend their afternoons practicing scales and such, work all night performing, then jam for free at an after-hours joint until dawn, just for the sheer pleasure of it. In sharp contrast, almost every writer I know will go to great lengths to avoid being in the same room with his typewriter. Those of us who are driven to produce great quantities of manuscript don’t necessarily get any real pleasure out of the act; it’s just that we feel worse when we don’t write. It’s not the carrot but the stick that gets most of us moving. I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no positive pleasure connected with writing. I enjoy getting ideas, for example—both the initial plot germs and the ideas that develop in the course of extended work on a novel. And I very much enjoy having written; the satisfaction of having completed a taxing piece of work can be monumental. This latter pleasure, come to think of it, is a negative one, isn’t it? When I’m delirious with joy over having finished something, my joy stems in large part from the fact that I do not have to work on it any more, that the dratted thing is over and done with. So it’s nice being about to write, and it’s nice to have written. But is there no way to enjoy writing while it’s going on? One thing that impedes enjoyment, I would think, is that writing’s hard work. Painters and musicians work hard, too, but there’s a difference. You can’t really relax and go with the flow while you’re writing—at least I can’t, and if anyone can show me how, I’ll be delighted to learn. Writing demands all of my attention and focuses me entirely in the present. I can’t let my mind wander, and if my mind wanders in spite of itself I find I can’t write, and when I want to write and can’t write I find myself possessed of murderous rage. When a painting doesn’t go well the artist can keep on painting and cover it up. When a musician’s not at his best, the notes he plays float off on the air and he can forget about them. When I’m off my form, the garbage I’ve written just sits there on the page and thumbs its nose at me. And when it gets into print that way, it’s there for all the world to see, forever. There are some writers who enjoy writing. Isaac Asimov, for one, seems to enjoy every minute of it, and there may be others similarly blessed. And everybody enjoys it now and then, when the words flow effortlessly and you feel plugged into the Universal Mind and the stuff on the page is worlds better than what you had in mind when you sat down. That doesn’t happen very often, but I’ll tell you it’s a kick when it does. Sometimes I think the Sunday writer enjoys a great advantage over those of us who have to do this stuff to put bread on the table. What constantly mitigates his enjoyment is his desire to give up his amateur standing and turn professional. I don’t know that every foot soldier carries in his knapsack the baton of a marshal of France. I do know that, when it comes to writing, everybody wants to get into the act, and every Sunday writer thinks his typewriter ought to be able to turn out a bestseller.
Maybe it just has to be that way. Maybe we can’t put up with the hard work of writing in the first place unless we’re goaded by the urge to publish. I would certainly hope, though, that Sunday writers can avoid equating failure to publish with failure as a writer. If you are gaining satisfaction from writing, if you are exercising and improving your talent, if you are committing to paper your special feelings and perceptions, then you can damn well call yourself a success. Whether you wind up in print, whether you ever see money for your efforts, is and ought to be incidental. No, I don’t feel guilty for writing my column each month. It may well be that many of my readers will never publish anything, but so what? Perhaps some of you will write a little better for having read one of my efforts. “You’re just encouraging them in their folly.” Am I indeed? That presupposes that writing stories which will not ultimately be published is folly, and that’s an assumption I’m unwilling to grant. And the very word folly calls to mind a line of William Blake’s—“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” I don’t know that persistence on the part of the Sunday writer leads to wisdom. I don’t even know that it will lead to publication. But it can definitely lead to satisfaction, and I’d regard that as no small reward.
7 “Dear Joy” CHAPTER
Dear Joy, By now I suppose you’re pretty well settled in at college. When I talked to your dad recently he did some pardonable boasting about your scholarship, and I’d like to offer my congratulations. He also said you were thinking about becoming a writer. On that score I don’t know whether congratulations or condolences are in order. As an alternative, let me furnish you with a little unsolicited advice. The first point that comes to mind is the question of what a future writer ought to study in college. When I went to school I automatically majored in English Literature; since I intended to write the stuff, it seemed fitting and proper to find out first what other people had done in that area. I don’t suppose this did me any discernible harm, but neither am I sure it did me much good. I don’t think there’s any question that writers ought to be readers, and I’ve never known a professional writer who wasn’t a virtually compulsive reader, but studying literature and reading are not the same thing. As in most academic disciplines, the student of literature undergoes a course of study which most prepares him to become a teacher of literature. This is not a bad thing to be, nor are teaching and writing mutually exclusive; a lot of writers who don’t make the grade, or are emotionally unsuited to life as a free-lancer, find teaching a comfortable occupation.
The only reason not to major in English is that it might keep you from studying something else that you’re more interested in. The most important single thing you can do at college is pursue your own interests, whatever they might turn out to be and however remotely they might appear to relate to a career in writing. I don’t honestly think it makes a bit of difference what you study—just so long as it’s what you wantto study. Humanities or hard sciences, history or botany or philosophy or calculus, whatever excites you intellectually at the time is the most useful thing for you as a student and, ultimately, as a writer. As a corollary to the principle of following your own interests, you would do well to find out who the most provocative professors are at your school. Then contrive to take at least one course from each of them, whatever the hell they’re teaching. The specific facts learned in a classroom, the content of the required reading, rarely lingers in the mind too long after graduation. But the stimulation of intellectual interchange with an exciting and exceptional mind is something which will be with you forever. Nobody can teach you to write, not on a college campus or anywhere else. But this doesn’t mean that writing courses are a waste of time. On the contrary, they’re a source of time—and this may very well be their most important function. They provide you with time and academic credit for your own experimentation at the typewriter. You might be doing this writing anyway, stealing the time from other courses. When you take a writing course you’re expected to devote a certain amount of time to writing, and that’s often useful, just as the need to produce assignments on demand is an inordinately valuable discipline. Most writing courses involve the submission of manuscripts which are read aloud to the class, by the instructor or the individual authors, after which they are subjected to group criticism. I hope someone improves on this format soon. Prose is not written to be read aloud, and the effect of a short story so presented has little to do with its effect in print. Even with these limitations, writing courses can be very valuable for you, less for the criticism you’ll receive from others than for the opportunity you’ll have to observe what doesn’t work in other people’s writing. This is an important point. The best and easiest way to learn writing by reading consists of exposing yourself to large doses of inferior amateur work. It’s easier to spot a flaw than comprehend the reasons an unblemished piece is flawless. Nothing helped my own writing like a few months of work reading unsolicited manuscripts at a literary agency. Every day I worked my way through mountains of swill; at night I sat at home writing, and I knew what mistakes to avoid in my own work. Try to read your classmates’ efforts in manuscript. Seeing beats hearing when it comes to teaching yourself how prose and dialogue work on the page. And take criticisms of your own work, from fellow students or instructors, with a generous splash of soy sauce. Shrugging off their sass will prepare you for the task of ignoring the carping of editors and publishers in years to come. Whether you take many writing courses or not, I hope you’ll do as much writing as possible during your college years. As far as what you ought to write, well, that depends on you. Prospective writers, in and out of school, approach the profession from different circ*mstances and with different goals. Some have a particular perspective which they want to be able to render in fiction. Others want first and foremost to establish themselves as writers; just what they wind up writing is a secondary consideration. If you’re of the first sort, the best advice I can give you is to avoid listening to any advice, mine included. You already know, on some intuitive level, what it is that you want to do. Go
ahead and do it, at your own pace and in your own way. Take all the time you need for your writing and let its form and content be whatever proves most suitable and natural to you. As far as commercial considerations are concerned, don’t be concerned with them. It is exceedingly rare that anything produced by a college writer has any objective value, either commercially or artistically. While you may prove a happy exception, it’s not terribly likely that anything you turn out in the next four years will make you rich and famous. This is a very good thing for you. It means you ought to consider yourself completely free from commercial requirements, at least for the time being. But maybe your main interest lies in satisfying commercial requirements. Maybe you want chiefly to become a writer, a professional wordsmith. This needn’t mean that what you write will be of less artistic value. It’s more a question of where you’re coming from as a writer. When I was your age—and you can’t imagine how I hate the sound of that phrase—all I wanted to do was get published. I wanted to see my name in print and on checks. I already knew that a writer was the only thing worth being and I was impatient to go ahead and officially become one. If you find yourself similarly obsessed, perhaps some advice might not be amiss. First of all, write as much as possible. The more active you are the quicker you’ll get into the habit of developing ideas and encouraging them to hatch into stories. Study the markets. I think it’s possible to become market-oriented without cheapening yourself as a writer. I don’t think you should try to teach yourself to write confessions or juveniles or whatever because you know there’s a market for them. Instead, read a lot of different kinds of magazines until you find some that contain the kind of stories that you think you might enjoy producing, and might be proud of at the same time. You’ll never do good work in a field you can’t enjoy as a reader and respect as a writer. Act like a pro. Learn the proper format for your manuscripts and use it when you type them. Submit things. Send out the pieces you write, send them out over and over again. I literally papered a wall with rejection slips my first two years in college, and if nothing else it established my own self-image as a writer, albeit not a terribly successful one. I suppose it also helped me get used to rejection. And then one wonderful day an editor asked me to revise a story, and he subsequently bought it, and all that acting as if paid off. All of a sudden I was a professional writer. Most campuses offer a variety of literary and journalistic activities—the college newspaper, the literary magazine, that sort of thing. Students with an interest in writing commonly get involved in these areas. They can be very rewarding, but only if you’re interested in them for their own sake. I’d recommend that you choose your extracurricular activities the same way you choose your courses, for their intrinsic interest to you. The time I put in editing the college paper was valuable to me in several ways. It helped me learn to write to space requirements, taught me to work against the pressure of a deadline, and assured me that I did not want to spend my life on a newspaper. But the most important extracurricular activity for me was hanging out. The college I attended, like the one you’ve chosen, was a small innovative liberal-arts college with a bizarre assortment of students and a comfortingly eccentric faculty. The personal growth and expansion I achieved through contact with all of these madmen and crazy ladies was far more useful to me over the years than anything I ever acquired in a classroom. And that’s been the experience of every writer I’ve known—and most non-writers too, as far as that goes. It may occur to you that, while writing is certainly what you want to do eventually, it would be nice to be able to make a living after you graduate. You may think, and may be advised,
that you ought to make specific preparations for a career so that you can support yourself while you’re getting established as a writer. Don’t waste your time. You may indeed wind up holding any number of jobs after college, but they’ll take care of themselves when the time comes. Planning now for a non-writing career when you actually want to become a writer is no more than preparing for failure. Spend the present growing, and learning, and writing, and enjoying yourself. And let tomorrow take care of tomorrow. Have fun, Joy. I don’t expect you to believe this, but there will come a time when these four years will be the good old days. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself—and thanks for providing me with this month’s column. Love, Larry
8 How to Read Like a Writer CHAPTER
WHILE LEADING a writing seminar at Antioch College, I had a chance to renew my friendship with Nolan Miller, in whose writing workshop I made some of my first attempts at fiction right around the time Teddy Roosevelt led the lads up San Juan Hill. We talked of students, then and now. “They all want to be told whether they have talent,” Nolan said. “Talent’s no guarantee of success, of course. The most talented writer in the world won’t get anyplace if he lacks the discipline to exploit his talent. But they always want to know if they have it or not, and I never tell a student he lacks talent.” “Why’s that?” I wondered. “Because I simply can’t tell. I may be able to detect talent on occasion but I can never be certain of its absence. I can’t know that a man or woman lacks the capacity to grow, to develop, to improve. Besides,” he added, “I don’t think it does them any harm to try their hand at writing. If nothing else, it makes them much better readers.” Years ago I heard the perhaps apocryphal story of the great violinist. I’ve recounted his approach in Chapter 12, “It Takes More Than Talent.” Nolan’s is gentler, and I very much prefer it. But do we actually become better readers by virtue of our efforts at writing? That would certainly seem to be a logical assumption. Personal knowledge of how a thing is done ought to give one a finer appreciation of that same thing when it is done by someone else. I am well aware, certainly, that my musician friend hears music very differently than I do, that my mother has a fuller experience in an art gallery as a result of the years she’s spent painting. This principle applies outside of the arts as well. There’s a reason beyond their celebrity value for employing retired athletes as sports announcers. Having played the game, they know it better than you or I. When it comes to reading, I’d have to say that most of us are pretty good at it to begin with. The one common denominator I’ve observed among writers of my acquaintance is a longstanding appetite for the printed word. Most of us have been well-nigh compulsive readers all our lives. Don Westlake once admitted that if there’s nothing else in the house,
he’ll go read the ingredients label on the bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Over the years I’ve met a couple of writers who are not like this, but their number’s so few as to qualify them for the endangered species list. While I’ve always read voraciously, the nature of my reading has changed considerably over the years. In my college years I went through books like bluefish through a school of menhaden, chewing up and bolting down everything that came within my reach. In a sense, I read a great many books with the determination of a smoker breaking in a new pipe, as if each book I read would somehow season and improve me. When I didn’t like a book I simply lowered my head and bulled my way through it anyway, as if setting it aside half-finished would be somehow immoral. Alas, no more. I don’t finish half the books I start nowadays, and a good many get hurled across the room after a couple of chapters. Part of this, I’m sure, stems from the selfconfidence of middle age. The narrator of Toby Stein’s All the Time There Is confides that she vowed on turning thirty-five never to finish a book merely because she had started it, and I submit that that’s a good vow to make and a reasonable time in life to make it. I think, though, that an increasing ability to discriminate between good and bad writing has had at least as much to do with my changed attitude toward what I read. The writing I do, day in and day out (whatever that means), has served to make me perhaps excessively aware of the technique of other writers. When I read the work of someone lacking in craft, I know it. This knowledge, this acute awareness, interferes with the voluntary suspension of disbelief upon which fiction depends for its effectiveness. If my writer’s ear tells me the dialogue I am reading is unnatural and clumsy, how am I to make myself believe in the existence of the characters who are speaking it? If my writer’s perceptions force me to notice that I am reading lumpish prose, how can I lose myself in the story? As a result, any number of bestsellers with considerable popular appeal leave me colder than an editor’s smile. They may tell a good story, but if I can’t get past the writing I can’t enjoy that story. I don’t mean to imply that people who do enjoy such books are to be condemned for their enjoyment. More often than not, I envy them. They’re having a good time, while I, a lifelong reader, am having an increasingly difficult time finding something to read. There are compensations, however. Because when I do find something good, I can enjoy it on several levels at once. On the most basic level, I can get caught up in the story as inextricably as the rankest soap-opera addict. I can laugh when it’s funny and cry when it’s sad. That, after all, is what fiction is for, and if anything, my professional involvement with the stuff has intensified my ability to respond to it—when it’s good. At the same time, I always have my writer’s eye open when I read something well-written. However involved I may be in the fate of the characters, I allow myself to notice what the writer is doing. When something works, I try to figure out what makes it work so well. When one paragraph in an otherwise smooth novel seems a little rough, I take a moment to try to figure out what off-note soured the chord. Sometimes, when I’m reading, I find myself doing a little mental rewriting. Does this one particular conversation go on too long? Suppose a couple of responses were eliminated— would that speed things up? Is this transition too abrupt? Or would things move more effectively if we had a fast cut here?
You might think that reading like this would be like sleeping with one eye open, that the writer’s awareness would inhibit the reader’s involvement. Curiously enough, it doesn’t seem to work that way. I’ve seen musicians at concerts sitting in the audience and following the score as they listen to the music, and I’ve been given to understand that this can heighten their enjoyment of what they’re hearing. In a similar fashion, my involvement in what I read can be intensified by my awareness of just what the writer is doing. The flip side of the whole process is at least as important. One never stops learning the tricks of our particular trade, and I’ve found that my continuing education takes place in two classrooms, my office and my library. I learn by writing and I learn by reading. If the years I’ve spent writing have raised my consciousness as a reader, so do the books and stories I read continue to sharpen my skills as a writer. The extent to which I’ve changed as a reader is never more apparent than when I reread something I haven’t looked at in years. Sometimes this can be a very disappointing experience. There are writers I treasured in adolescence whose books I find quite impenetrable today, not because they’ve deteriorated but because I look on them with altogether different eyes now. I was less critical then, less capable of reading as a writer, and when I turn their pages now I want to weep for my own lost innocence. These disappointments are more than made up for by the great delight of rediscovering an old favorite and finding I like it more than I ever did—because now I’m far better equipped to appreciate the author’s excellences. It seems to me that every time I return to John O’Hara and Somerset Maugham I discover new evidence of their enormous craft. Years ago I read their novels and short stories for several reasons—for sheer story value, to make the acquaintance of their characters, and for what light their auctorial intelligence could shed upon such matters as Life and Truth and Beauty. I still read them for these reasons, and get more out of them than I ever did. But at the same time I am more aware now of the manner in which they achieve particular effects. I observe, while caught up in the story of The Moon and Sixpence, say, how Maugham wields the perspective of his narrator like a conductor’s baton. Reading Ten North Frederick for the fifth or sixth time, I am no less caught up in the inexorable decline of Joe Chapin for my noticing how O’Hara uses the viewpoints of various characters to reveal facets of his protagonist. I’ve slowed down in my reading. I used to dash through books like a self-taught speedreader. Now I take more time, savoring what I read, chewing each mouthful thoroughly before swallowing. Writing has indeed made me a better reader, just as reading continues to make me a better writer. How to read like a writer? I’m afraid I can’t think of many specific tips toward that end. One thing I’ve observed is that I’m more critical and detached when I read a manuscript than when I read galleys, more so too with galleys than with a bound book. The closer I am to what came out of the writer’s typewriter, the more conscious I am that I’m reading a person’s work rather than something that came down from the mountaintop carved in stone tablets. By the same token, it’s easier for me to get caught up in a bound book than a manuscript. But that’s by the way. I don’t know that you have to make a particular effort to learn to read like a writer. If you keep writing—and keep reading—it just happens. Enjoy it.
CHAPTER
9
Rolling With the Punches A COUPLE of months ago a writing student of mine was discussing a story he’d written a year or two previously. It had come within a hair’s breadth of being accepted by a prestigious literary quarterly. The author then submitted it to Harper’s and got it back with a personal letter from Lewis Lapham. “Well?” I said. “Where’d you send it next?” “I didn’t.” “Beg pardon?” “I put it in a drawer,” he said, shrugging. “I figured it got rejected twice so there must be something wrong with it, so why should I waste my time sending it out again?” Extraordinary, don’t you think? Any story that came that close to acceptance at these two markets is almost certainly publishable somewhere. But this particular story will almost certainly not be published—because the author isn’t sufficiently determined to give it every possible chance of publication. When novice writers ask my advice about getting published, one point I can’t emphasize too strongly is the importance of being absolutely relentless about submissions. Once you’ve got a story to the point where you think it’s worth submitting, you must submit it and submit it and submit it until someone somewhere breaks down and buys it. Before this happens, you will very likely accumulate rejection slips sufficient to insulate an attic. Your collection may not represent any near misses, may not include any personal notes from eminent editors. You may not even experience the wee thrill of seeing Sorry hand-scrawled across the bottom of a printed slip. Tough. If you really want to be in this silly business, you cannot let this sort of thing bother you. You paste the rejection slip on the wall or toss it in the wastebasket. You take the story out of the envelope it came back in and tuck it into a fresh one. You consult your records, see where it’s been, then flip through Writer’s Market and pick out a place where it hasn’t been. And then you put it in the mail, and you repeat this process ad infinitum until the damn thing sells. Over and over. Again and again. Relentlessly. What do you suppose it means when your manuscript comes back to you like a well-hurled boomerang? It doesn’t mean you’re a brain-damaged churl who couldn’t write your name in the dirt with a stick. It doesn’t mean your story stinks on ice. It doesn’t mean you should forget about writing and pay more attention to those ads promising high profits raising chinchillas in your bathtub. All it means is that a particular editor didn’t want to buy a particular story on a particular day. Maybe he didn’t even read it. Editors are as apt to be overworked as the rest of it, and sometimes the prospect of wading through slush is uninviting, and who’s to say that no one ever had a bad day and just rejected everything unread? This doesn’t happen often, but even an editor with the best will in the world can have a headache or a hangover and simply not like anything he reads under those conditions. Suppose the editor does read your story, and reads it on a good day. He can still despise it— but that doesn’t mean it’s despicable. When all is said and done, editorial reactions to all
material, and most especially to fiction, are ultimately subjective. The fact that one person dislikes something does not mean it is bad. Furthermore, a rejection doesn’t have to mean the editor dislikes the story. Maybe it simply means he doesn’t like it enough to buy it. Maybe he’s over-inventoried on fiction at the moment, and you’d have to knock him out of his chair in order to sell him, and he just doesn’t like your story all that much. Maybe he just bought a story very much like yours. Maybe your story’s about eggs and he got a bad one at breakfast. Maybe— Well, you get the idea. Bad stories get rejected, but so do most good stories most of the time. It’s important to recognize—and then dismiss—the enormous odds we all face every time we put a story in the mail. I was talking recently to the editor of one of the little literary magazines. He buys three or four stories an issue and publishes four issues a year. So he’s in the market for twelve or fifteen stories annually, and how many fiction submissions per year do you suppose he receives? Four thousand. The odds would seem overwhelming. On due reflection, the inference you might draw might be that anyone would have to have his head examined to buck those odds. On the other hand, twelve or fifteen people every year do get a story accepted by this publication, and those twelve or fifteen stories have one thing in common. They all came out of the pile of four thousand. The more you submit, the more you reduce the odds against eventual publication. But nobody ever sold a story by leaving it in a desk drawer. Yes? Did you have a question out there? I agree with what you say, but when one of my stories keeps coming back I get discouraged. I figure they’re right and I’m wrong. It’s only natural, isn’t it? Of course. Even a seasoned pro finds rejection disheartening, and for a beginner it’s that much more of a blow. What you have to do is work on your attitudes so that rejection doesn’t lead inevitably to dejection. The best way I know to manage this is to make your resubmission policy as automatic as you possibly can. Establish a hard and fast rule to get a manuscript back in the mail within twenty-four hours of its receipt. Better yet, send it out immediately—make it the first order of business to get that script off your desk and back in the mail. One reason not to keep it around is you might read it, and that’s a bad idea. You’ve already read it enough. The addition of a rejection slip isn’t going to heighten your enthusiasm. So don’t read it. Don’t even keep it around long enough to tempt yourself. Just submit the damn thing forever? Well, forever’s a long time. You can work out your own system, but I’d recommend keeping it constantly at market for a minimum of a year. Then, if you want, read it. Maybe you’ll see something you want to change. Maybe you’ll decide you hate it altogether. After a year, you can give yourself permission to withdraw it from market—or you can confirm your original judgment and resubmit for another year.
Isn’t it a mistake to submit a story to an editor who’s already rejected a different-story of mine? No, and why should it be? Remember, you weren’t rejected. Your story was rejected. It’s not the same thing. It costs a lot to keep a story in the mail. Don’t you reach a point of diminishing returns? Admittedly, the whole process was less of a wrench when first-class mail cost four cents an ounce. Even so, the high cost of submission isn’t all that high. If you ultimately sell the story, you’ll come out ahead. If the story proves ultimately unsalable, you’ll have spent a few dollars establishing its unsalability. Depending on your current status, you may regard the expense of stamps and envelopes as part of the cost of doing business, an aspect of one’s apprenticeship, or the price of a relatively inexpensive hobby. I don’t believe it when someone tells me he stopped submitting a story because of the expense. I think he’s simply rationalizing an unwillingness to face further rejection. You mentioned the long odds we all face. Isn’t part of the problem the amount of amateurish tripe every editor has to wade through? It seems to me that people who submit inferior work make it harder for the rest of us. Why don’t you say something to discourage them from wasting editors’ time? I received a letter from a Florida writer who made essentially this point. What she failed to realize is that a writer’s own perception of a story’s salability is no index of anything. Unquestionably, a great many would-be writers submit inferior work. But I don’t think they do so knowing it to be inferior. Nor is this glut of inferior work a problem for the rest of us. If my story doesn’t sell, it’s not the inferior stories that have kept it from selling. Quite the opposite. It’s the stories that were better than mine that got in my way. If I were going to be self-seeking, then, I’d try to discourage good writers from submitting their work for publication. Of course nothing I might say would be likely to influence their behavior—any more than it would influence those people sending in amateurish efforts. Back up a few steps. You dismissed the pain of rejection very blithely a few mintues ago. Believe me, it’s real pain! No kidding. Do you think I enjoy it myself? There are some things you can do, however, to minimize the pain. First of all, you can keep involved in the constant production of new work. By focusing your concentration upon the work itself and making the marketing process as mechanical as possible, you can shrug off rejection more easily.
This leads to the second method of reducing pain. Keep as many things in the mail as possible. That way when a story comes back it’s not your entire output that’s been rejected but only a very small fraction thereof. By the same token, you’ll have so many swallows up in the air that one will be returning to Capistrano every day or so. Oddly, this makes things easier. When rejection becomes a routine fact of life, a virtual daily occurrence, you get used to it. Ultimately, you may reach the point where you see rejection not as a negation of your worth as a writer, not even as condemnation of a particular story, but as what it is—an inescapable part of the process which ultimately results in acceptance. Don’t be too upset, though, if it takes time before you acquire this philosophical detachment in full measure. Until then, just sum up the editor’s ancestry and personal habits in a few terse sentences—and get your manuscript back in the mail.
10 Bic, Scripto, Parker and Cross CHAPTER
“SO YOU’RE a writer,” they say, time and time again. “That must be very interesting.” Must it? My work, such as it is, consists of sitting alone at a typewriter and tapping fitfully at its keys. It has occurred to me that the only distinction between what I do and what a stenographer does lies in my having to invent what I type. If I say as much, it’s generally assumed that I’m joshing, whereupon my questioner will very likely chuckle. Should another question seem called for, he’ll ask where I get my ideas, or if I’ve had anything published. Or he may ask what name I write under. I’ve written under any number of things in my life. Low ceilings. Hanging plants. Threats of exposure. Duress. I have also written under a whole host of aliases at one time or another. In recent years, however, I have written solely under my own name, but if I say as much to my interlocutor I’m going to put him off-stride; he’ll feel he’s committed a faux pas, having assumed I use a pen name since he’s so clearly unfamiliar with my own. And I’ll only make things worse by obligingly trotting out some pen name I used in the past, for it surely will be equally unfamiliar to him. “Norman Mailer,” I’ll say. Or Erica Jong. Or both of them, if the mood strikes me. It may be my doing that any number of people are walking around today, secure in the knowledge that Norman Mailer is a pen name of Erica Jong’s, and for all I know they may be right. Did you ever see those two at the same time? But let’s shift gears before all of this cuteness gets irretrievably out of control. Pen names, to judge from my mail, are a subject of at least passing concern to many of my readers. I had a letter just the other day from a woman intent upon keeping her true identity a secret not only from her readers but from her prospective publisher as well, and wanting to know how she could do all this without getting into a tangle with the tax authorities. I assume she has her reasons.
But just what are the reasons for writing under a name other than one’s own? Surely the ego gratification of seeing one’s name in print is a powerful motivator for most of us. Why should we pass up that satisfaction for the dubious pleasure of seeing our words attributed to Helena Troy or Justin Thyme or some other appropriately altered ego? At the present time, I’m a fairly strong believer in writing under one’s own name. It has taken me over twenty years and the occasional use of at least that many pseudonyms to arrive at that conclusion. Before I explain my position, perhaps we can examine some of the reasons why a pen name can be useful. 1. THE AUTHOR’S OWN NAME IS UNSUITABLE. A writer’s name can be a liability for any of several reasons. It may be too similar to that of an established writer. Journalist Tom Wolfe is evidently willing to chance confusion with the late novelist Thomas Wolfe, and there are several John Gardners and Charles Williamses who write for a living, but why tempt fate? A pen name may be indicated if one’s own name is unpronounceable or somehow ridiculous. Remember, though, that nomenclatural absurdity is largely subjective; consider the pop singer who rose to fame after changing his own inoffensive name to Engelbert Humperdinck. Sometimes a lackluster name clamors to be changed. Martin Smith published several mysteries under his own name, and while the books were excellent nobody could remember who he was. (The situation was compounded by the fact that his friends all call him Bill.) In the course of time, Smith’s agent dubbed him Martin Cruz Smith, interposing the author’s mother’s maiden name, and his first book under that name, Nightwing, soared on to bestsellerdom. Perhaps it would have done so regardless, but the added Cruz certainly didn’t hurt. 2. THE AUTHOR HAS A SPECIFIC REASON TO AVOID RECOGNITION. I know at least one writer who uses a pen name solely to shield his identity from his ex-wife. If she knew he was publishing novels, she’d almost certainly petition for an increase in alimony, and she’d very likely get it. By using a pen name, this author gets to keep his literary earnings. Of course he still pays taxes on them, and lists them on his tax return. To do otherwise would be to risk a jail term for tax evasion. 3. THE AUTHOR IS WRITING DIFFERENT TYPES OF BOOKS. This is a standard argument for employing a pen name. Suppose you’re writing juveniles for one publisher, shoot-’em-up thrillers for another. Won’t your readers be upset to learn that the same person’s writing gory stuff on one typewriter and sweet verses about bunny rabbits on the other? Won’t you be better off doing the juveniles as Hillary Everbright, the rough stuff as Studd Bludgeon? I’m not sure it matters. Most readers won’t even notice what you’re doing in fields they themselves don’t read, and won’t hold it against you if they do. But this maintenance of different literary identities for different kinds of writing is a time-honored principle. 4. THE AUTHOR IS TOO PROLIFIC. Some writers use several names because they publish several books a year. They feel that neither the bookselling industry nor the reading public will take them seriously if all these books are identifiable as the produce of a single writer. I don’t know how valid this is. On the one hand, I’ve seen reviewers take a shot at “this latest potboiler cranked out in nothing flat by Writer X.” On the other, over the long run your books help each other. Fans want to read everything you’ve written, and have an easier time of it if they know what to look for. I don’t think Isaac Asimov is hurt by having published so many books of so many different sorts, all under his own name. Yet I could name other writers who have lost credibility with critics in this fashion.
5. THE AUTHOR WANTS TO LOOK LIKE AN EXPERT. Years ago, I wrote a series of books that purported to be case histories of various anonymous souls. The subjects of these case histories were indeed rather more than anonymous. They were fictional, made up out of the whole cloth, with their sexual histories displayed for the reader’s education and/or titillation. I used a pen name on these books—you bet your bippy I used a pen name—and the pen name had an M.D. (In this particular instance, the publisher knew the name was a phony but thought the author was a legitimate physician operating under an alias. Ah, what a tangled web…) It is quite lawful, I was told, to use a doctor’s pen name so long as one does not usurp the prerogatives of a doctor. Since I neither diagnosed nor prescribed, I was presumably within my rights. As far as the ethics of all of this may have been concerned, I’m not sure there’s any good sense in imposing questions of ethics upon a profession which has muddled along for centuries without any. More recently, I used a female pen name on a novel written from a woman’s point of view, thinking that the book would be better received for my doing so. I don’t think I would take this particular position now. 6. THE AUTHOR IS NOT PROUD OF WHAT HE HAS WRITTEN. Here, finally, is the strongest single reason for using a false name. When one is well aware that one is publishing trash, one can salvage at least a modicum of self-respect by refraining from publishing it under one’s own name. An objection comes quickly to mind. If it’s tripe, why publish it at all? Why not limit oneself to the publication of work one is proud to see printed under one’s own name? This is a good argument, logically unassailable, but I don’t know that it is too closely grounded in reality. This is no easy business for the neophyte, and to publish anything, trash or treasure, is very much an accomplishment. The beginning writer must make it his first priority simply to write and get paid for it. In the greater majority of cases, he cannot expect to be doing so at the top of his form. Someday he may write first-rate work for first-rate markets, but that may take a while. In the meantime, he may write and publish a lot of lesser work. He may not be actively ashamed of this work, may indeed take a professional’s pride in it, but may still recognize it as unworthy. Why shouldn’t he reserve his own name for work of which he is altogether unashamed? There’s a thin line here. A person’s reach does exceed his grasp, after all, and if you wait for perfection you’ll wait forever, publishing your entire life’s work under one pseudonym or another. Similarly, there are books I liked well enough when I wrote them but regard as inferior work now; ought I to regret having published them under my own name? I do not regret having done so, any more than I regret being a better writer now than I was twenty years ago. As I started to say earlier, I’ve come grudgingly to the position that a pen name ought not to be used unless it seems necessary. I am able to see now that I used pen names as a way to avoid taking responsibility for my own work, not in the eyes of others as much as in my own. By the same token, I got a kick out of the element of deception that is inherent in pseudonymous writing. Pen names provided me with a vehicle for escaping the prison of self. The lure of a false identity always appealed to me, and there was a time when I traveled around the country under a pen name, acting out in a rather bizarre fashion. I had two of my pen names carrying on an affair, dedicating books to one another. It was all a touch schizoid, now that I think back on it.
I don’t know that I would go so far as to say I regret it. Pen names hurt me professionally in two ways that I can think of. They diluted my efforts and thus kept me from building a following as quickly as I might have, and they allowed me to spend more time writing recognizably inferior work than I might otherwise have done. All the same, the freedom of a pen name may have constituted a liberating influence at the time; perhaps, knowing I intended to publish everything under my own name, I’d have tightened up and written nothing at all. Should you use a pen name? I wouldn’t presume to advise you. Your own circ*mstances, like everyone else’s, are special. The choice must be entirely your own.
11 Writing With Two Heads CHAPTER
COLLABORATION ALWAYS seems like such a good idea. Two heads, after all, are purported to be superior to one, especially if they’re attached to two different bodies. Why shouldn’t a piece of writing go faster and more smoothly if two minds conceive it and two pairs of hands commit it to paper? Nobody’s perfect, and if one combines one’s talents with another writer, perhaps the match will be complementary, with each making up for the other’s deficiencies. With luck, the union may even prove synergistic, with the collaborative persona of two writers yoked in harness greater than the sum of their separate abilities. Where, after all, would Beaumont be without Fletcher? Gilbert without Sullivan? Abbott without Costello? Jekyll without Hyde? Leopold without Loeb? Ahem. By collaboration I mean those joint ventures wherein two writers work together. This might well seem obvious, but for the fact that the opportunity for collaboration most frequently presented to us is something rather different. Typically, we are offered this sort of chance by a bore at a co*cktail party. “You know, we ought to get together,” a chap will say upon learning my occupation. “I got some stories you wouldn’t believe. My problem is I have tons of ideas but I’m not a writer; I can’t put them on paper. So what we’ll do is I’ll give you the ideas and you’ll do the writing and we’ll split the money. How’s that?” “Suppose we switch roles?” I’m apt to say, particularly in the party’s later stages. “Suppose I give you my ideas, and you do the writing. And then we’ll split the money.” Whoever’s ideas we use, I’m not inclined to call this sort of literary partnership collaboration. It’s a good deal closer to what the non-fictioneer calls ghostwriting. And on occasion it’s exactly that. I know of one instance, for example, in which it was decided that what this country most needed was a novel of political intrigue by a muckraking Washington columnist, since deceased. Unfortunately the man in question was either unequipped or disinclined to write such a novel. He was, however, quite willing to see his name below the title, so a competent novelist was quickly found to handle the actual chore of hatching a plot, dreaming up characters, and tapping out a few hundred pages of unexceptional prose and dialogue. The columnist’s contribution, in addition to the use of his name, consisted presumably in his sharing some inside poop with the writer and reading the final manuscript to make sure its reflection of the Washington scene contained no obvious clinkers.
In this case the book sold reasonably well, so none of the parties concerned had reason to complain of the financial result. Still, the process was substantially less collaborative than the ghosting of a movie star’s autobiography, in which case the star at least provides the story and a working version of the facts. It was certainly not a matter of the work being shared by the two principals of the arrangement. Such genuine collaboration seems to work out much more often for play-wrights than it does for prose writers. I’m not certain why this should be true, but it may well be that theatrical writing, even when one man does all of it, is apt to have a collective aspect to it. One takes it almost for granted that rewriting will play a substantial role in the process of readying the play for production, and that any number of persons will offer input in this direction. Producers and directors will suggest changes. Actors will propose improved versions of their lines. Finally, the process of actually performing the play, first in a bare theater and then before an audience, will indicate where changes must be made if the play is to succeed. Thus there’s a long record of theatrical collaboration. This seems to be particularly true with comedy, and there are some comedic playwrights who can’t seem to work effectively by themselves, George S. Kaufman having been perhaps the most obvious example. Bill Hoffman, a playwright friend of mine, spent three years collaborating with another playwright and found the process quite successful. “One of us would sit at the typewriter and we batted each line around before it got written. The process seems to stimulate both of us. Our abilities complemented one another to a certain extent; he was a little better at storyline development and I was probably a little better at actual dialogue, but by the time something was actually written down it was impossible to say who had contributed what. Everything amounted to a joint effort.” I know two women who write novels in this fashion, Barbara Miller and Valerie Greco. One of them sits at the typewriter, the other stands alongside, and they discuss and come to agreement on every sentence before it gets typed. Curiously, I find this perfectly comprehensible as a means of producing work for stage or screen, and the image of a pair of sitcom writers swigging coffee and tossing gags back and forth strikes me as quite the way that sort of thing ought to be done. Yet I simply cannot imagine writing a short story—or, God help us, a whole novel—in this fashion. There are, however, any number of other ways for fiction writers to share the work. A few years back Donald E. Westlake and Brian Garfield decided to collaborate on a book called Gangway!, a comic thriller (Westlake’s forte) set in the Old West (Garfield’s milieu). Here’s Westlake’s description of the process: “First we sat down and discussed the whole thing at length. Then I wrote a fifteen-page outline of what we had discussed. I gave this to Brian, and he expanded it to forty pages, putting in all the historical context and everything. Then he gave it back to me and I cut it back down to twenty-five pages. At this point we were thinking screenplay, and this version was shown around as a treatment. When it didn’t fly, we decided to do it as a novel first. “I wrote the first draft, limiting myself to action and dialogue—not where they were or what they were wearing, just what they did and said. My draft ran about thirty thousand words. I gave it to Brian and he doubled it, turning each of my pages into two pages, putting in all the background and such. Then he gave me his sixty-thousand-word version and I edited it, and I gave it back to him and he edited it, and then we gave the whole mess to an editor.” “It sounds,” I ventured, “like five times as much work as sitting down and writing a book.” “Yes,” he agreed, “and about a quarter as much fun, and for half the money.”
Two writers I know collaborate frequently on short stories, discussing a plot at length before one of them sits down and writes it. Since they live three thousand miles apart, one or the other of them does the actual writing unassisted. Even so, the leading profitmaker on many of their joint ventures is Ma Bell. Years ago, I wrote some novels in collaboration, including three with Don Westlake and one with Hal Dresner, who has since gone on to write screenplays. At that time we were all earning a curious living writing softcore sex novels, a medium that lent itself tolerably well to the collaborative process. These collaborations could hardly have been simpler. There was no prior discussion of plot, no careful development of outline. One of us sat down and wrote a first chapter and gave it to the other, who wrote a second chapter and gave it back. The book loped along in this fashion until ten chapters had been written and it had come, as all things do, to an end. It was all great fun. Don and I tended to leave one another with impossible cliff-hangers, killing off one another’s chief characters at will. Hal and I devised a La Ronde form that made sex-novel collaboration almost effortless—i.e., the viewpoint character in the first chapter had, uh, a carnal connection with someone, who went on to become the viewpoint character in the second chapter, wherein he or she got it on with the person destined to star in Chapter 3. And so on. These collaborative experiments led in due course to the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, the Great Sex Novel Poker Game. This ill-advised venture consisted of half a dozen of us, all writers of this sort of trash and all fond at the time of nightlong poker sessions. Operating on the premise that any of us could produce a chapter in an hour or so, we met for a night of poker during which five of us sat around the table while one of us at a time went upstairs and wrote fifteen or twenty pages of The Book. By the time the night was done—or the following day, or whatever—we would each have contributed two chapters, the book would be finished, and a division of the spoils would make us all winners, even those of us who had proved unlucky at cards. This well-laid plan went speedily agley. After five more or less successful chapters, one of our number, his brain an object-lesson in the folly of amphetamine abuse, wrote his two chapters back to back and went home. Unfortunately, his contribution turned out to be absolute gibberish, and the writer who followed him, instead of proclaiming as much, spent hours trying to write a sensible sequel to it all. The book, in short, did not turn out well. I don’t remember how I did at the card table. Since then, I’ve used collaboration—or the prospect of collaboration—largely as a means of avoiding work. If there’s something. I really want to write, I’ll probably sooner or later sit down and write it. If, on the other hand, there’s something I recognize as a good idea but don’t really want to mess with, I can propose it as a subject for collaboration, secure in the knowledge that I’ll never have to have anything further to do with it. “We ought to collaborate on this,” a friend and I will agree, and then we’ll spend a jolly hour tossing ideas to and fro, and that’ll be the end of it. Because we’ll each keep having other things to do, yet neither of us will feel at all guilty, because it’s something we can always get around to eventually, whenever we both happen to be between books at the same time, and in the mood to collaborate, and like that. A case in point occurred a few years ago, when I came up with an excellent if incompletely formed idea for a book involving global intrigue during World War II. It wasn’t really my kind of book, yet there was a lot of strength in the basic idea, so I talked about it with Brian
Garfield and proposed it as a subject for collaboration. Brian happily agreed, and we discussed it some, and that was the end of that. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. Some years later I got a handle on another element of the plot, which made it an even stronger notion, though still not really my kind of thing. I talked it over with Brian and decided to go ahead with it alone, since as a collaboration it would never have gotten written. This way it did get written, but it turned out that it really and truly was not my kind of book, and what I wrote wasn’t terribly good. At which point it turned back into a collaboration, in this case with yet another writer, Harold King. This was his kind of book, and he liked a lot of what he saw in my first draft and had excellent ideas of his own to bring to bear upon it, so we talked it over and he went to work on the book. And it should finally make its appearance in the stores sometime during the fall or winter. Finally, another project in which I’m currently engaged was done collaboratively not as a way of avoiding work but to avoid avoiding it. I’d been entertaining the idea of a guidebook to vegetarian and natural food restaurants for a while, but I doubt I’d have got anywhere with it if Cheryl Morrison and I had not entered into collaboration upon it. The problem with this book was that it would require little bits of work here and there over the course of a great many months. Because I would always have a primary project on the table, the guidebook would have been lost in the shuffle. And the same thing would have happened if Cheryl had undertaken the whole project herself. As it stands, each of us feels an obligation to the other. Thus the work gets shared, and, a little at a time, it’s getting done, largely because neither of us is prepared to let the other down. I haven’t tried to tell you how to collaborate. Indeed, on balance I’d probably advise you against trying it altogether, unless you really and truly feel you’ll write more effectively as someone’s partner. There have been any number of viable partnerships—Fern Michaels, Wade Miller, Manning Coles, Ellery Queen, Burdick and Lederer—but most of the time the desire to collaborate stems from the hope of making the process of fictional creation less lonely, and most of the time that just doesn’t seem to be possible. The Concerto for Four Hands and Two Typewriters has its appeal, but for most of us writing is probably destined to remain a solitary occupation. Like dying, it seems to be something we have to do on our own.
12 It Takes More Than Talent CHAPTER
IT CONTINUES to astonish me what a widespread and enduring fantasy Being a Writer is for the population at large. It’s a rare day when I don’t encounter some misguided chap who expresses the desire to trade places with me. And it’s on those not-so-rare days when everything goes wrong, when the words won’t come but the rejections fly thick and fast, when the bank account’s gone dry again and editors don’t even bother lying about the check’s being in the mail, that otherwise sane folks tell me how much they envy me. “I wish I had your self-discipline,” they’ll say, generally saying so on a day when I’ve got the backbone of a threadworm. “I envy you the imagination to keep coming up with ideas.” Or they may envy me my education, which was an unremarkable one, or they’ll say they wish they knew my formula for writing success, as though I had somehow unearthed an
alchemist’s secret for transmuting the dross of nouns and verbs into the shimmering gold of fiction. Nobody ever says, “I wish I had your talent.” And I find that fascinating. I don’t think artists in other media get the same response. I doubt somehow that people kept grabbing. Picasso by the shoulder and telling him how they envied his self-discipline, standing in front of the easel day after day. I don’t suppose Caruso had to listen to that kind of crap, either. Actors and singers in particular seem to be plagued by people who think talent is all there is to it, that they’ve been given a gift which allows them to stand up there in front of the microphone and show their stuff. The hours of training and practice, the essential will and tenacity, are somehow discounted. With writing, it’s the talent that’s apt to be discounted. There are times when I tend to resent this. The unspoken premise in “I wish I had your self-discipline” is that anyone with my selfdiscipline could do what I do, that a persistent chimpanzee could match me book for book if he could just sit still long enough and work the space bar with his non-opposable thumb. My ego doesn’t much like to hear this sort of thing. And yet I have to admit that there are times when I think these people are onto something. It strikes me now and then that talent may be one of the least important variables in the writing business. People without a super-abundance of talent succeed anyhow. People with tons of talent never get anywhere. It happens all the time. And it happens, I guess, in every field of creative endeavor. For years I subscribed to the popular myth that talent will out sooner or later, that all people with genuine ability in a particular field will ultimately achieve success in that field. I’ll tell you, you’d be better off believing in the tooth fairy. All over America there are singers and actors and painters and composers and sculptors and, yes, writers, blessed with a sufficiency of talent but born, as Thomas G. would put it, to blush unseen, and waste their sweetness on the desert air. If talent’s not the answer, what else does it take? Why do some of us succeed while others do not? Is it just a matter of luck? I’ll tell you this much. Luck doesn’t hurt. And simple luck has a great deal to do with the fate of an individual submission. When you mail off a story to a magazine, elements that have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of that story will play a part in determining whether or not it sells. The editor’s mood when he reads it is a factor, and one you have no way of controlling. The state of the magazine’s inventory is another. Competition being what it is, I’d go so far as to say that every time you manage to sell an unsolicited submission to a magazine, you’ve been lucky. But I also think that luck tends to average out over a period of time. The writer who sells his first story to the first editor who sees it is a lucky writer indeed, but that first sale provides no guarantee of a second sale. Luck runs hot and cold, and nobody’s lucky all the time. What does it take, then, to be successful at free-lance writing? What, besides talent and luck, helps determine who makes it and who doesn’t? It seems to me that will is enormously important. There are any number of jobs a person can pretty much fall into, but I don’t believe writing is one of them. Every once in a while somebody does become a writer apparently by accident, but such persons rarely remain writers for very long. In order to get into this business and in order to stay in it, you generally have to desire it with a passion bordering on desperation.
And the intensity of that desire doesn’t seem to have anything to do with talent. A couple of summers ago I taught a seven-day seminar at Antioch College. One of my students was head and shoulders above the others. She was a middle-aged woman who had spent all her life on a farm, raising children and helping her husband with the farmwork, and she had as good an eye and ear for rural settings as I’ve yet encountered. Her prose was clear and clean, her dialogue was excellent, and her stories and sketches absolutely sparkled. It was immediately evident to me that she was the one person in the seminar who had more than enough ability to succeed as a professional writer. She also had something to write about. She knew that she wanted to write fiction that derived from what she knew—life in the rural midwest. Some of us know that we want to be writers without having the faintest idea what we shall write about—I was certainly in that category— but this woman had no problems on that score. What she did want was reassurance. Could I assure her that her prospects were good? Could I tell her it was not unrealistic to hope to make sales writing the sort of stories she had in mind? Because if such expectations were unwarranted, she explained, then she didn’t want to go on wasting her time writing. I spent quite a bit of time telling her how good she was, but even as I did so I wondered if perhaps I was wasting my time. Oh, she had the talent, all right. And there were any number of ways in which she could ultimately exploit her background and turn it into successful and commercially viable fiction. But her question suggested to me that she would never achieve her goal because she didn’t want it badly enough. Because for almost everyone the road to writing success goes through some very rocky territory indeed. If she was that worried in advance that the time she spent writing might turn out to have been wasted, how could one expect her to rise above the inevitable rejections and disappointments that just plain come with the territory? Perhaps I should not even have encouraged her. There’s an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote his life to music. But if his talent was not equal to his calling, he wanted to know ahead of time so he could avoid wasting his life. He played, and the great violinist shook his head. “You lack the fire,” he said. Decades later the two met again, and the would-be violinist, now a prosperous businessman, recalled their previous meeting. “You changed my entire life,” he explained. “It was a bitter disappointment, giving up music, but I forced myself to accept your judgment. Thus, instead of becoming a fourth-rate musician, I’ve had a good life in the world of commerce. But tell me, how could you tell so readily that I lacked the fire?” “Oh, I hardly listened when you played,” the old master said. “That’s what I tell everyone who plays for me—that they lack the fire.” “But that’s unforgivable!” the businessman cried. “How could you do that? You altered the entire course of my life. Perhaps I could have been another Kreisler, another Heifetz—” The old man shook his head again. “You don’t understand,” he said. “If you had had the fire, you would have paid no attention to me.” Perhaps my student had the fire. I’ve had no contact with her since that seminar, so I can’t say whether or not she has continued to write, or if she’s had any success with it. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she’s given up. Not everyone has the will. Not everyone cares that much about writing stories and getting them published.
Will is every bit as important for those of us who have a taste of success. Several years ago a woman of my acquaintance decided to try her hand at writing. She showed me a couple of chapters of an erotic novel she’d written and I was immediately impressed by her ability. She was a natural stylist, readily able to assume the general style of any literary genre. While she tended to minimize this talent, insisting it was simple mimicry, that’s what stylistic ability generally consists of at the outset of one’s career. She abandoned the erotic novel, finding it an uncomfortable genre, and took the time to read half a dozen gothics. Then, in rather rapid succession, she wrote and sold two gothics. After that she wrote a hundred or so pages of an unsuccessful mystery novel, and after that she didn’t write a thing. She had the talent, and she had enough success to make it clear that a career as a free-lance writer was available to her. She had, too, enough drive and self-discipline to produce those two books and get them published. But, ultimately, being a writer was just not that important to her. She had drifted into it largely as a result of association with other writers, and she drifted out of it when it proved insufficiently rewarding. I suspect my friend has something in common with the phenomenon of one-book authors. The common wisdom holds that such writers have only one book in them, that having gotten it out of their systems they have nothing further to say. I think it might be more accurate to say that they have a very strong desire to write a particular book but no real desire to become a writer per se. Having written that book, they have slaked their hunger. Fair enough. Some people climb one mountain and complete one marathon and let it go at that. Others define themselves as mountain climbers or marathoners and go on climbing or running as long as they have breath in their bodies. And some of us go on writing. I have a feeling that the tendency to perceive onself as a writer is a somewhat different matter from simple will. I think, too, that it plays a big part in determining who makes it as a writer and who does not. In my own case, I decided (or recognized; it may have been more a matter of recognition than decision) that I was going to be a writer when I was in the eleventh grade. A teacher’s offhand remark put the idea in my head, but once planted it grew like a weed. I had no idea how I would go about becoming a writer or what I would write about, but I somehow knew it was what I was going to do. I am quite certain that this self-definition had a lot to do with the development of my career. I submitted my earliest efforts to magazines, and while they came back like bad pennies, and with better cause, I took this in stride. The day came when an editor suggested a rewrite, and then another day came when he bought the story. That was not the end of rejection and disappointment. Sometimes it seems more like the beginning, and the end is not yet in sight. But throughout it all I have never been able to shake that perception of myself as a writer. It has kept me chained to this bloody desk for more years than I care to number, and it has made it impossible for me seriously to entertain the idea of doing anything else for very long. That recognition of self as a writer can happen at any age. Consider another friend of mine, who awoke eight or nine years ago to the idea of becoming a writer. He was at the time editing a scientific trade journal for little money and less glory, and he had lately become friendly with several of us who wrote fiction for a living. One weekend he realized two things —that he wanted the sort of life we were leading, and that such a life was attainable.
Monday morning he called in sick and rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter. By the time his wife got home from her job he had eight or ten pages of a novel written. He called in sick Tuesday and did another chunk of the book. Same thing Wednesday. Thursday he got up bright and early, ate as hearty a breakfast as the next condemned man, and went to his office. A couple of hours later my phone rang. “I just quit my job,” he said. “The book’s coming along nicely and I want to stay with it.” I don’t remember what I said. Probably something along the lines of yeah-but-how-are-yougonna-make-a-living? “No problem,” he said. “I’m a writer now.” I wasn’t convinced of the truth of either of those sentences, but even so I figured his downside risk was limited. After all, his wife was working, they didn’t have any kids, their basic overhead was low and the job he’d quit hadn’t been such a much. After a little token breastbeating at having encouraged him to persist in his folly, I gave a shrug that would have gladdened a Frenchman’s heart and went on about my business, such as it was. Couple of weeks later he presented me with something like two hundred fifty pages of manuscript. Would I be so kind? Ahem. I took it home. I sat down with it. I started to read. Page for page and line for line, his book was as bad a piece of writing as I’ve ever been confronted with, and that covers a lot of ground. It was not publishable, but that’s the least of it. It was not rewritable, either, nor was it readable. Nor, alas, could it have been described as promising. There was nothing promising about it. No one could in good conscience read that manuscript and encourage its author to try writing anything more ambitious than a laundry list. I was aghast. My friend had quit a job to produce this? Well, he’d better get another in a hurry. Assuming he could find someone fool enough to hire him. I didn’t have the guts to say any of this. Instead I passed the buck—and the manuscript with it —to my agent. When his judgment echoed mine we tried to figure out what to tell the author. We decided to stall, and while we did so my friend told me he was halfway through Novel Number Two. The second book was much better. It was still nothing you’d be tempted to call good, but it was written in a language readily identifiable as English. My friend finished it, gave it to me and then to my agent, and went on to the third book. The second book didn’t sell. The third did, though, and the fourth and fifth. They were not wildly successful. They were published as hardcover mysteries, had reasonably positive reviews and mediocre sales, and did not go into paperback. One got nominated for an award but failed to win. The story could stop right there and it wouldn’t be the worst story ever told, either. But there’s more. My friend went on to write several more mysteries, and these did not sell. There was a market slump about that time, and hardcover mysteries were suddenly about as much in demand as legionnaire’s disease. My friend wrote three or four in a row and couldn’t get arrested. By this time he was single again, and broke. He took a job tending bar and wrote days. After a while he quit writing mysteries that nobody wanted and began doing the preliminary research for a large-scale adventure novel that would capitalize on his interests and areas of expertise. He spent a lot of time on research and more on plot development, and then he went on to spend a great deal more time writing and rewriting. Then the book came out, had a sixfigure paperback sale and a six-figure movie sale, touched one or two of the bestseller lists
briefly, and must have earned him something like—what? Half a million? I don’t know, and it’s not really important, because this chapter isn’t about money. It’s about writing, and the set of mind necessary to make a go of it. At first glance, the story’s point seems obvious enough. My friend had the will to succeed, the drive to keep going in the face of discouragement and rejection. He had, too, a perception of himself as a writer that refused to fade. In addition, he had a single-mindedness of purpose that enabled him to take chances. Quitting his job on the basis of a few days’ production was probably ill-advised, and I certainly would not recommend it to anyone in a similar situation, but perhaps it was essential for him. Suppose he’d worked nights and weekends on that first book, taking a year or so to produce an unsalable manuscript. Would he have been as quick to plunge in again and write books two and three? When, after having sold several books, he found himself incapable of supporting himself by writing, he might have tried to find a job rather like the one he had left. Instead he deliberately sought out a subsistence job, undemanding parttime work that let him pay the rent while he went on writing. Again, he was taking a chance instead of playing it safe. It’s worth noting, though, that the chances he took were sane ones. If he was walking a tightrope, he was not doing so without a net. If he’d failed at the beginning, the worst thing that could have happened is that he’d have had to find another job. If his big adventure novel had failed, he’d have had to go on tending bar, or look for something with more long-range promise. But no one was going to starve to death because he wanted to be a writer. This talk of starving puts me in mind of another attitude that’s important if one is to be comfortable as a free-lance writer. You have to have a pretty high threshold for financial insecurity. If a regular paycheck is emotionally essential to you, perhaps you’d be well advised to stay with a regular job. I was very fortunate in this respect. I started writing so early in life that my ordinary expenses were extremely low. The last job I held before taking up writing fulltime was in a literary agency, where my base pay was sixty dollars a week before taxes. That doesn’t sound like much money now, and it wasn’t much money then, either. My low standard of living made the small sums of money I could earn writing more significant than they’d have been otherwise. If I went home from the office and wrote a threethousand-word pulp story and sold it for a cent a word, that was half a week’s income right there. And, once I’d left the job, I didn’t have to hit the bestseller list in order to match my previous income. Before very long I had a standing assignment writing a book a month for a paperback publisher. The pay was six hundred dollars a book, which was more than double what my salary had been. All of this was helpful early on. As I grew older and acquired a wife and children and a higher standard of living, what helped keep me from going crazy was a temperament which took financial insecurity for granted. This is not to say that I find poverty a treat, or that I am not aggravated by slow-pay publishers and inconvenienced by the stretches of financial hardship that seem to be an inescapable part of the writing life. Sometimes a pile of bills and dunning letters can have a paralyzing effect on just about anyone. But most of the time my writing goes on independent of my solvency or lack thereof. This is true of most of the people I know who function successfully as free-lance writers. But not everyone is so constituted. I know a number of established professional writers who simply lack the temperament required for fulltime free-lancing. They continue to hold fortyhour-a-week jobs, jobs which they often profess to hate, simply because they are not comfortable without the security of a regular paycheck. In several cases, there’s no question
but that they could earn more if they gave up their jobs. And they know this, but some of them have found out fulltime self-employment cuts their writing production to the bone because they can’t work effectively when burdened with all that anxiety. It has always seemed to me, on the other hand, that writing is infinitely more secure than any employment could hope to be. All my friends who hold jobs could conceivably be fired. Who can fire me? Even a tenured college professor could one day see his college go out of business, and then where would he be? I, meanwhile, can go on writing for a variety of publishers, adapting to changes in the marketplace, and all without a care for compulsory retirement rules or other abominations. Of course I can’t look forward to a pension, and I have to pay my own medical insurance, and I don’t get any fringe benefits or sick leave or paid vacations. Nor am I guaranteed a day’s pay just by showing up for work in the morning; if I don’t produce anything, neither do I earn anything. I can generally accept all that. But not everybody can. There’s another essential quality in the writer’s temperament, and it seems on the surface so obvious that I came close to overlooking it altogether. Quite simply, you have to like the work. By this I don’t mean that the physical act of sitting at a typewriter has to be enjoyable in and of itself. Most writers hate the process, to one extent or another, and everybody hates it now and then. (This is an anomaly of writing, and an interesting one at that. Most of the painters I know enjoy the act of painting, and almost every musician I’ve known loves to play so much that he goes on doing it after his day’s work is done. But writers often hate writing.) What a writer must enjoy, or at least be able to tolerate, is the utterly solitary nature of the work. When all is said and done, writing is a matter of sitting alone at a desk, staring more often than not at a blank wall, and turning thoughts into words and putting the words on paper. I know a man who free-lanced for a while some years ago. He started off working at home, then rented a hotel room so he would have an office to go to. That structured his days somewhat, but it didn’t really help because he couldn’t take the solitude. He gave up the hotel room and rented space in an office so that there would be other people working around him. He enjoyed that more but it cut into his productivity because he preferred interacting with the other people to concentrating on his own work. He stopped freelancing and got a job, and he’s been gainfully employed ever since. He’s published books now and then, writing them at night and on weekends, and periodically he tells me how much he hates his job and how he longs to quit it and write fulltime, but that’s nonsense. He’d go nuts without a job to go to. Even if you’re the sort who finds solitude comfortable, I think it’s very important for writers to make sure they have sufficient human contact when they’re not working to compensate for the lack thereof during their working hours. We can’t be alone all the time, nor can we expect our families to fill our needs in this area. The isolated writer loses touch with the world. He forgets what people are like. He uses up his writing source material and fails to replenish it. In my own case, I’ve found that I need the occasional company of other writers. There are things about writing which people who are not in the business simply cannot share. The company of my fellows is stimulating. There’s a certain amount of cross-pollination in such social intercourse, and a few hours in another writer’s company serve to reinforce my own perception of myself as a writer. At the same time, I definitely require the company of people who are not writers. An exclusive diet of shop talk is an unbalanced one. Besides, one wants to be occasionally exposed to reality, if only in small doses. As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, “People
who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange.” And that’s the final requisite of the writer’s temperament. We’re every last one of us a little strange, a wee bit different. And vive la difference.
PART TWO
Nose to the Grindstone, Shoulder to the Wheel: Fiction as a Discipline
13 Writer’s Hours CHAPTER
I’VE FOUND over the years that the mechanics of writing appear to be endlessly fascinating to writers and non-writers alike. Perhaps because the creative process is so utterly incomprehensible, even to those of us who are personally involved in it, it is easier for us to focus on more tangible aspects of writing. Do we write in the morning or at night? At the typewriter or in pencil—or with a crayon, for those of us who are not allowed to use anything sharp? Do we outline in advance or plot things out as we go along? Somewhere in the course of this sort of conversation, one is apt to be asked just how many hours a day he tends to put in. The answer, whether it’s two or twelve hours a day, is apt to be followed by a qualification. “Of course that’s just time spent actually writing. Of course that doesn’t include the time I devote to research. Of course, that doesn’t include the time I devote to research. Of course, when you come right down to it, a writer is working from the instant the alarm clock goes off to the moment when he goes to bed. For that matter, the process doesn’t stop when I’m asleep. The old subconscious mind takes over then and sifts things around and sets the stage for the next day’s work. So I guess it’s safe to say that I actually practice my craft twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” I suppose most of us deliver some variation of that speech at some time or other, and I suppose some of the time we even believe it. A certain part of me, however, does not buy this load of pap for a minute. As far as that stern writer’s conscience of mine is concerned, I’m only really working if I’m sitting at my desk tapping my typewriter keys and turning out pages of finished copy. Thinking about writing isn’t work, and research isn’t work, and reading proof isn’t work, and meeting with publishers isn’t work, and talking on the phone isn’t work, and not even rewriting and editing are work. Unless I can actually see a manuscript of mine getting further from the beginning and closer to the end because of what I’m doing, I’m not entirely capable of regarding the task I’m performing as work. Understand, please, that I know better. I realize intellectually that the non-writing chores I’ve enumerated above are directly related to my profession, that they take time and energy, that I
can’t slight them without adversely affecting the quality and/or quantity of my writing. But this knowledge doesn’t seem to help me much. Unless I’ve put in my daily stint at the typewriter, and unless I’ve got something to show for it, I feel as though I’ve played hookey. This attitude probably serves a purpose. My mind is sufficiently fertile that I can almost always dream up some worthwhile occupation which will keep me away from my desk. There’s always a book it would pay me to read, a neighborhood I could profitably explore, a person whose expertise I should seek. None of these extramural activities is as hard as actually sitting down and writing something; thus, but for the conscience that hounds me, I could happily go months on end without wearing out a typewriter ribbon. Sometimes, though, I find myself backed into a corner, locked into a no-win situation, damned if I do and damned if I don’t. This happened quite vividly when I was working on The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. Bernie Rhodenbarr, the burglar of the title, had just hied himself off to Forest Hill Gardens, an upper-middle-class enclave in the borough of Queens. It occurred to me that I had not been to Forest Hill Gardens in over twenty years, at which time I had visited it very briefly. I had only dim memories of the neighborhood and had no way of knowing if it had changed in the intervening years. I had two choices. I could trust my memory while taking comfort in the fact that every work of fiction takes place in its own alternate universe anyway. Or I could spend an afternoon zipping out there on the F train and walking aimlessly around to see what I could see. Either way I was determined to feel guilty about it. If I stayed home and worked, I’d beat myself up for slacking on research. If I went out there, I’d accuse myself of wasting time on pointless research when I might have been tapping typewriter keys and producing finished pages. Once I was able to see that I was in a double bind, I tossed a mental coin and went to Forest Hill Gardens. As it turned out, my memory was sound and the place hadn’t changed a bit. But I felt my time had been profitably spent; I’d refreshed my impressions, picked up a little local color, and certainly enabled myself to write the scene with increased confidence. It doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes hours devoted to this sort of research are a waste, and sometimes there’s no way to determine in advance whether this will be the case. American Tobacco’s George Washington Hill used to say that fifty cents of every dollar he spent on advertising was wasted. The trouble was, he went on to explain, that there was no way of knowing which fifty cents it was, so he’d go on spending the whole dollar all the same. It’s that way with research, and with all the other tasks that take me away from my desk. One factor in the operation of my personal Jiminy Cricket mechanism is, I’m sure, that I don’t spend all that many hours at my desk. Years ago I was given to putting in long stretches at the typewriter; I was younger then, which may have had something to do with it, and I was a less meticulous writer, which must have had plenty to do with it. In any event, I could work effectively for five or six or eight hours at a clip. I can’t do that now. I don’t structure my work in terms of hours, finding it more useful to aim at producing a certain amount of work, usually somewhere between five and ten pages depending on the sort of material I’m working on, the deadline I’m facing, and the phases of the moon. My work usually takes me somewhere between two and three hours. If I’m done in an hour, I’m delighted to call it a day. If I’m not done in three hours, I generally call it a day anyway, though I’m by no means delighted about it. There’s a point at which it becomes counter-productive for me to continue to work, on a par with running a car’s ignition when the gas tank’s empty. You don’t get anywhere and you just run down the battery.
Most workers, I’ve been told, don’t really spend more than two or three hours a day actually doing anything. They take breaks, they file their nails, they daydream at their desks, they talk baseball, and two hours get stretched into eight. It’s comforting to know this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I think of myself as putting in a shorter working day than the rest of the world. I’ve found a couple of things I can do to make my writing life as guilt-free as possible, and I pass them on for whatever they’re worth. 1. I MAKE WRITING THE FIRST THING I DO. Over the years, I’ve written at every possible time of day and night. For some time now I’ve written immediately after breakfast, and it’s by far the best system for me. There are several advantages—I’m freshest then, my batteries recharged after a night’s sleep—but the most important reason for me is that once I’ve got my day’s work done, I’m able to give myself permission to do as I wish with the remainder of the day. 2. I TRY TO WORK SEVEN DAYS A WEEK. Again, there are other reasons why this is useful. With a novel, for example, working every day keeps the book from slipping away from my subconscious mind. Whatever I’m working on, novels or short stories, daily production helps me keep from feeling profligate over working so few hours per day. By the same token, when I do take an unscheduled day off, I can do so with a clear conscience; after all, I’m still working six days that week. 3. I SAVE ROUTINE WORK FOR LATER. I’m frequently tempted to answer my mail the minute it arrives, to proofread galleys as soon as they hit my desk. These chores enable me to be practicing my profession without actually having to write anything. But they’re of secondary importance, and I don’t have to be at my sharpest to deal with them. They’ll still be around when I’ve got my daily five pages finished. Lately, for example, I keep getting packages from Cincinnati, parcels chock-full of entries in the Writer’s Digest short-story contest. My natural inclination is to drop everything and read these stories as they appear, but instead I stay at my typewriter and save those stories for late at night when I can’t sleep. After I’ve read a couple dozen, I sleep like a baby. Finally, I allow myself to make occasional use of that old reliable copout—i.e., that writers are really working twenty-four hours a day. Because in certain respects it’s undeniably true. Just the other day, for example, I did my daily quota of pages in the morning, spent the afternoon in the gym lifting heavy objects, and then wandered around for an hour or so. In the course of my wandering I watched a car enter an apartment building’s underground garage, and it suddenly occurred to me how Bernie Rhodenbarr could get into an otherwise impregnable apartment building by first locking himself in an automobile trunk. Will I ever use that little bit of business? I probably will, as it happens, but almost every walk I take produces some comparable bit of woolgathering, and most of the wool I gather never gets spun into a yarn. Is it work? And does it matter if it is or not? Points to ponder, and I leave you to ponder them. For my part, I’ve spent a shade over three hours writing this chapter, and I’m done now. I think I’ll give myself permission to enjoy the rest of the day.
14 The Carrot and the Stick CHAPTER
“SO YOU’RE a writer,” she said, spearing a co*cktail frank. “You know, I’d love to be a writer, but I know it’s impossible. I lack the discipline.” I suppose I could have offered to supply the missing ingredient, perhaps by lashing her nude to a desk chair and flogging her with a flail, but I only muttered something inoffensive and went off in search of the stuffed grape leaves. Because everybody would love to be a writer, and everybody lacks the discipline, and it’s a good thing, because the profession is crowded enough as it is. Imagine, for instance, if every dreamer with an urge to see his byline on a book jacket actually went so far as to roll a sheet of paper into his typewriter and start filling it up with words. Imagine, further, if all the people who started novels had the effrontery to finish the bloody things. Imagine if everybody with an itch and an idea took the trouble to turn the idea into a plot, and then sat down and wrote the story. Why, we’d be up to our nostrils in literature, for heaven’s sake! Forget the trees that would be pulped to facilitate such a gush of literary productivity. Think instead of the editors who would be the recipients of it all. They all have too much to read as it is, and it takes forever to get an answer from them, and just consider how much worse the situation would be if their daily reading load were increased by a factor of ten or twenty or two hundred. You lack the discipline to write, sir? Well, good for you. Stick with it. Ah, but for you, Gentle Reader, the situation is rather a different matter. You, let it be said, are a writer, not a bore at a co*cktail party or some similar sort of ship passing in the night. The last thing I want to do is discourage you from putting words on paper. You, clearly, are Serious About Your Work. Haven’t you purchased this book? Are you not reading this very page? If that’s not a commitment to one’s art, a dedication to one’s craft, whatever is? It’s my belief that self-discipline is a problem for the vast majority of writers, however productive and successful they may be. In order to get his work done, the writer has to be every bit as much of a self-starter as the chap they’re always looking for in those ads for door-to-door widget salesmen. He doesn’t even have the advantage of an early morning pep talk from the divisional sales manager. He has to supply all his motivation himself. Ultimately, he has to tempt with the carrot and swat with the stick—and at the same time he’s the poor old donkey pulling the cart. Novelists are especially assumed to require a full measure of self-discipline, and for good reason. It takes a lot of hard work over an extended period of time merely to complete a book-length work of fiction. A poem can be dashed off in a matter of minutes. A short story can be hammered out at a single sitting. In both cases, inspiration can carry the writer through the completion of the work. This is simply not true with the novel. Inspiration alone will not get the thing written, any more than sheer speed will carry anyone to the finish line in a marathon. To continue the analogy, a novelist, like a marathon runner, receives praise simply for having completed his task irrespective of how well he’s performed it. No one (except perhaps the runner’s mother) congratulates a last-place sprinter for having survived to the finish line of a hundred-meter dash. Nor do people hail one as some sort of conquering hero for having typed the last line of a poem or a short-short. All this notwithstanding, I submit that the short-story writer has every bit as great a need to apply the carrot and the stick in order to be either productive or commercially successful. While seeing one story through to completion may be a less than Herculean task, it takes no
end of discipline to do the same thing repeatedly, coming up with idea after idea, grinding out story after story, and working throughout at the top of one’s form. The novelist has the advantage of momentum; once into a book, he can give it its head and follow where it takes him. He knows, when he gets up in the morning, what he’s going to be writing that day. The writer of short fiction, on the other hand, has to keep developing new projects and developing enthusiasm for them as he does so. And he has to do so while marketing previously completed efforts, shrugging off the inevitable rejections that are a part of that marketing process and refusing to allow them to interfere with his steady production of new stories. Are there tricks of self-discipline? Is there a particular distance to extend the carrot, a special way to apply the stick? I’m sure there must be, and I live in hope that one day I’ll find the formula. Because I’ve been indefatigably productive over the years, turning out more books than anyone should reasonably have to read, people tend to assume me to be a model of self-discipline. Yet I frequently look at other more industrious writers and castigate myself for my dilatory nature. Doubtless they in turn berate themselves for falling short of their role models—the bee and the ant, I would imagine. And does the ant in turn worry that he’s a closet wastrel? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Here are a few tricks of the trade: 1. GIVEN WRITING TOP PRIORITY. At executive training programs they like to tell the story of Charles Schwab, then president of U.S. Steel. He told an efficiency expert that he didn’t have time to listen to him at length but wondered if the man had any quick suggestions for him. “Every morning,” the expert said, “make a list of the things you have to do that day. List them in order of importance. Then concentrate on the first task until it’s finished, without diverting your attention to anything else. Then go on to the second task, completing as much as you comfortably can in the course of the day.” Schwab looked at him, shrugged, and asked what he wanted for the suggestion. “Try it for a month,” the man said, “and then pay me what you think it’s worth to you.” Thirty days later, Schwab put a check in the mail for twenty-five thousand dollars. The expert’s advice is as good as it ever was, and as much so for writers as for steel company presidents. I would suggest that you put writing at the head of each day’s list. Make it the first thing you do. Give it priority, not letting yourself be sidetracked until the day’s writing is done. 2. SET GOALS FOR YOURSELF. I work mornings, generally putting in two or three hours a day; when I work more than three hours my concentration flags and the work suffers. My objective, however, is not to put in a certain number of hours but to produce a certain quantity of work. More often than not, the goal I set myself is five pages a day. If I get my five pages written in a flat hour—which does happen now and again—I’ll generally call it quits then and there. I may do an extra page or two, if the words are flowing nicely and I want to leave off at a natural stopping point. But I’ll feel under no obligation to put in all the hours allotted for purpose of writing. On the other hand, if I don’t reach my five-page goal within three hours, I may stay at the typewriter a little longer and see if I can’t fulfill my quota. I’m not absolutely compulsive about this, but I know I’ll feel better during the rest of the day if I get my pages written, and I do so when possible.
I can usually manage it—in part because I’ve had the foresight to set easily attainable goals for myself. I rarely find five pages a day to be a strain; if I did, I’d adjust the quota accordingly. I avoid the trap of raising the goal as I go along, like an assembly line speedup. The object’s not to test myself. It’s to get my work done. 3. STAY IN THE NOW. The most important single element in enabling me to concentrate on today’s work is the ability to make that the only thing I’m concentrating on. If I let myself worry about tomorrow’s work and next Tuesday’s work, I’m not going to do my best work today. If I’m writing a short story, I can’t let myself get diverted into worrying about what story I’ll write next, or where I’ll send this one when I’m finished with it, or what I’ll do if it’s rejected, or what I’ll buy for myself when it sells. I can only do today’s work today, so why waste energy? 4. JUST GET IT WRITTEN. Frequently I find myself convinced that all I’m doing is turning perfectly good bond paper into garbage. Sometimes I’m right. Sometimes it’s an illusion. When I feel this way, it’s impossible to tell which will prove to be the case. The answer, I’ve found, is simply to get it written, giving myself permission to throw it out later on if it turns out I’ve produced swill. This is occasionally easier said than done. It’s hard to persevere when I’m convinced that the last sentence I typed is utterly wooden. But I frequently find afterward that what seemed horrible while I was writing it looks perfectly fine the next day—or at least no more horrible than the rest of my work. And, on those occasions when I do wind up tearing it up the next morning, at least I’ve done some work and the momentum of my writing is undisturbed. 5. DON’T TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY. The work of any artist requires a certain degree of doublethink. In order to practice my craft day in and day out, I have to be very serious about it. But if I take it too seriously I’ll clutch, rendering myself incapable of the relaxed approach necessary for optimum creativity. Here’s a story for illustration. Two retired gentlemen meet, and one complains that he’s going nuts. “You need a hobby,” the other one says. “Something to give you an interest in life and a reason for living.” The first is skeptical. “You mean like pasting stamps in a book? Doing needlepoint? What kind of a hobby?” “I’ll tell you,” says the other, “it doesn’t even matter what the hobby is so long as you got one. My hobby, just as it happens, is bee-keeping.” “You keep bees? You, living in two and a half rooms on Pitkin Avenue? How many bees do you have, anyway?” “Oh, it’s hard to say, but about twenty thousand.” “Where do you keep ’em?” “In a cigar box.” “But…but, don’t they get all crushed and dead and everything?” “So? Listen, it’s only a hobby.” It’s only a book, I’ve told myself time and time again. Sometimes it feels like the most important thing in your life, and it seems to be what you do to justify your own existence, but don’t take it so seriously. It’s just words on paper, it’s just a pack of lies. Listen, it’s only a book. That takes the pressure off. Knowing it’s only a book, knowing empires won’t rise and fall on the strength of it, I’m able to breathe in and breathe out and get the thing written.
Ahem. Those are my professional secrets, and you’re welcome to ’em. I can assure you they work for me. By applying them diligently, I’ve been able to get this written and in the mail—only two weeks after the due date. Listen, it’s only a column.
15 Creative Procrastination CHAPTER
PROCRASTINATION’S HAD a bad name ever since 1742, when Edward Young called it the thief of time. (He’d have written that line back in 1739 but he just kept putting it off.) Lord Chesterfield inveighed against putting off until tomorrow what you can do today, lumping the pastime with idleness and laziness. And Thomas DeQuincey, tongue tucked firmly in cheek, saw procratination as the end product of a chain of character deterioration that might begin with a simple act of murder. We free-lance writers, fixed with the responsibility of scheduling our own time and temperamentally prone to procrastinate, have every reason to agree. And surely this column, designed to send its readers scampering to their typewriters, will take a firm stand against the gentle art of keeping up with yesterday. Right? Wrong. On the contrary, I would submit that procrastination has its place. I’m not endorsing it out of hand, understand. In writing, as in the rest of life, the best way to get things done is to go ahead and do them. They rarely do themselves. And it has been my observation that those writers who sit down and write, day in and day out, are the very writers who get the most accomplished. So procrastination in general is a massive liability. Creative procrastination, however, can be a definite asset. The trick is to know just when to defer action and when to get busy. Let me give an example. When I first started writing, about the time the pterodactyl made it onto the endangered species list, I saw to it that as little time as possible elapsed between the onset of an idea and its tranformation into a piece of fiction. I was writing stories then for the surviving crime pulps, and I would typically get a story idea of an afternoon and deliver a finished manuscript to my agent the following morning. More often than not it sold. Not to a very good market, mind you, and not for much money, and the story itself would rarely be memorable in any way, but I was young and that was the best I could do. Nowadays I do things a little differently. A couple of months ago, for example, I got a Noteworthy Idea. I conceived of a mystery story in which the murder victim would function as the detective, solving his own murder after it had taken place. I had recently read Life After Life, by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., and his reports of after-death experiences triggered my story idea. In the old days, I’d have gone directly to my typewriter. And, most likely, I’d have gotten nowhere with the story, because this particular idea was not an easy one to turn into a piece of short fiction. Furthermore I had no plot, no theme, no characters, no conflict—nothing but the
bare idea as I’ve described it to you. I could have tried contriving these other elements at the typewriter, but instead I procrastinated. I made a note to myself on the little memo pad I carry around. Man solves own murder, I scribbled, right between Pick up laundry and Water philodendron. Every now and then my eyes would hit those words and I’d tell myself I’d have to get around to doing the story one of these days. Each time this happened, my subconscious got a little nudge. Gradually, these little nudges made a collective impression. My original concept of the story, never fully formed and never committed to paper, called for the lead character to operate on some sort of spectral plane, perhaps spooking the killer into a confession, something eerie like that. After a spell of creative procrastination, I changed this. I decided the lead would die clinically in the operating room while they were removing the bullet or some such, would then have an after-death experience of the sort Moody described, in the course of which he’d be given to understand that he could not be permitted to die until he’d carried out the mission of finding out who had killed him. Whereupon he’d return to life and set about investigating the circ*mstances of his murder. Much better, I decided. The story was starting to have a shape to it. But I still didn’t feel ready to write it, so I put it back in a warming oven and left it alone. A while later, I was reading poetry. I wasn’t reading Robert Frost, but something reminded me of Frost, and I realized the title I wanted for my story was “And Miles to Go Before I Sleep.” I wrote that on my memo pad and crossed out Man solves own murder. (I’d already picked up the laundry by that point.) I like having a title before I write a story. I certainly don’t insist on it but it helps. So I had the title now, and it was a good one, but I still didn’t have the story. So I put it off again. A week or a month later, I started thinking about the lead, trying to figure out who he was. And who had killed him? And why? I wasn’t sure, but I decided maybe he was a middle-aged businessman. I provided him with a wife and a business partner and a mistress and a son and a daughter, and I gave all five of them motives so they could be suspects. Vague motives, because they were still vague people, and because I had no idea which of them was the killer. Time for more procrastination. One day, you’ll be pleased to hear, I decided I was ready to write the story. I don’t know what told me this; most likely I was avoiding work on something else. At any rate, I sat down at the typewriter and got to work. Somewhere along the way I had decided to write the story in the first person. It was trickier to do it this way, describing those after-death experiences in the lead’s voice, but all that time spent living with the story convinced me it was the way I wanted to do it. And it turned out to be easier than I’d thought, because the mood and tone came rather easily to me by now. Another interesting thing that happened is that the lead turned out to have more of a purpose than simply bringing his killer to justice. As he investigated each suspect, he found himself resolving his unfinished business with each in turn, putting his emotional affairs in order before dying for a second and final time. This change turned a simple gimmick story into something with substance. I was pleased with the way the story turned out. It didn’t seem to need substantial rewriting, perhaps because it had received so much unconscious modification and restructuring before I
sat down to write it. Eleanor Sullivan liked the story and bought it for Alfred Hitchco*ck’s Mystery Magazine, where it appeared as “Life After Life” in the October ’78 issue, should you care to see for yourself how it ends. My point, though, isn’t that I produced a brilliant piece of work or won fame and fortune with it. It’s not and I didn’t, but it would surely never have reached its present form if I hadn’t repeatedly put off until tomorrow work I was insufficiently prepared to do that day. Code of Arms is another example of creative procrastination in action—or inaction, come to think of it. I first got the germ of the book a full four years ago. I was reading something about World War II and wondering, not for the first time, why on earth Hitler had halted the German armor outside of Dunkirk. That two-day respite permitted Britain to withdraw a quarter of a million troops; otherwise she might have been unable to continue the war. Suppose some Englishman had penetrated the Wehrmacht High Command? Suppose that was the cause of the stop order? I decided that would make the premise of a hell of a novel, and I went off and occupied myself with other things. It wasn’t until years later that I suddenly remembered that idea and hit on the precise identity of the person responsible for saving the British at Dunkirk. I now had not merely an idea for a book but a compelling and commercially viable one. I promptly devoted the next six months to research, which is not quite the same thing as procrastination, although they often look alike. Then I talked to a publisher and worked up an outline, and after more work than went into Chartres Cathedral and more perils than Pauline, Code of Arms was published in the spring of 1981. In this instance, I’m lucky I didn’t lose the idea altogether. It’s important, I think, to keep the idea visible—in a notebook, on a wall chart, whatever. That way you’ll jog your memory from time to time, and when an idea or a piece of information comes along that you can use, you’ll reach out and incorporate it in the story as it evolves. When does procrastination become other than creative? When it consists of avoiding work rather than postponing it, and when my alternative to working on Project A is not working at all. Since I’m inherently lazy, I force myself to work on Project B instead. Another thing—it was Don Marquis who called procrastination the art of keeping up with yesterday, and conscience compels me to give credit where it’s due. And pretty soon I’ll share with you my thoughts on the subject of Creative Plagiarism. Perhaps we’ll take up that topic next chapter. Perhaps I’ll put it off for a while. Meanwhile, though, I’ve got to go water the philodendron.
16 Time Out CHAPTER
I’LL TELL you something. The more time I spend in this writing game, the clearer it becomes to me how little I know about it. It’s a rare month that goes by without my wondering that I have the temerity to go on writing for a living, let alone offer you out there suggestions as to how you can go and do likewise. This humility attack is not the product of an insight gained from contemplation. Would that it were. On the contrary, it is the bitter fruit of experience.
Consider if you will the pattern I have established for myself over the past several weeks. Each morning, as is my custom, I awaken around seven. I get out of bed, see my shadow, and dive back into bed, where I contrive to spend the ensuing four hours with the covers pulled over my head and my eyes clenched shut. Because I’m not really tired and have already had plenty of sleep, I have to be quite relentless about this, forcing myself to stay put each time I’m moved to awaken. Then, round about eleven, I roll out at last and put the teakettle on to boil. By that time it’s safe to start the day. I’m a morning writer, and with the morning gone I can proceed directly to the non-writing portion of my day—a meal, a gym workout, a lunch date, a long walk, whatever pleasing prospect presents itself. I don’t have to walk into my office, I don’t have to look at my typewriter. I’ve avoided work for yet another day. I’ve won. I’m not going to dignify this curious behavior by calling it writer’s block. I’m not altogether certain what writer’s block is, but it seems to take the form of an inability to get anything written however hard one tries. It’s painfully clear to me that I have not been trying, that I have indeed done everything in my power to avoid finding out if I am or am not capable of writing by giving my typewriter a wide berth. Regular readers of my column may well recall how I tend to stress the importance of Keeping at It. The writer who gets things done, I’ve pointed out, is the writer who shows up for work day in and day out. Regular hours and regular production are the keys to productivity. The hare may show a lot of early form, but the smart money’s always on the tortoise. I’ve argued, too, that not only one’s productivity but the quality of one’s work is enhanced by this slow-and-steady modus operandi. When I work every day—or six days a week, say—the book I’m working on stays very much in mind. I think about it during the day and let my subconscious work it over at night. I don’t have a chance to lose my grasp of it. Why, then, don’t I start the teakettle going at seven, get to my desk by eight, and nail down the Pulitzer Prize? I suppose because things don’t always go as I would have them go. My best-laid plans, like those of other mice and other men, gang aft agley. But perhaps a little background on my present situation might be instructive. Couple of months ago I started work on a very intimidating project, a novel that’s rather more ambitious than anything I’ve undertaken in the past. It’s going to be a fairly long book, probably running four to five hundred pages in manuscript, which would make it twice as long as the mysteries I most often turn out. It will also cover a lot of ground temporally and geographically, and although I know the general shape of the plot I have no outline for this book, and don’t want one. The plot is going to have to disclose itself to me as I go along. The writing went very well at the onset. In the first month I worked five or six days a week, wrote five or six pages a day, and completed the first section of the book, a chunk of one hundred thirty pages. Then I had to switch to a different viewpoint character and pick up the story at another time and in another place. I took a week off to give myself time to get out of the first character’s head and into the second’s. At the week’s end I hurled myself once more into the breach and wrote every morning for three days, and on the fourth day I got up and realized I could not go on. This realization has since become a way of life, repeated each morning with subtle variations. It would be nice if I were at least enjoying this non-writing time, but of course I’m not. I
constantly beat myself up for it, accusing myself of self-indulgence and sloth, and that certainly doesn’t help. What does help is if I am able to regard this time off as a part of the creative process. I’m able to take that stance when I look at some of the time-outs I’ve called in the past. Last fall, for example, I sat down on schedule and wrote the first sixty pages of the fourth Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery novel. Somewhere around page sixty I got the nagging feeling that something was wrong, although I had no idea what it might be, or what to do about it. I resolved this dilemma by lapsing into the sort of paralysis I’m in now, albeit of a different style. I was then able to avoid work without staying in bed, simply by setting up dates to resume work. “I’ll get back to it after Thanksgiving,” I told myself. Thanksgiving came and went, and I realized that I had the auction of the paperback rights of Ariel coming up in mid-December. “Well, I’ll wait until that’s out of the way,” I allowed. “Who can work with all that hanging fire?” Who indeed? Not I, certainly. Once Ariel had gone under the hammer, the holidays were upon us. Who would initiate a project at such a time? Again, not I. I decided to get back to work when the new year started. And I did. New Year’s Day I took the subway clear to Riverdale to scout a location, one I did not wind up using in the book, as it turned out. And on January 2 I sat down at the typewriter and started the book over on page one, and I swear the thing flew. I wrote the whole book in five weeks flat and was delighted by the way it turned out. The prose flowed like water from a well. The plot evolved very neatly. All I had to do was show up each morning and type it out. What this suggests to me is that the time I spent goofing off was not wasted time at all, that those two months away from the typewriter were somehow a part of the process of literary creation. I’m sure I could not have done as good a job on the book, or had as good a time with it, if I had forced myself to hammer away at it back in October. Why, then, can’t I regard this present period of inactivity as more of the same? After all, I did the first chunk of the book quickly and easily, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. (Or at least I was, until this current indolence led me to regard everything through mud-colored glasses.) It’s not illogical to supposed that my subconscious needs time to gather its forces before springing forward again. I take substantial intervals between books without second thought. Might it not be equally important to take time off between the sections of a long book? Of course it might. Furthermore, I’ve been going through a lot of personal aggravation during the last two months of a sort that could in and of itself throw one’s literary productivity offstride. Isn’t it fair to assume that I’ll be more capable of resuming work after this emotional ferment dies down a bit? Of course it is. I think the first step in getting through these dry periods is one of acceptance. I don’t see how we do ourselves any good by beating ourselves up for our inability to fulfill our own excessive expectations. I can always devise a schedule for myself that I am incapable of carrying out. One’s reach does exceed one’s grasp, inevitably, and one’s life never goes quite according to the script one has written for it, and thank God for that. Acceptance is easier said than done, however. I can accept stretches of inactivity much more easily after they’re over than while they’re going on. Those months of not writing last fall—I
can now regard myself as having made a brilliant decision, and I have to force myself to remember what a different view I took of it all at the time. It’s a lot harder to see the picture when you’re standing inside the frame. Once the writing is going well again I’ll very likely see my current lethargy as having been valuable, but right now, even while I’m typing these lines, I have the ambivalent feelings of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. I want to believe, but I’m starting to get scared. I think there are ways to avoid making a period of inactivity worse. Besides acceptance, I think it’s helpful to avoid letting everything else go to hell along with the writing. This too is easier said than done, and my current miasma has been exacerbated by a stubborn refusal on my part to do anything else that might make me feel better or might render my life more manageable. I’ve fallen hopelessly behind in my correspondence, for example. I’ve let my bookkeeping slide. And I’ve had a difficult time keeping up with my normal routine. I always feel better, for example, after one of my thrice-weekly visits to the gym, but it is a part of my present malaise that I haven’t felt like going to the gym. I’ve been making myself go anyway. I don’t want to go there, and once I’m there I don’t want to be there, and I can’t for the life of me see any point in picking up heavy iron objects only to return them to the place I found them. It seems an utter waste of time and energy. But I do it anyway, even though I don’t feel like it, and then I take a sauna and a shower, even though I don’t feel like that either, and afterward I feel better. And I do tell myself, from time to time, that I’ll get back to work on the book eventually, that I’m not finished forever with writing as a profession, that I’m ahead of schedule anyway and the book will get done when it gets done, and— And sometimes I believe it. It’s not fun. One thing I’ve found to be true for most of us is that, whether we enjoy writing or not, one thing we enjoy a good deal less is Not Writing. Unfortunately, it seems to be true that Not Writing is occasionally a part of the writing process. And it’s a lot more tolerable, and probably better all around, if I can learn to trust the process. At least I’ve written this month’s column—which, like everything else lately, I’ve stubbornly avoided doing. Like my gym workouts, I’ve gritted my teeth and done it in spite of all inclinations to the contrary, and whether or not it was worth doing is something I’m not equipped to judge. But I feel better for it.
17 Do It Anyway CHAPTER
I’VE GOT a friend who’s been calling me almost daily for the past couple of weeks. Some time ago he contracted to write the libretto for an opera and he’s having a miserable time of it. He fell behind schedule, missed a deadline, and is being gently hounded by those to whom he is responsible. My experience in this area is, to say the least, limited. I’ve never gone to an opera, let alone written one. But we’re friends, and opera librettists are evidently in fairly short supply, so I’m one of several people he calls regularly when he wants to gripe, moan, cry, beat his breast, and solicit the odd word of encouragement.
Of late my words of encouragement have grown increasingly predictable. He’ll natter on about how the words won’t come, how when they do come they’re terrible, how he can’t stand to look back at what he’s written, how every time he writes something he wants to tear it up, how just sitting at the typewriter has become an anxiety-producing activity, and so on ad nauseam. “Do it anyway,” I tell him. “Put your behind on the chair and your fingers on the keys and get the words onto the paper. They don’t have to be good words. They don’t have to be the right words. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to enjoy writing them and you don’t have to be proud of having written them. You don’t even have to believe that the whole process is worth doing. Do it anyway.” “But it’s no good,” he’ll sometimes say. “It’s wooden, it’s lousy, it’s bad.” “Fine,” I reply. “Write a bad libretto. Do it anyway.” I don’t invariably proffer this sort of advice, either to others or to myself. Sometimes when a book doesn’t feel right the best thing I can do is put it deliberately aside for a while and return to it when my subconscious has had a chance to sift through it and work things out. Writing, after all, is not like factory work. You can’t necessarily be productive—and get paid for your efforts—simply by showing up for work and performing your allotted task. Sometimes persistence and perseverance don’t amount to much more than banging the old head against the wall. The immovable wall. There are times, though, when it is demonstrably more important to get something done than to get it done well. This would seem to be the case with my friend. His choices are not between writing a good libretto and writing a bad one, but between writing something and being relieved of the assignment altogether or failing to fulfill it. The daily newspaper is often held up as a great training ground for writers, and there are certainly innumerable members of the profession who had their start in newspaper journalism. While newspaper experience will not in and of itself guarantee success as a fiction writer, one can’t have spent much time in the game without learning to get things written and get them in on schedule. In the newspaper business, no story is a good story if it doesn’t get into the paper. If the courthouse burns down tonight, my story had better be in tomorrow’s paper. It may not be a great story, it may not have the last word on the subject, and it may not be so written as to make Hemingway eat his heart out, but it’s got to be in print. Otherwise it’s no good to anybody. Any daily newspaper contains innumerable stories that might have been better if their authors could have devoted more time to them. But they do their job. Sometimes awkwardly, sometimes incompletely, and almost always imperfectly, they deliver the news while it’s news. Deadlines are considerably more elastic for the free-lance fiction writer. Often the only ones that exist are of his own making. Even when all of our writing is done entirely on speculation, it’s common procedure for most of us to set little deadlines, to plan to finish a particular story by a particular date. Empires will not fall if we fail to do so. More often than not, nobody but us will know. Of course that’s generally punishment enough. Most of us who manage to function productively as free-lancers tend to be quite hard on ourselves, demanding rather more than a boss would dare to demand, and beating ourselves up whenever our grasp falls short of our reach.
Thus when we set arbitrary deadlines for ourselves, we generally work mightily to meet them. However we can usually keep a saving sense of proportion on the matter. If I’ve decided to finish a piece of work on Tuesday, and if that’s going to be achievable only at jeopardy to the quality of the work, or the state of my health, or the considerable inconvenience of others, I’m flexible enough to extend the deadline to fit the circ*mstances. When our deadlines are not arbitrary ones of our own making, and when the time for flexibility has come and gone, then it’s time to Do It Anyway. A couple of observations make this particular task a little easier. First of all, let’s examine the single most paralyzing element in this sort of bind, the conviction that what one is writing is beneath contempt. How can we force ourselves to go on writing when we know that what we’re writing is no damn good? It helps me to recognize that I am by no means the best judge of my own work—especially when I’ve just written it. There have been times when I’ve thought a piece of writing was coming along very nicely, only to find out when I’d finished that there was something wrong, most often a lack of tension overall that had not been apparent page by page as I was writing it. More often, though, it’s the other way around. Writing that seems unutterably labored while it’s coming out of the typewriter turns out to be perfectly adequate. Certain experiences have even left me suspecting that how I feel about what I’m doing may be the least important variable in my fiction. Some fifteen years ago I once wrote two-thirds of an adventure novel while living in marital harmony in a New Jersey city. Then my life turned abruptly and dramatically upside down, I lived through a car wreck and a capsized marriage and other trauma the report of which I’ll spare you, and some weeks later I found myself in a bed-and-breakfast in Dublin with a deadline approaching. And so I went to work. Everything was different, including my rented typewriter and the long narrow sheets of paper they sell over there. Certainly my view of everything was different. But I did manage to realize that it was more important that the book be finished than that it be perfect, and I whacked away at it every day until it was done. The publisher accepted it without revisions and published it as Tanner’s Twelve Swingers, and when I read it for the first time after its publication I couldn’t determine where the break had come. There was no seam. My life had a seam in it, all right, that was a long time smoothing out, but the book was all of a piece from first page to last. Even when the circ*mstances of a book’s production are less dramatic, it’s a rare book that doesn’t have a spot of slow going in it. Once in a while I’ll write something and it’ll flow like water from a well all the way to the end, but more likely there’ll be occasional days—and hence occasional chapters—that come like dental extractions. Long-distance runners say that every race has a bad patch in it. Everything hurts and the whole process seems unendurable and the runner wants nothing so much as to drop out of the race. At this time, what one has to do is call upon his previous experience, recognize that what he’s going through is a bad patch, and get through it with the foreknowledge that things will get better shortly. Books have bad patches of just that sort. The important thing is to get through them, to get the words down however ill-chosen they may seem. For myself, I find more often than not that what I write on a bad day isn’t demonstrably worse than what I write on a good day, though it seems so at the time. But when I’m going through a bad patch I could type Hamlet’s soliloquy and deem it stilted and wooden. I have to discount my feelings about what I’m doing and just go on doing it.
One thing that helps is to give myself permission
