The Liar's Companion A Field Guide for Fiction Writers

278 Pages·2011·1.06 MB·English

by  Block

The Liar’s Companion
A Field Guide for Fiction Writers
The Liar’s Companion
A Field Guide for Fiction Writers
LAWRENCE BLOCK
Contents
Introduction
Writing, Always Writing (October 1987)
The Hearts of the Matter (November 1987)
The Scene of the Crime (December 1987)
The Courage to Change (January 1988)
The Writing of Random Walk (February 1988)
Keeping Up Appearances (March 1988)
Writing at an Artists’ Colony (April 1988)
When I Get Like This I Can’t Even Think of a Title (May 1988)
Messages for Your Most Important Reader (June 1988)
15 Things You Must Know About Writing the Short Story (July 1988)
By the Time I Get to Phoenix I’ll Be Working (July 1988)
No, but I Saw the Movie (August 1988)
Prejudice and Pride (September 1988)
The Ripening Process (October 1988)
Fiction to Order? (November 1988)
Is It Time to Quit Your Day Job? (December 1988)
Bouncing One off the Fourth Wall (January 1989)
Lies, Lies, Lies (February 1989)
Not Enough Rain (March 1989)
Ten Percent of Your Life (April 1989)
Inspiration Is Where You Find It (May 1989)
It’s Your Book (June 1989)
Piping Them Aboard (July 1989)
Keeping Them on the Ship (August 1989)
Killing Them at the End (September 1989)
Joywriting (October 1989)
No Tense Like the Present (November 1989)
A Question of Character (December 1989)
Stop Making Sense (January 1990)
Why Fiction? (February 1990)
Writer to Writer (March 1990)
Writing All the Time (April 1990)
The Book Stops Here (May 1990)
Good News About Bad News (June 1990)
Short Story Time (July 1990)
Getting Real (August 1990)
Just Spell My Name Right (September 1990)
Are You Sure Chandler Started This Way? (1991 Yearbook)
Introduction
F or fourteen years, from 1976 to 1990, I wrote a column on the writing of
fiction for Writer’s Digest. At the very beginning it was an every-other-
month affair, alternating with a column on cartooning, but in short order the
magazine dropped the cartoonist, and my column went monthly.
I have to say it did me a world of good.
I make my living writing books, and it’s an unstructured and uncertain
occupation. So it did me good to have one specific thing to do every month, and
to be assured of receiving a monthly check for it. The numbers on those checks
were never enormous; I got $150 a column at the beginning, and coaxed enough
raises out of them over the years to get that number up to $500 at the end. Now
that was nothing to sneeze at, but neither was it anything to drool over.
But the money was the least of it.
Over the years, four books emerged. The first was Writing the Novel from
Plot to Print, specifically commissioned by Writer’s Digest Books after I’d been
writing the column for a year or so. It’s never been out of print, and now, I’m
pleased to report, it’s available as an Open Road ebook.
Next was Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. It was published in 1981, and
composed of past columns, and I offered it to WD Books but the editor wasn’t
enthusiastic; my agent sent it to Don Fine at Arbor House, who published it in
hardcover and trade paperback and placed it with the Book-of-the-Month Club.
WD Books looked at how Telling Lies was doing and felt they’d missed the
boat, so when I had enough columns for a second volume, they got on board
right away. I called the book Spider, Spin Me a Web. Both books have been in
print pretty much continually since their original publication, and both are
available now from HarperCollins in either trade paperback or ebook form.
That’s been gratifying, believe me. When I write something, I really like to
see it remain available for people to read. My great friend, the late Donald E.
Westlake, was asked by a mutual friend why he’d agreed to the republication of
some of his very early work. The money couldn’t amount to that much, the
friend said, so why bother with the deal?
“The difference between being in print and out of print,” Don told him, “is
the difference between being alive and being dead.”
Right.
And yet the books aren’t the most important benefit I got from that column,
either.
I could string this out, and talk about other fringe benefits—that the column
gave me sufficient credibility as a writer about writing so that I could
successfully develop an interactional writing seminar and present it all over the
country for a couple of years, that this in turn led to my writing and self-
publishing a book version of the seminar. (Write for Your Life, and it too is
available as a HarperCollins ebook.) That the column brought me speaking
invitations. That it very likely led some people to have a look at my novels.
All true, and all good. But secondary, really, to the most important thing
that column did for me, and I’ll quit stalling now and tell you what that was.
It made me a better writer.
O nce a month I had to come up with an idea for a column, some aspect of
writing to address in around 1,800 words. Now after I’d been doing the
column for a year or so, then-editor John Brady discovered flow charts, and
decided that was what was needed for the optimal functioning of his editorial
operation. So he wrote me a letter requesting that I supply him with the subjects
I intended to cover in the next six months.
Now how the hell did I know? I didn’t, obviously, and told him as much,
and he told me this was really important, and after we’d gone back and forth a
time or two more, I sat down and wrote out a list. Then, a month at a time, I
wrote and submitted my columns, and not a one of them could be found on that
list. So much for the flow chart.
I wasn’t being deliberately contrary. (Well, maybe a little.) But there was
no way I could know in advance what I’d be able to write about in a given
month. There were more than a few months when I didn’t know what I was
going to write until the day when I sat down and wrote it.
But an idea always came along. I don’t think I was ever once late with a
column.
So it would seem that the need to produce a column was always very much
in my mind, if not consciously on it. And one way or another this column-to-be-
written informed both my reading and my writing.
It’s a rare writer indeed who is not also a world-class reader. I had always
been an omnivorous reader, and one blessed with a hearty appetite. When I
became a writer, I immediately became a better reader; I found myself noticing
what worked or didn’t work in the story I was reading, and in turn became a
better writer when I found myself applying what I’d noticed to my own work.
Writing about writing added another level to the whole enterprise. I
continued to read for pleasure—I don’t think I’ve ever been able to read in its
absence—but now I would come across elements in what I read that got me
thinking, and that now and then provided me with the subject matter for a future
column.
Similarly, writing about writing made me more aware of elements in my
own work.
I don’t want to belabor this, it hardly seems worth it, so I’ll just state it
again and let it go at that: writing that column for fourteen years made me a
better writer.
W hat on earth qualified me to tell people how to write?
I’d get that question occasionally, and it struck me as a reasonable
one. I’d generally respond by explaining that I didn’t tell people how to write,
that I would never presume to do such a thing. While my column was
instructional by definition, I didn’t provide a lot of specific instruction. For the
most part I talked about something I’d noticed in my work or another’s, and how
I’d solved (or at least coped with) something that had come up in the course of a
book or story. I was endeavoring to share some of what I’d experienced and
observed. If that constitutes teaching, then I was a teacher. If not, not.
Because I never thought of myself as teaching in the traditional sense, I
never wanted to present the same lesson twice. WD’s various editors over the
years would have liked to see me return to the same basic topics rather more
often than I did. But I really wasn’t interested in repeating myself.
Now in some magazines repetition is inevitable. If you’ve got a home
gardening magazine, you can’t decide not to write about tomatoes simply
because you ran a comprehensive tomato article five years ago. There are folks
out there who weren’t reading the magazine back then, and the others, who’ve
been with you all along, won’t remember that old article. Or, even if they do,
they won’t mind reading it again.
But once I’d written something, I wouldn’t go back to it unless I had
something reasonably interesting to add. And that had its advantages, especially
when it came time to collect the columns into a book. It wasn’t just the same
thing over and over again.
I stopped writing the column in 1990. It wasn’t a very happy parting of the
ways, and I left with a sour taste in my mouth. And I figured that all in all it
was more than time for me to be done writing about writing. I seemed somehow
to have written close to half a million words on the subject, and that was plenty.
And I had four books to show for it. That, too, was more than enough.