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The Liar's Companion: A Field Guilde for Fiction Writers
The Liar's Companion: A Field Guilde for Fiction Writers
The Liar's Companion: A Field Guilde for Fiction Writers
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The Liar's Companion: A Field Guilde for Fiction Writers

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For fourteen years, five-time Edgar winner and MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column on fiction for Writers Digest magazine. These columns yielded four books regarded as classics: Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, Spider Spin Me a Web, The Liar's Bible...and now The Liar's Companion.

Here are some reviews on Goodreads:

"This recently released treasure from award winning mystery author Lawrence Block is a welcome addition to my bookshelf. ...Block has a gift for casual gems of wisdom that stir my storytelling imagination."

"No subject is off limits for Block. From lofty questions (how do writers get their ideas?) to the mundane (how many pages should you write every day?) to the personal (how often should writers exercise? how should writers budget their money?), the advice is practical, funny, and never boring. I do not have a desire to be an author, but these glimpses into the writing life fascinated me."

While Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and Spider Spin Me a Web group the author's columns by topic, Block scrapped this approach when preparing The Liar's Bible and The Liar's Companion, feeling the material flowed more naturally by simply running the columns in chronological order. As Block has written, "Bible and Companion consist of my later columns, and as such they seem to me the best representation of my views on the subjects at hand. Telling Lies has always been the bestseller, perhaps because it led the way, perhaps because I'd had the good luck to stumble on a particularly good title...but I think it quite likely that Bible and Companion are the better books."

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 10, 2017
ISBN9781386099598
The Liar's Companion: A Field Guilde for Fiction Writers
Author

Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is one of the most widely recognized names in the mystery genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar and Shamus Awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He received the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association—only the third American to be given this award. He is a prolific author, having written more than fifty books and numerous short stories, and is a devoted New Yorker and an enthusiastic global traveler.

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    The Liar's Companion - Lawrence Block

    • 1 •

    Writing, Always Writing

    October 1987


    THE JOB OF BEING A WRITER NEVER ENDS. NEVER.


    Man must work from sun to sun.

    Woman’s work is never done.

    That, at least, is how they put it in the bad old days of sexism and long hours. Now, what with union contracts and feminism, not to mention the around-the-clock shifts facilitated by electrification, the old rhyme simply won’t stand up. How can we update it, to produce a suitable bromide for our times?

    Mere mortals work from 9 to 5.

    A writer works when he’s alive.

    Well, it rhymes and it scans, but I can’t say I’m crazy about it. There ought to be a better way to convey in verse the idea that the writer’s work never ceases. Perhaps we’ll take another stab at it in a little while. Meanwhile, let’s examine not the rhyme but the reason.

    Is it true? Do writers really work all the time? Is the creative process a metronome that drives us endlessly, keeping us tapping to the beat?

    Or is this, as many of our spouses and children and friends and relatives have long suspected, a lot of hooey? Is this just our way of weaseling out of car-pool duties and piano recitals, a rationale for long walks, afternoons in a hammock, hours of uninterrupted reading time, and the approximate social skills of a wolverine? Is I’m actually working all the time something young writers learn to say at writing school, much as cleaning women learn to say It broke?

    Relax. Don’t panic. Not to worry.

    It’s really true.

    Writers work all the time.

    Take the other day, for example. What did I do with myself? How did the busy little bee improve each hour? Just what action did I take to put words on the page and bring money into the house?

    Well, let’s see. I read a couple of books and a magazine or two. I watched a ball game on television. I got wet in the Gulf and dried off in the sun.

    What’s that? You say it doesn’t sound like work?

    A lot you know.

    Take the reading, for example. Now, a lot of reading is research. Sometimes it’s specific research, when I want to learn something that I need to know in order to write something I’m working on, or planning to work on. Sometimes it’s general research, like reading a book on precious and semiprecious gemstones because I frequently write books about people who steal such things. And sometimes it’s not exactly research, but it’s a matter of keeping up with what other people in my field are doing.

    And is this what you were reading the other day, sir?

    Well, no, Rachel. As a matter of fact, I was reading for enjoyment.

    Then it wasn’t work, sir, was it?

    Ah, but it was, Rachel. I’m afraid it’s impossible for a writer to read without working.

    Consider. One of the books I read was The Good Mother, a bestselling mainstream novel by Sue Miller lately out in paperback. I got interested in the characters and caught up in the plot, and then on page 156 I returned to the business of being a writer.

    A few pages earlier, the narrator entered a coin-operated laundry and commenced doing a load of wash. There she meets a young man with whom she had words on a previous laundry visit. They have a conversation in which he apologizes for his surly behavior earlier, and then he tries to pick her up, and then

    He turned and looked out the window. The dog came and stood in the doorway briefly, and he and Leo seemed to exchange a long look before he left.

    Wait a minute. What dog?

    So I find myself looking over what I’ve read. Half a page earlier a dog had figured metaphorically; when Leo tosses a verbal overture at the narrator, she thinks: Here it comes, as inevitable as a dog at a hydrant. But that’s not a real dog, it can’t be actually walking in the door and cocking an eye at Leo and a leg at one of the washers, can it?

    Three pages earlier, there’s this at the end of a long paragraph of description:

    Every now and then the same rangy black dog would come in and check the wastebaskets and changing personnel.

    Well, that’s the dog. I must have read the sentence that introduced him, but he hadn’t stayed in my mind for the thousand or so words that followed. Now, having rediscovered him, I couldn’t let go of him. Would other readers react as I had reacted? Had the dog been insufficiently established by that single reference to let readers recognize him when he reappeared? How much do you have to implant that sort of stage dressing, and how long will the reader retain it?

    There may not be any answers to these questions, but the fact that the questions themselves come up confirms that reading is always work for a writer. Even when you read for sheer enjoyment, at least a part of your mind is busy deciding what works and what doesn’t, and how the writer gets certain effects and what alternatives might have been employed. It’s a nuisance when I find myself rewriting perfectly adequate sentences in my mind, or wasting time figuring out where the black dog came from. But it’s part of my job.

    Take Two

    Though he appears a lazy slob

    A writer’s always on the job.

    I don’t know if I like that any better. It seems defensive, doesn’t it?

    What else did I read lately, and how was I practicing my profession when I did so? Well, I read part of a trashy novel about a prestigious law firm. The author was a lawyer with impressive qualifications, so I expected the inside story, whether or not the fiction was well-crafted.

    Very early on, a young lawyer under consideration for a position with the firm has a business lunch with one of the partners. The author makes a real point of having him not order a drink first because he’ll need his wits about him; it never occurs to either the young man or the writer to have something non-alcoholic. The older attorney, while ordering a martini of his own, smiles approvingly at the young man’s decision not to have anything, and then the two of them have a full business discussion, with a job offered and accepted and the young man volunteering to start work that very afternoon, all before they even order their lunch.

    Well, I’ll tell you. A scene like that makes you wonder if the author ever went out to lunch, let alone with a partner in a top Manhattan law firm. Any lunch of this sort would involve a whole lot of small talk, with precious little serious business broached before the coffee and dessert. One wouldn’t have to be a writer to get angry with this particular author. But, as a writer, I found myself musing on how I might have written the same scene. I wouldn’t report all the small talk, of course. Writing is always a matter of selection. Start with an opening exchange, then cut to the dessert course? Stay with the small talk and summarize the rest?

    I thought, too, about the importance of accuracy. Conversations in fiction are not exactly as they are in the real world, and events can happen more rapidly. The older man might legitimately reach a decision at the dinner table in fiction that he would sleep on in the real world.

    But the reader’s suspension of disbelief has a breaking point. When the reader says, Wait a minute, that’s not the way it is, you’re in trouble.

    Take Three

    Better keep the coffee perking—

    Day or night, the writer’s working!

    What else have I read lately? Well, the August issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine showed up the other day. I could say I have to read it in order to keep up with work in my field, and that’s true enough, but I read it because I felt like it. And one of the stories was Long Shot on a Stone Angel, by Donald Olson.

    It was a good story, nicely told. In it a retired gentleman begins visiting prisoners in order to have something to do, and he winds up doing some investigative work to clear a man who has been convicted of killing his wife. Part of his investigation consists of a visit to the convicted man’s apartment where the murder took place.

    Wait a minute, I said to myself. How is this possible? The guy has been arrested, stood trial, got convicted, and is serving a stretch in prison. The sentence is unspecified, but it’s either life or a lot of years, and what’s his apartment doing with his pictures and furniture still in it? Even if he owned the apartment, it would be sold for legal fees. If it’s a rental, it would have long since been rented. No way on earth it’s just going to sit there waiting for him to get lucky and make parole seven years down the line.

    And that’s a real plot problem, because something the old man finds in the apartment turns out to be essential to the development of the story. There’s no way to do it without a visit to the apartment. You either do it as he did it or you forget the story altogether.

    Of course, if it had been a house, one that had been in the family a couple of generations and was thus owned free of any mortgage, he might have elected to hold onto it. Or maybe if it was a condo he could have had it set up to rent furnished, and thus his things would still be there. Still . . .

    Well, it doesn’t matter, obviously. The story worked fine as Mr. Olson wrote it, and if I hadn’t been in a nitpicking mood, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the plot problem in the first place. But, as a writer who doesn’t stop working, I couldn’t notice it and cluck my tongue and let it go at that. I had to look for a way to replot the story and solve the problem.

    Take Four

    Even when the fish are biting

    The hapless writer’s always writing.

    I think I liked the last one better. But the point is—yes, Rachel?

    Sir, I think we get the point that reading is work. But what about baseball?

    It’s the highest form of spiritual activity.

    But how does it get to be work, sir?

    You think it’s easy for those guys? Standing around in the hot sun? Chewing and spitting, they lay waste their power. It may look like a game, Rachel, but . . .

    I mean for you, sir. How is it work for you?

    Oh.

    Well, take the other day. I was watching the Mets and Darryl Strawberry was batting. Now Darryl Strawberry can hit a baseball about as far as any human being alive, but he can only do this when he swings the bat, which is an action he sometimes fails to perform. I sat on the couch while Mr. Strawberry looked at a called third strike to end the inning. His eyes widened in abject astonishment at the umpire’s verdict.

    What a surprise, I said.

    Then my wife, Lynne, said something, and I suppose the announcer did, too, but don’t ask me what it was. Because I was busy trying to decide how What a surprise would work upon the page. I had meant it sarcastically, as you have probably already surmised, but would a reader know as much if I just set the words down without explanation? In actual speech we convey a lot by inflection and tone of voice, and that doesn’t always come across in print.

    What a surprise, he said sarcastically.

    Well, sure, that works, but I’d generally prefer not to use an adverb to do the dialogue’s job. I’d rather let it fall upon your ear as sarcasm than wave my arms and shout out that it’s sarcasm.

    He arched a brow. What a surprise, he said.

    That works, too. Or the other character would react to the line in such a way that we get the inflection:

    Then what happened?

    Strawberry took a called third strike.

    What a surprise.

    "Come on, he hasn’t been doing it that much this year . . ."

    Down to Work

    I could go on. Writing is a full-time job, it really is, and you never really take a vacation from it. I could go through a whole day and show you how every conscious moment—and the unconscious ones as well—were part of the business of being a writer.

    I could, but I won’t. We’re out of space.

    Besides, the Reds are at Wrigley for an afternoon game with the Cubs. I’ve got work to do.

    • 2 •

    The Hearts of the Matter

    November 1987


    ON WRITING FROM THE HEART, TO THE HEART.


    I just read a book that ought to be unequivocally unpublishable. But it is going to be published, and its publisher thinks it’s going to be a bestseller, and I think the publisher’s probably right.

    The book is Poppy, by Barbara Larriva. Ballantine Books is publishing it as a hardcover title in October, and has taken the unusual step of launching the book with a special reader’s edition in trade paperback format for free distribution at the American Booksellers Association convention. They sent me a copy, which is how I am able to rush into print with a column inspired by Poppy even as the book is finding its way onto bookstore shelves.

    Poppy is the story of Allegra Alexander, once the brightest of stars in the Hollywood firmament, now a bitter old woman with terminal cancer who has elected to refuse radiation and chemotherapy and is waiting to die. While she lies grumbling in her hospital bed, she is visited by a relentlessly cheerful and cheering young girl named Poppy. Ultimately, inevitably, Poppy’s sunshine pierces Allegra’s dark despair.

    That’s enough by way of plot summary. The book is brief and the plot none too complex, and I don’t want to give away its few surprises.

    But why did I begin by categorizing it as unequivocally unpublishable?

    For starters, consider its length. Poppy runs to something like 30,000 words. If you were to set out to write something unpublishable, and you wanted to make it unpublishable in every respect, you couldn’t pick a better word length than 30,000. A short novel runs 60,000 words, and a very short novel runs 50,000. Thirty thousand words is far too long for a magazine and far too short for a book.

    What does this mean when a manuscript is making the rounds? It means that a lot of markets would reject it without really looking at it. If I were an editor with a desk piled high with submissions, and if I saw at a glance that a particular manuscript was half as long as the shortest novel we’d published in the past 20 years, I might very well send it back to its author without even scanning the first page. Not every editor would do so—some are as compulsive as the rest of us, and can’t dash a few drops of A.1. Sauce on a hamburger without reading the label on the bottle. But some would.

    More to the point, virtually every editor who did read the manuscript would do so knowing full well he was reading a manuscript that was unmarketably short. Given the realities of publishing, given the glut of submissions, given the fact that one is never called to account for the bestsellers that got away but must justify the flops he said yes to, every editor who’s been on the job for more than a few months has a built-in predisposition toward rejection. A first novel by an unknown writer and it’s only 30,000 words long? Come on!

    Enough about length; if I don’t watch myself I’ll devote more words to the subject than Barbara Larriva did to her whole book. Obviously Poppy got published in spite of its length, not because of it. The book has something that made it impossible for an editor to say that automatic No to it.

    What is it?

    It is not the brilliance of its style, the poetry of its composition. I do not want to imply that Poppy is poorly written. It is not. Barbara Larriva is a good writer, and Poppy is well-organized, lucid and accessible. But it is not so superbly written that the writing announces itself as a masterpiece. The individual sentences are not so flawlessly composed that they resonate within us as prose poetry. The prose and dialogue are adequate. They carry the story quite effectively, but they never transcend the story. We do not read Poppy in spite of the way it was written, but neither do we read it because of the way it was written.

    Is it the characterization that grabs us? I don’t think so. The only characters of much importance are Allegra and Poppy. While they are both drawn with some finesse, and while they are etched strongly enough to linger in the mind, I didn’t find either all that compelling. It’s no chore to spend an hour or two in their company, but I wouldn’t ink in either on my list of fiction’s most unforgettable characters.

    The plot, then? Some books overcome a multitude of flaws because the plot just draws us in and won’t let go. We can’t wait to find out what happens next, and our eagerness to do so allows us to overlook any other deficiencies the book may have.

    Is that the case with Poppy? Again, I think not. If anything, it seems to me that the plot errs on the side of simplicity. I was able to anticipate most of its twists and turns.

    So what’s the answer? Why did the book get published? Why does the publisher think he’s got a bestseller here, and why do I suspect he’s right?

    I don’t think intellectual analysis will supply the answer, because I don’t believe the magic success factor here is one that has anything much to do with the intellect. Poppy works on an extra-intellectual level. It hasn’t got all that much to say to the mind, certainly nothing the mind hasn’t heard before. But it somehow manages the feat of speaking directly to the heart.

    • • •

    Fiction’s emotional impact is achieved through the transfer of feeling from the writer to the reader. The writer feels something, encodes that feeling in words upon the page, and transfers that feeling through those words to the reader at the other end of the line. And all of this takes place irrespective of what’s going on in the conscious minds of writer or reader.

    While I read Poppy, there was not a moment when I was unaware that I was reading a story someone had written. My mind was busy throughout, analyzing, evaluating, criticizing. Because I am not only someone who writes fiction but also someone who writes about writing fiction, I have become a very tough audience for fiction. I am constantly weighing alternative ways of phrasing the sentence I’ve just read, paying an untoward amount of attention to the technical choices the author has made and the extent to which they have or haven’t worked. As a result, I inevitably keep a certain amount of distance from virtually everything I read, even the books I’m drawn into.

    I wasn’t all that much drawn into Poppy, and I had no trouble keeping a detached eye on the narrative. This is a little obvious, my mind would say. This doesn’t really work. I see what she’s doing here. I know what she’s getting at. And so on.

    And, while I was busy being aware of everything that was less than perfect about Poppy, I kept finding myself moved to the point of tears.

    I have to tell you that this was disconcerting. It is one thing to be all caught up in a book or movie and be moved to tears. That happens to me now and then and I welcome it. But in this instance I was not all caught up in the book, I was detached and remote and analytical throughout, and I was moved to tears anyway.

    That sort of thing doesn’t happen often. Oh, if I’ve been up for 36 hours on airplanes, or if I’m under a ton of stress of one sort or another, I may be emotionally vulnerable to an unusual extent. When I’m like that, I may get misty-eyed over a supermarket opening. But the day I read Poppy I was as close to stability as I ever get, and the little book worked its magic upon me nonetheless.

    Magic. I think that’s a fair word for it. I was not deeply drawn into the story, I didn’t care a whole lot about the characters, and yet my heart was touched. According to Pascal, the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. If I want to know why my heart was touched, I can’t look to the world of reason for the answer.

    • • •

    Feeling comes from feeling, the reader’s feeling from the writer’s feeling. Poppy is not the first book to succeed emotionally beyond its artistic and intellectual success. After I laid Poppy aside, the book that came first to mind was Love Story, by Erich Segal. That too was a short book that tugged (shamelessly, I always thought) at the reader’s heartstrings. It was also a book one could very easily ridicule, as I don’t doubt Poppy will be ridiculed in some quarters if it is the commercial success I expect it to be. (No one bothers to ridicule flops.)

    Whatever was right or wrong with Love Story, I can recall that Mr. Segal always claimed to have been overcome emotionally when he wrote it; he said he had trouble typing the final section because he kept breaking down and weeping. The same people who criticized the book as mindless pap had a fair amount of fun with the image of the author blinking back tears through those last pages and all the way to the bank, but I have never doubted that Mr. Segal was speaking the literal truth. I think he was indeed moved to tears writing the book, and I think he instilled that feeling in the book, and that it worked as it did for readers because of the feeling that communicated itself from him to them. Other factors may help explain why Love Story was the specific book it was, but that alone explains to me why it worked the way it did.

    With Poppy, I think the feeling is love. The rather simple message of this rather simple book would seem to be (rather simply) that love heals all. Poppy’s selfless and unconditional love transforms Allegra. The love Allegra is then able to express transforms her life and her world. This is by no means the first time this message has been told, in fiction or elsewhere; it works so powerfully here because of the love which empowered Barbara Larriva when she put it on paper. That love, which she seems to have been able to receive and embody and transmit, is what makes her little book work.

    Isn’t it a hell of a note? We try to study writing as a craft, seeking to learn what to put in and what to leave out and how to best arrange our selected ingredients, and then it turns out that, as E. E. Cummings put it,

    since feeling is first

    who pays any attention

    to the syntax of things

    will never wholly kiss you

    Is that all there is to it? Should we forget about the syntax of things altogether?

    No, of course not. The better we are at our craft, the tighter a ship we provide for our feelings to set sail in. But there must be more to it than craft; we must learn too how to put our own hearts into what we write. Otherwise we’re sending empty vessels out to sea, and the world will not much care whether or not they reach port safely.

    • 3 •

    The Scene of the Crime

    December 1987


    THOUGHTS ON RESEARCH: HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH, HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?


    Toward the end of July, Lynne and I were in Detroit, where we spent a couple of hours visiting Joan and Elmore Leonard. Mr. Leonard is the bestselling author of Glitz and Bandits and Touch, and if we’d arrived a few days later we would have missed him, because he was planning a visit to Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

    Cape Girardeau, as you may know, is a city of 35,000 situated on the Mississippi in the southeast corner of the state, a little more than a hundred miles south of St. Louis. It might seem an unlikely spot for a visit from a top suspense novelist, especially one who has been cited by Playgirl magazine as one of the ten sexiest men in America. What, I wondered, was drawing Dutch Leonard to Cape Girardeau?

    The name, he explained. I liked the sound of it, he said, and I had it in mind for some time that I might set a book there. And then I had the idea of starting a book with an airplane crash, and someone’s killed in it, and there’s an insurance investigation of a relative of the victim. And I thought maybe the crash could take place in Cape Girardeau, and then the story would move on somewhere else from there.

    Mr. Leonard makes occasional use of a researcher, and in this instance his researcher had other business that would bring him close to Cape Girardeau. He went there and returned with the answers to some questions, along with an array of material from the local chamber of commerce. All of this had enabled Mr. Leonard to conclude that Cape Girardeau would do nicely for the book he had in mind, and now he was going there himself to see the place with his own eyes and get the feel of it.

    I found this very interesting, not least because I had just recently completed a novel that sprawls across 18 states. While I had, at one time or another, been in all of those states, I had by no means visited every city and town where I’d set a scene. In my book, a group of people walk from

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