Lawrence Block - The Liars Bible: A Good Book for Fiction Writers

More by Lawrence Block

BOOKS FOR WRITERS

NON-FICTION

ANTHOLOGIES EDITED

WRITING AS JILL EMERSON

THE CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY

THE COLLECTION OF CLASSIC EROTICA

THE MATTHEW SCUDDER NOVELS

THE BERNIE RHODENBARR MYSTERIES

KELLERS GREATEST HITS

THE ADVENTURES OF EVAN TANNER

THE AFFAIRS OF CHIP HARRISON

NOVELS

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

WRITTEN FOR PERFORMANCE

The Liars Bible

A Good Book for Fiction Writers

Lawrence Block

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Writers Digest, in which the articles contained in this book were originally published.

Copyright 2011 by Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved.

Production: QA Productions

Introduction

In the fall of 1975 I spent a month on North Carolinas Outer Banks. Every day I fished off the Rodanthe pier, and every night I ate what I caught. It was a full life.

When I wasnt fishing, I sat in my room and wrote. Along with several short stories, I turned out an essay that attempted to answer the perennial (and perennially annoying) question of the non-writer to the writer: Where do you get your ideas? I discussed the way ideas crop up and how they turn into stories, and I mailed the piece off to Writers Digest and forgot about it.

Six months later I remembered, when I learned that the magazine wanted to buy the article. I was in Los Angeles by then, living at the Magic Hotel, and my daughters would be flying out at the end of June to spend the summer with me. I figured they could keep me company at the hotel for July and we could spend August seeing something of the country on the way back to New York. And one of the places wed stop en route would be Cincinnati, where WDs editor, John Brady, could take me to lunch.

I had an agenda, and I shared it with him over bowls of the chili for which the city is famous. The magazine had several monthly columns, I pointed out, but what it didnt have was a column on the writing of fiction, and that seemed to be the chief interest of the greater portion of its subscribers. Surely they needed a fiction column, and surely I was the very person to write it.

Remarkably enough, Brady agreed with me. Maybe it was the chili. I wound up with an assignment to deliver 1,500 to 2,000 words every other month; theyd cut their cartoon columnist back to six issues a year, to alternate with Fiction.

Id planned on returning to L.A. after I dropped off the kids, but wound up staying in New York. I rented a place on Bleecker Street and went to work. After Id delivered three columns, Brady bumped the cartoon guy altogether and put me on a monthly schedule. I wrote that column, year in and year out, for fourteen years.

The piece that started it all, the essay I knocked out in Rodanthe when I wasnt hauling spot and croaker out of the Atlantic, wasnt the first Id written about writing. Seventeen years earlier, in early 1958, I was a college student whod dropped out to hang on to a summer job at a New York literary agency, quite the perfect learning experience for a wannabe writer. I spent eight hours a day reading fee scripts, the submissions of other wannabes who paid my boss to read their work. I was the one who read it, and it was my task to write letters over his signature detailing why their stories were unsalable, but assuring them that they were talented, and that they were best advised to write another story, and send it in. Uh, with another check, of course.

The moral and ethical aspects of all of this notwithstanding, it was a wonderful job. You learn more reading inept work than you could ever learn from a master. You see whats wrong. Thats easier than trying to see whats right.

A couple of months into the job, I noticed one obvious error that a surprising number of my earnest hopefuls were committing. They used unwieldy verbs in dialogue, whipping out Rogets Thesaurus to avoid saying said all the time, and then wedding the verb to a cumbersome adverb. I wrote a piece about this, called it Gloomily Asserted Smith, and gave it to Henry Morrison, who occupied the rung directly above mine on the Scott Meredith ladder. He sent it to a magazine called Author and Journalist, and, mirabile dictu, they bought it. I think they paid $25, but it might have been as much as $35; whatever it was, thats what I got... minus 10 percent for Scott, needless to say.

Gloomily Asserted Smith never led anywhere, unless you want to see it as a forerunner of my column. But the column itself led to four books.

The first, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print, was the suggestion of Brady and his fellows in WDs book division; by that time Id been doing the column for a little over a year. Its been in print ever since.

The second and fourth were Telling Lies for Fun and Profit