For 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.
Once 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.
What 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. Wasn’t it?
Well, now there are six. A couple of months ago, Open Road brought out The Liar’s Bible: A Handbook for Fiction Writers. And here we have The Liar’s Companion: A Field Guide for Fiction Writers.
In a moment I’ll tell you how they came to be, but first I want to say something about titles. My two books drawn from WD columns were Telling Lies for Fun and Profit and Spider, Spin Me a Web. I don’t know that one is any better or stronger or more user-friendly than its fellow, but if I had to pick one over the other, I’d go with Spider. The columns are more recent, and I was very likely a little more knowledgeable when I wrote them.
Year in and year out, Telling Lies sells more copies than Spider. Like, lots more copies.
What’s the difference? Well, obviously, the chief difference between the books lies in their titles. A great title, it’s been often said, is a title on a bestselling book. Telling Lies for Fun and Profit is a great title.
Well, I’m no dummy. And that’s why the two new books aren’t called The Spider’s Bible and The Spider’s Companion.
But where did they come from?
Well, it’s not really all that hard to explain. Telling Lies gathered columns from my first four years at WD, Spider from the four or so years after that. That left a lot of columns uncollected, and in the ordinary course of things I would very likely have sorted through them and looked around for a publisher.
But when I rather abruptly stopped writing the column, I quit thinking about the subject.
And then, a couple of years ago, I heard from a fellow I know named Terry Zobeck. He’s a fan and a collector, and his particular collecting interest is centered on the initial magazine appearance of works by those writers he most esteems. Toward this end he had compiled a great number of issues of WD, and by purchasing bulk lots he’d wound up with duplicate copies of many of those issues.
He’d checked them against his copies of my books, and established that he had a host of columns and articles of mine that had not appeared in either Telling Lies or Spider. That was more than enough uncollected material for a new book, and would he like me to send him his duplicate issues?
I could hardly say no. In addition to the duplicates, he went to the trouble of photocopying those columns of mine for which he had only a single copy. In all, I now had in hand 77 pieces that had never previously been published in book form, an ample amount for not one but two books.
So I thanked him profusely and put the box in the corner of my office and forgot about it for a couple of years. Making use of the material promised to be a whole lot of work, and I wasn’t sure a print publisher would be that enthusiastic anyway.
Then Open Road came along, and set about publishing forty-plus backlist books of mine as ebooks. I’d long since come to believe that ebooks are the future of publishing, and it’s beginning to look as though the future has arrived, and not a moment too soon. I asked the Open Road folks if they’d be interested in a pair of books on the gentle art of prevarication, and they responded with great enthusiasm, and we were on our way.
So now I’m the author of six instructional books for writers. And no, I don’t think writing can be taught, but I know it can be learned. Most of us learn in two ways, by reading and by writing. (I found a third way to add to the mix: by writing about writing.) What we read and what we write, and the extent to which we’ll find it helpful, is very much an individual matter. Some people say they’ve found what I’ve written about writing to be useful reading matter. I hope that turns out to be true for you.
Sometimes I’m asked what’s the one piece of writing advice I consider most important.
Write to please yourself, I reply.
That’s not all there is to it, not by any means. But there’s nothing without it.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village