Spider, Spin Me A Web

A Handbook For Fiction Writers

Lawrence Block

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061861840
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Authorship
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The craft of writing is a lot like spinning a web: You take threads and weave them skillfully together, and only you know where this intricate network of twists and turns begin and how it will end. Now, with Lawrence Block's expert advice, you can learn this art of entrapping your reader in a maze of fascinating fiction.

Spider, Spin Me a Web is the perfect companion volume to Block's previous book on writing, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which Sue Grafton noted "should be a permanent part of every writer's library." As helpful and supportive as always, Block shares what he's learned over the course of writing over one hundred published books: techniques to help you to write a solid piece of fiction; strategies for getting a reader (or editor) to read—and buy—your book; ideas for increasing your creativity and developing an environment that will nourish you and your craft.

Spider, Spin Me a Web is a complete guide to achieving your full potential as a writer.

PART ONE

Building the Web
The Techniques of Fiction

What is most often associated with a spider in the minds of the majority of people? Its web! The very name spider refers to its spinning habit, though the making of a snare is not the only use to which the spider puts its silk. The wandering spiders build no snares yet use the silk in various ways. Most spiders as they move pay out a drag-line behind them, and it is this type of line which supports the spider should it lose its footing or jump from a support. At frequent intervals the drag-line is fastened to the substratum by a large number of looped threads. This is called an attachment disc and it is from this point that the spider is supported should it drop on its drag-line.

One of the most interesting uses to which silk is put is the parachute. The spider climbs high up on a blade of grass, on a fence, or pole, and facing the wind stands on the tips of the tarsi and tilts the abdomen upwards. From the spinnerets are emitted threads which are paid out as the air currents pull, until the buoyancy of the parachute is enough to support the spider, which releases its hold and is carried away in the breeze.

—B.J. Kaston & Elizabeth Kaston

How to Know the Spiders

1. Organic Writing

“When you sit down to write a book, how much of it do you already have fixed in your mind? Do you know how it will end? Do you know how it will get there?”

This is one of the questions that comes up most frequently when I meet my readers. (It runs a close second to “What is Bill Brohaugh really like?” and is a whole lot easier to answer.) And it’s a point, certainly, that I’ve addressed from time to time over the years, discussing the relative merits of planning and spontaneity, the security of a detailed outline, the freedom of travelling without a formal itinerary.

I was thinking the other day that, however carefully the writer plans ahead, with or without an outline, you never really know exactly what’s going to happen next in any truly engaging piece of fiction. Because good writing is never merely a matter of assembling a boxful of component parts according to a sheet of directions, and that holds true even when you’re the one who handcrafted the parts and wrote the directions.

Writing, you might say, is an organic process. It grows as it goes. Each page is the product of everything that has gone before it, including of course the preceding page. I may know—or think I know—exactly what I’m going to write today and tomorrow. But something unplanned will happen during today’s stint at the typewriter, some unimportant piece of dialogue, some bit of description—and what I write tomorrow will be changed by it.

Here’s an illustration, from a letter I received from another writer a few months ago.

In a story I’m working on now, I needed an unusual barkeep, and in creating her I gave her just three fingers on one hand. No reason, other than to make her distinctive. But by the end of the first chapter, I let her do some of the talking, and she explained how she had lost two fingers, and very shortly the loss of the fingers became important to the plot then unfolding. Including reference to the three-fingered hand was, in a sense, sowing a seed that I harvested—by making certain fictional connections—later.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Sometimes significant plot developments derive from minor character tags or scene dressing, as the writer above describes it. In other instances, little bits of business which the writer drops into one chapter will create echoing elements in later chapters, in a way that seems to give the overall work a fuller texture.

Sometimes what looks like a theme—and would very likely get labeled one by a critic—grows out of this sort of organic accident. An example that occurs to me cropped up in The Triumph of Evil, a book I wrote some years ago under the pen name Paul Kavanagh (and due to be reissued in a year or so under my own name). Early on, the lead character, one Miles Dorn, watches robins nesting outside his window. Later on, his young mistress’s pet cat kills a baby robin. That scene, which led to an interesting emotional exchange between Dorn and the girl, would never have happened had I not had him looking out the window earlier on with no plan to make use of what he saw there.

But that wasn’t the extent of avian influence in that book. At another point in the book, Dorn is in a city and watches a woman feeding pigeons in the park. He muses that for all he knows the woman is poisoning the birds, and ruminates some on pigeon eradication programs which so affect the birds that they lay eggs without shells. And, still later, he’s in New Orleans and wanders into a museum where he sees row after row of glass cases containing stuffed birds, some of them of species which have since become extinct.

If anyone were dotty enough to think The Triumph of Evil merited scholarly analysis, some sort of thesis could be propounded on the use of birds as a symbol in the book. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other mentions I’ve since forgotten.) Now we could argue that such a thesis would be pure nonsense, since the author is in a position to attest that he had no conscious intention of using birds as a symbol, or as a metaphor for something or other. On the other hand, I wouldn’t dream of denying that one bird reference gave rise to another, unconsciously if not consciously, and I am perfectly willing to entertain the hypothesis that my unconscious mind may have had some sort of grand design in mind, one way or another.

Most of us who’ve spent a fair amount of time writing have come to see that the conscious analytical/intellectual part of the mind has only a small amount to do with what winds up on the page. It’s another portion of the mind altogether that just plain knows, sentences after the introduction of a newly-imagined character, what that character will or won’t do, say, notice, respond to, or remember. It’s that obscure side of the mind, too, that keeps producing fictional ideas—not just the initial idea that sparks the creation of a piece of writing, but the endless parade of creative ideas which must follow to see the work through to completion.

“Where do you get your ideas?” That’s the non-writer’s perennial question, as if the initial idea is everything, as if after that one merely has the tiresome chore of filling in the blanks. But it is not like that at all. The writer’s mind generates ideas without pause from the first page to the last. Whenever a character opens a door, the writer has to think of something to be on the other side of it. Some of the larger pieces of furniture in the room, if you will, are dictated by a plotline that has already been determined, but other furnishings must be dreamed up on the spot, and some of them will derive from what has gone before, and will lead to what ultimately follows.

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The writer’s mind generates ideas without pause from the first page to the last

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My perception of my own role in this process has varied from time to time. At times I think I am the source of all my work. At other times I see myself more as channel than source, conveying stories from some unknowable well—the universal unconsciousness, the sublime music of the spheres, the mind of God, call it what you will. Perhaps everything we would write already exists in perfect form; it emerges on the page in one degree or another of imperfection, depending upon the extent to which we are open channels.

What is it, Arnold?

I was just wondering if you were going to suggest we use Ouija boards instead of typewriters, sir.

Not unless you can find one with an automatic carriage return, Arnold. No, I’m not so much recommending that we try to channel our writing as suggesting that we’re always doing just that, that that’s precisely what our imagination and intuition is always doing.

Let’s return for a moment to the letter from the writer who created (or channeled, or whatever) the three-fingered bartendress, sowing a seed for later harvest.

He writes:

A lot of beginning fiction writers sow no seeds. They include no detail, or if they do include detail, it is for the sake of description or verisimilitude. It is rarely done with the intent of creating a few layers that might be mined later. The mining might be done in terms of plot, or in terms of later expanding a characterization, or in terms of creating a voice or in terms of weaving connections throughout the fiction. Because in order to weave connections, we have to have a stock of proper connecting points.

You don’t know how having a three-fingered woman will affect your plot now, but it’s there as fodder, to be used later. You don’t know why a character’s interest in collecting baseball cards affects things now, but perhaps he’ll later notice that someone’s alibi of going to a game that day is wrong because he mentioned a player who had been traded a year before. Or something…

I think the best way to sow the particular seeds my friend is talking about is simply to allow them to be sown, to keep the more logical side of one’s mind from interfering in the process. The idea of giving the barkeep three fingers was just that, it was an idea, it came to the writer, and he allowed it to take form in his work without using logic to rule it out. He could have said, “Wait a minute here, three fingers is kind of grotesque, it seems gimmicky, why do I want to do that, what’s the point of it, maybe I should think about this before I get carried away.” Instead he trusted the intuitive impulse that gave him the character, and the natural organic process of writing let other things happen further on down the line, growing inevitably out of that original notion.

Here’s another example of a slightly different sort. Years ago I spoke to an old friend for the first time in a long time. He informed me that his mother had died since our last contact, and related the curious circumstances of her death. A friend of hers had found an abandoned television set on the street and brought it to her apartment; the set had been booby-trapped, and when he turned it on, my friend’s mother was killed by the ensuing explosion.

When I heard this, I made the appropriate sympathetic sounds, and unconsciously filed the incident away. Some seven years later I was writing a book called Eight Million Ways to Die, and I had my lead character, Matthew Scudder, talking to somebody, and the somebody he was talking to recounted the incident of the exploding television set, saying that it had happened to the mother of a mutual acquaintance.

Now this had nothing to do with the plot of the book. It was consistent with one of the book’s themes—i.e., that the world in general and New York in particular are dangerous places—but it didn’t connect specifically with anything that preceded or followed it. But it was just the right story for that fellow to tell Scudder right about then, and my mind had been holding it on a darkened shelf all these years, waiting for the time and place to trot it out.

I recounted this incident at a writer’s conference, using it to illustrate that certain people tend to tell you things that prove useful in your fiction, and one person in my audience asked a question I found surprising. How, he wondered, had I known to use it where I did? What made me decide to do so? What were my reasons for the decision?

“It fit,” I said. “It was perfect there.”

“But how did you know that?”

I didn’t know how to answer his question. How did I know it? By knowing it, I thought. I just knew it, that’s all.

How did my friend decide to maim his bartender? Not through planning and calculation. Not with the thought that a three-fingered bartender just might lead to something, either. He made the decision because it just felt right. It was, thus, an intuitive decision, and he let his intuition have its head.

And, because the intuition always knows what it’s doing, other things were able to grow out of the decision. Organically. Yes, Rachel?

I thought when things grow organically that means with no bug sprays or chemical fertilizers.

Well, that would describe my own writing perfectly, Rachel. I never use bug sprays, and an abundant supply of natural fertilizer is the wellspring of all my work. Is that what you were going to say, Arnold?

No, sir. I was going to ask who the writer was who had the three-fingered bartender.

That was Bill Brohaugh.

You’re kidding.

Honest.

Sir, could I ask you something? What’s he really like?

2. The Look of Words upon the Page

In the class I used to teach at Hofstra University, students took turns reading their assigned work aloud. Each story, upon having been read, was discussed and criticized by the author’s fellow students. This workshop approach is probably the most common method of teaching writing, and one can say for it what Churchill said of democracy, i.e., that it is a terrible system, its sole virtue residing in its marked superiority to all the other systems in existence.

What is most clearly wrong with the system derives from the fact that prose fiction is not designed to be read aloud. One takes in its message with the eyes, and the ear it must please is that inner ear that hears what the eye has recorded in silence.

This is not to say that reading prose aloud is without purpose. It is of particular value, it seems to me, to the writer himself; when he has to stand up there and read his own words aloud, he is apt to be struck by those unfortunate turns of phrase, those awkward verbal constructions that seemed perfectly acceptable when they were just sitting there on the page. One student of mine last semester had a tendency to overwrite, and I noticed that his purplest passages would stick in his throat when he tried to read them to us. I understand that some writers make a point of reading each day’s production aloud, either to a friend or to the unhearing walls, so that they can catch weaknesses in their writing that the eye failed to detect.

Perhaps the greatest fault of the workshop approach is that the reader’s audience is in no position to judge how the story being read does or does not work upon the page. One of my students began the term by writing whole stories in single unbroken paragraphs, as endless as Faulknerian sentences and impossibly deadening to the reader’s eye. I broke him of this pernicious habit, but only because I collected my students’ work at the end of class and had a look (as opposed to a listen) at what they had done.

If you take a few moments to watch readers at a paperback rack, you’ll see that they choose books on the basis of eye appeal. It is the visual allure of the cover that gets the book picked up in the first place, but it is the visual appeal of words upon the pages which ke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• About the Author
• Other Books by Lawrence Block
• Copyright
• About the Publisher