The Crime of Our Lives by Block Lawrence

Author:Block, Lawrence [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Lawrence Block
Published: 2015-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

Once I’d walked in at nine or close to it, I’d hang up my jacket. (We wore jackets and ties to the office, but took off the jackets. I don’t think it ever occurred to me or to anyone else to show up without a necktie. At one point I acquired a black shirt with a button-down collar, and took to wearing it with a white tie. Henry, visibly embarrassed at the task forced upon him, took me aside on one such sartorial occasion. “Larry,” he said, “Scott doesn’t remember Mark Hellinger, and he’s seen a lot of gangster movies, and, um, well, maybe you could not wear a black shirt and a white tie to the office.” “Oh, okay,” I said, and the next day I showed up with the black shirt, pairing it this time with a black tie. Nobody ever said a word. And, thinking back, I wonder why we wore ties in the first place, because we had no dealings whatsoever with the public. Nobody ever saw us. Any visitors—and there weren’t many—passed directly from the waiting room to the offices in the rear, bypassing our bullpen altogether.)

But I digress.

Once settled in, my first order of business was to walk over to a file cabinet, where the top drawer was filled with fee submissions, arrayed in the order they’d been received. The schedule called for a two-week interval between our receipt of a submission and our reply—long enough so they could believe Scott had been able to give their effort due consideration, but not so long that they’d feel neglected.

Each manuscript was in a file folder, and if the author of the manuscript had had prior dealings with us, all the letters he’d written would be there with it, stapled to carbon copies of our replies. If this was our first crack at him, there’d be just the new story and whatever letter he’d sent along with it.

It didn’t take me long to learn to cherish these new people. They were so much easier to reject.

There was a formula, you see, to the rejection letters it was my job to produce. Scott Meredith had written a book, Writing to Sell, and in it he’d channeled Aristotle and presented what he called the Plot Skeleton: a strong and sympathetic lead character confronts a problem, his initial struggle to overcome it only deepens his dilemma, and at last through his own admirable efforts he brings things to a satisfactory conclusion.

That’s a quick version; in the letters that went out over Scott’s signature, we often got half a page out of the plot skeleton. The more space we filled detailing the plot skeleton, the less we were required to say about the story.

And, while the plot was always the ostensible reason for returning the story, it rarely entered into the equation. A writer could copy a plot from Chekhov, and he’d still get the story turned down on the ground that the plot was faulty. (And, on the very

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