The Liar's Companion by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lawrence Block
Published: 2017-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

3. The liar is flexible. Mozart wrote down the music he heard in his head. Michelangelo looked at the block of marble and cut away the part that wasn’t David.

Similarly, the writer sees the story and its characters whole in his mind, and tells the reader what he sees.

When things go perfectly (and sometimes they do) that’s all there is to it. The artist is given to hear the music in the mind, to see David whole within the stone. But our vision is usually imperfect, or more accurately incomplete, clouded. We have to vamp a little.

A plot idea comes to mind, and I start following it, writing a scene. Then I realize that it will throw off something I’ve already foreseen coming up in a later chapter. For a moment, the intellect has to be brought to bear to see if the two conflicting elements can be reconciled. If not, it weighs them both. Can I think up something better for the later chapter? Or would I be better advised to scrap the new development and devise an alternative?

It is useful to be able to perceive alternatives. Sometimes I’ll write a scene, and I see it so clearly on my field of inner vision, and it writes itself so effortlessly, that I can easily overlook the fact that it’s not a useful scene, that it takes the book in the wrong direction. I can, if I find my way to it carefully, uncover another scene that I will be able to visualize and to write about just as vividly, a scene that will have the added virtue of fitting the book.

Writing—indeed, all art—is a matter of making one choice after another. Sometimes, when everything is clear-cut, when each sentence in a book seems to have a sort of inevitability about it, it merely means that the choices are all being made on an unconscious level. More often we choose constantly—whether to write a scene long or short, whether to summarize an event or illustrate it, whether to reveal certain background facts we know about a character or leave them forever unreported. Even when we are never in the slightest doubt as to who these people are or what they’re doing, we make choices all the time.

The best liar is giving a full and accurate report of something he has managed to let himself believe, but he is keeping one eye all the while upon his listener. If something’s not going over, he shifts gears and finds something that will. Similarly, the writer keeps an ear to the ground, hearing what the reader will hear and seeing how the sound registers. If it sounds off, he looks for another approach.

Blake, who reminded us that

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent

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