The Liar's Companion: A Field Guide for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9781453218549
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2011-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Not Enough Rain

SHOULD YOU READ FICTION WHILE

WRITING IT? THE ANSWER DEPENDS ON

HOW PARCHED YOUR SOIL IS.

March 1989

Long ago, the Australian writer Peter Carey was interviewed on American television. In the course of the program he explained why he avoids reading other people’s fiction while in the process of composing his own.

“Otherwise,” he explained, “I’ll read a particularly good description of a storm. And I’ll put the book down and say to myself, ‘Damn, that’s my problem—I haven’t got enough rain in my book.’ ”

The foregoing is not a verbatim quote. It’s not even a close reconstruction from memory, because I never saw the program in question. I had it recounted to me by my friend Philip Friedman, author of the about-to-be-published courtroom thriller Reasonable Doubt. I am reconstructing from memory Philip’s reconstruction, so Mr. Carey’s actual words may well have been something rather different.

No matter. They amount in any case to an excellent argument against reading while you’re writing. “Not enough rain in my book.” Says it all, doesn’t it?

Except that Philip, reporting the incident, drew quite the opposite moral from it. “I thought about what he’d said,” he told me, “and I realized that’s precisely why I do read other people’s fiction while I’m working on a novel. Because, if I don’t, there really won’t be enough rain in my book.”

We had this conversation back in September, when Philip and I were both coincidentally in residence at the same writers’ colony. He was finishing up Reasonable Doubt, while I was at work on The Cutting Edge of Death, a detective novel featuring an ex-cop named Matthew Scudder, of whom I have written on several occasions over the years. (Faithful readers of this column will perhaps recall my explaining a year or so ago that I would not be able to write any more books about Mr. Scudder. Obviously, this turned out to be every bit as premature as Mark Twain’s obituary. How all of this came about may prove instructive, and I’ll very likely write about it sooner or later. Stay tuned.)

After Philip and I had our conversation about Mr. Carey, I shrugged it off and went back to work. I did notice over the next several days that I was paying rather more attention than usual to the weather—not the weather there at the colony, which I recall as wildly variable that month, but the weather Scudder was encountering in New York. There was, that is to say, quite a good bit of rain in The Cutting Edge of Death, and I couldn’t help wondering if some of what was splashing on the page was a result of our discussion.

More to the point, I found myself thinking about the whole question of reading while you write, of bombarding the senses with another writer’s fiction while endeavoring to produce one’s own. I myself have addressed the issue in several different ways over the years, and with varying results.

Early on, it would have been inconceivable for me to have avoided reading while I wrote.

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