Spider, Spin Me a Web: A Handbook for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: # Paperback: 264 pages # Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (July 17, 1996) # Language: English # ISBN-10: 0688146902 # ISBN-13: 978-0688146900, Writing
Published: 2011-11-04T00:16:50+00:00

The Beginner’s Mind / 123

If it’s arrogance that so often prevents us from approaching writing with the beginner’s mind, the source of that arrogance is almost invariably fear, the self-centered fear that we will appear worthless if we let the world know we still have something to learn. A mystery writer who took my seminar in Minneapolis confessed that he’d had trouble working up the courage to come; he himself had recently participated in a symposium, and he was afraid what members of his audience might think if they encountered him on the other side of the lectern. I can understand his fear easily enough. I’ve felt much the same thing myself on similar occasions.

As I said, I myself stopped reading writing magazines when I started publishing my own stories. I resumed reading WD some years later when I started writing this column, and of course I read each issue cover-to-cover. It’s hard now to believe that I willfully denied myself such a useful tool for so many years.

I handicapped myself in other ways through the same sort of fear-based arrogance. I published mystery and suspense fiction for over fifteen years before I got around to joining Mystery Writers of America. I wanted to belong to the organization, but I was waiting for an invitation. Through some oversight or other I didn’t get an invitation, and I was damned if I’d actively seek membership. (Perhaps I was afraid it would be denied to me.) When I did finally join MWA, I realized I had deprived myself of the pleasures and benefits of membership for reasons of ego and nothing else.

I still have trouble reading how-to-write books, perhaps out of fear that I’ll find out I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. But I try to attend other writers’ talks at conferences, not just to “catch their act” but to learn what they have to teach me. And I’m looking forward this season to taking

“Write For Your Life” myself. Roy Sorrels and Donna Meyer will be leading half the seminars, and at least once I want to be in the audience—not to see how they’re doing, but to see what I can get out of the experience. A couple of times this past spring they led sections of the seminar, and at first I distanced myself by focusing on how they were doing. In Minneapolis, however, I let myself participate wholeheartedly in the character-creation process while they were leading it, and by so doing I learned a great deal about myself and about that particular process. I expect it will be quite a confrontation for my ego, trying to forget while I take the seminar that I created the thing in the first place, but my original motive was to produce the sort of seminar I myself would like to take, and I hope I’ll be able to develop enough of a beginner’s mind to do just that.

What would you do differently—if you had a beginner’s 124 / Spider, Spin

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