I don’t read a great many non-fiction books these days, much less review them – I’m getting old now, and life seems too short to wind myself up with information that’s likely to confirm my jaded worldview. But I’ve had Telling Lies for Fun and Profit for a while, and recently it jumped off the high shelf at me. I’m a great admirer of much of Block’s fiction, particularly the Matt Scudder mysteries: he has a real conversational gift-of-the-gab that immediately immerses you in his (usually NYC) milieu and makes reading anything by him a real page-turning pleasure. Telling Lies for Fun and Profit is a how-to guide for wannabe and aspiring writers (subtitled a manual for fiction writers), and like many failed novelists, I have any number of these littering my bookcases, most of them partly-read. This is generally because they tend to be interspersed with writing exercises, and this kind of reminds me of when I used to watch The Big Match on Sunday afternoons as a kid, and immediately wanted to go out and play football instead of watching Derby draw 0-0 with Stoke, even though I had no-one to play with – long story short, I do an exercise, and the book gets put down and forgotten about. But Telling Lies for Fun and Profit contains very few exercises – there are two or three suggested ones toward the end, but that really is it. Instead, there’s the subtext, just do it, what are you waiting for, and as such it’s a quietly inspiring read, delivered in short, punchy chapters, originally published as monthly columns in Writer’s Digest magazine. The only other how-to book I can think to compare it with is Steven Pressfield’s equally excellent The War of Art, or Stephen King’s On Writing.
Block does eventually get into the detailed mechanics of novel-writing – the inciting incident, the twin reversals of fortune, conflict and resolution, character building, all of that stuff – but they’re largely absent from the first half of the book, although he does make slanted references to them from time to time; but when he does get to them, he delivers a veritable masterclass. I was reminded of learning them at college, thinking dejectedly of how they had ruined all literature for me as they took most of the surprise out of whatever I was reading, much like when I tried to learn bass guitar to my favourite pop records as a teenager, and never listened to music in quite the same way again; when I related this a playwriting tutor, I received the response, tell me about it, so it isn’t just me. Block mentions this in Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, but suggests that over time it’s only served to heighten his participation in the reading experience, something I have to agree with – all in all, he’s a wise old goat, and someone you might do well to listen to if you’re just starting out, or if you’re not. As a writer I’m a fool for in-order chronology, so something that was of particular interest to me was the trick of reversing the first and second chapters, in order to start with the action and provide the reader with an immediate hook; but there’s a whole lot more than that in here.
Telling Lies for Fun and Profit is also quite old, copyrighted as 1981 in my edition with an updated introduction from 1994 (he’s penned another how-to, very contemporary, Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel, which you should also check out), and as such it should really seem dated, with its references to blue pencils and typewriter ribbons, and its complete lack of the same regarding blogging and MS Word, but it really doesn’t, because the essential information is timeless: just get on with it, develop a discipline, get used to rejection, here are the mechanics. I’m very glad that I picked it up again. Four stars.
Mad Teddy read some books. 