I'm interested in reading therefore it only makes sense to me that I should be interested in writing too. Not that I have any plans on writing but I believe knowing some more about the craft of writing while deepen my appreciation for what I read. This book was very informative about the process as it was in the late 1970s, while tastes and tech have changed the basic process of creative writing remains the same. Brain dreams up great idea, record the idea into a novel.
For me the most interesting chapter was Chapter 3 Read Study Anyalyze, it tells ways in which to break up an existing novel into its parts through an outline.

If you're interested in becoming a novelist you could get advice from worse authors then Block who's had a long career as a novelist. ( )

Though I've never read any of his fiction, I'm familiar with Lawrence Block; when I was about twelve, I stumbled across his non-fiction writing guide, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, in the public library. I probably read that book about fifteen times. I don't remember any of the advice contained within, but I do remember this: it was hilarious. It was probably the only book, ever, besides The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that I recall laughing-out-loud at, persistently and throughout. So I was pretty psyched when I found another fiction-guide by Block, his earlier Writing the Novel: from Plot to Print, at my current public library. Though my memories of the earlier book are fairly hazy, I can say with some certainty that some of the content here must have been repeated--many of the anecdotes and much of the advice felt intangibly familiar. Unfortunately, the humor is absent here. I think I only chuckled once! Nevertheless, this was a worthwhile read. Block, who in 1982 had already written several dozen books (who knows how much he's written now), gives practical, straightforward, and sensible writing advice in an amicably plain style.It's difficult for me to summarize this advice. He states things just about as succinctly as they possibly can be stated. For example:

Isn't it harder to write a novel than a short story?No. Novels aren't harder. What they are is longer. That may be a very obvious answer, but that doesn't make it any less true. It's the sheer length of a novel that the beginning writer is apt to find intimidating [. . .:] Each day's stint at the typewriter is simply that--one day's work. And that's every bit as true whether you're writing short stories or an epic trilogy. If you're writing three or six or ten pages a day, you'll get a certain amount of work accomplished in a certain span of time--whatever it is you're working on.

And:

Steady day-in-day-out work on a book keeps you in the book from start to finish, and keeps the book very much in your mind during those hours you're at the typewriter and during those hours you're doing something else--playing, reading, sleeping. [. . .:]"A novelist," Herbert Gold says, "has to think/dream his story every day. Poets and story writers can go for the inspired midnight with quill dipped in ink-filled skull." And Joseph Hansen adds, "I have made a number of young novelists angry by saying that writing is something you do when you get up in the morning, like eating breakfast or brushing yoru teeth. And it is. Or it had better be."

And:

I've observed that most of the people who start first novels never finish them, and I've come to believe that actually seeing a book through to the finish line is the most important thing you can do in your first essay at the novel. This to my mind is what separates the sheep from the goats and the ribbon from the clerks: the determination to stay with a book until it's done, for better or for worse. [. . .:]When you're making your initial attempt, I would suggest that other considerations be kept in the background. In this case, the first thing is to get written. Later on you can worry more about getting it right

I could go on, but I fear that I'm already risking copyright infringement. Hopefully, though, this gives you an idea of the type of writing advice that Block gives--at times harsh, certainly no-nonsense, but realistically so. His intention is not to show the near impossibility of making a living as a writer--after all, he has, and he seems to attribute this success more to stubborn determination and a refusal to make excuses than anything else. It's interesting to contrast this with Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees, which I read recently. Lerner, who abandoned her poetry writing to become an agent, seems to view the career writer as a flighty, temperamental, and wholly impractical creature of somewhat mythic proportions and rarity. Block may agree on the "temperamental" aspect, but otherwise regards novel writing as an entirely feasible endeavor, provided that one is willing to work tirelessly at it. On a whole, Block's vision of writing is much more encouraging.That's not to say that Writing the Novel doesn't have its flaws. It's terribly dated--typewriters, how quaint!--and Block hasn't met a cliche that he doesn't like, even this one. But it's a solid and worthwhile read regardless. I thin it might be time to give Telling Lies for Fun and Profit a second (or sixteenth) look. ( )

http://www.i-reports.info/b/B199318.html ( )