Writing popular fiction

square.
    Max, the bartender, wasn't as moody as Rita had been. He was willing to talk. In fact, he had some interesting news. "Selma's been in here the last couple of days, Lou. She's been asking around about you."
    The longest paragraph in the example is essentially all transition, getting Lou from one place to another. It stalls the story, because it adds nothing, and it should be pared down to the minimum. It should have been handled this way:
Still, she sat, silent.
    "Damn you," he snapped, crossing the small room, slamming the big oaken door behind him.
    Thirty minutes later, he was in his favorite bar on the square downtown. Max, the bartender, wasn't as moody as Rita had been. He was willing to talk…
    As soon as one scene is over, you should lead your reader into the next, with no excess prose between them. The details of how the character got from here to there do absolutely nothing for the story except retard it.
    One popular way of changing scenes is with the space break, a blank space on the page between the blocks of print, which indicates when one scene has ended and another begun in a different place or time from the first. To make the best use of this the writer may want to end the first scene with a lead-in for the opening of the second. For example:
Still, she sat, silent.
    "Damn you," he snapped, crossing the small room to the big, oaken door. "I'm going down to the bar. If you won't speak to me, at least Max will!" He left, slamming the door behind.
    Max put the beer down before him and, in that match-making tone of voice some bartenders culture, he said, "I've got some new for you. Selma has been in the last couple of days…"
    Another transition of the same sort might run like this:
The voice on the phone said, "Have the ransom money at the museum by midnight tonight. Otherwise, your wife is dead."
    Mike swallowed hard, wiped at his mouth and said, "I'll be there, midnight on the dot."
    The museum was dark and deserted when he rounded the corner and walked towards the stone lions that flanked the steps.
    As you can see, writing good scene transitions is really a simple matter; as I said, when discussing style, brevity is the best course.
    The most successful writer, as I've said before, is the one who can sit down at his typewriter every working day and produce a certain number of words or finished pages, regardless of what he might prefer to do instead. If you can write ten pages a day, five days a week, you can complete ten solid novels in a year. I've done it; I've done even more than that, in fact. And I know of one man who, working for a literary agency during the day, commuted to the suburbs each evening and sat down and wrote ten pages, no matter what, on top of his regular job and commuter's blues!
    However, many writers find that each day, in this sort of schedule, can begin with a small writer's block, a two- or three-hour thing, before the mind is nimble enough to create. There's a cure for the mini-block. When you sit down to start, each
day
, begin by retyping the last page or two that you finished the day before. Not rewriting, mind, just retyping. This little trick will put you back into the mood you were in when you were working steadily the day before, and it can eliminate that mini-block for almost anyone.
    It also helps to keep your work area clean, uncluttered, and your resource notes or material easily at hand. I have read countless articles about how good it is to work at a cluttered desk, how the jumble of books and papers can give you a feeling of excitement and fertility. Bull. A writer is a professional, and he needs that sense of order that is so evident in other professions like medicine, law, and education. I think it's interesting that I've never read the cluttered-desk theory proposed by any truly
successful
author, and I know that you will find it easier to start each day if you're working in a pleasant, businesslike area.
    Occasionally, of course, there are days when nothing works, when the clean work area and the retyping of yesterday's last page, and the brisk walk around the block do nothing to get the juices flowing. When this happens, it is best to take the day off, and perhaps the next day as well—if you keep in mind that the lost wordage will have to be made up in the days following your short vacation.
CHAPTER TEN    Practicalities: Questions and Answers
    1. I
want to be recognized as an artist, not just as a storyteller. When the category fiction