Yes, it’s Mr. B’s 83rd birthday, and it’s also the publication/shipping date for A Writer Prepares, his memoir of his apprenticeship as a writer, from his teen years to the publication of the first Evan Tanner novel. Yes, he’s received pretty much every award his peers and fans can offer him. Today, however, I’d like to add to the celebration from my viewpoint as a teacher.
I initially encountered Larry’s work not through his novels or short stories, but through his books for writers. During the 1990s, F+W Publications, Cincinnati-based publisher of (among other things) Writer’s Digest, would have an annual warehouse sale late in the year. My dad discovered it first, scarfing up art books from the stock. By this time, I was working in Cincinnati myself, for a (sort-of) rival publisher, but I still harbored hopes of becoming a writer of fiction, so Dad brought me along to the next warehouse sale, and that became a regular part of our holiday shopping until I returned to graduate school.
I scooped up a slew of books on crime and mystery writing in particular, but some others on the art and craft of writing in general. One of the latter group was Writing the Novel from Plot to Print, by Mr. Block. I also ran across his Telling Lies for Fun and Profit and Spider, Spin Me a Web. I didn’t know if any of them would be particularly helpful — or if anything at all would be particularly helpful, for that matter — but the books were deeply discounted, and well, one can never have enough books, right?
But as it turned out, the books really were (and remain) helpful. I took a lot of creative writing courses in my first run through grad school — it was a way to keep my GPA where it needed to be as I wandered through academia and the Lexington music scene. I do value those classes, but while they (justifiably) focused on the artistic end of things, there really wasn’t much on the craft of what we were doing. What made a scene work or not work? How can you use dialogue to tell your story? And that stuff matters; even when Dylan Thomas spoke of his “craft or sullen art,” you’ll notice which he mentions first.
But these books were practical approaches to writing as a craft, looking at the nuts and bolts of getting the right words and ideas onto the page in the right order. There wasn’t the emphasis on the whiteness of the whale that had marked a lot of the workshops I had attended in the previous years. (This shouldn’t be a surprise — several of the books were collections of El Bee’s columns on fiction writing at Writer’s Digest.) This isn’t to say that there was no attention to the sullen — or even cheerful — art. There’s always going to be some of that when we deal with the imaginative, I think, as there should and must be. But the books struck me as eminently useful. On top of that, the column/chapters were typically short and entertaining even as they informed. They were good reads. They still are.
A couple of years later (still in Cincinnati, but not long before we moved to Muncie), I discovered the Matt Scudder series at a bookstore just off Fountain Square, and became a fan in short order. Oddly, it took me a little while before I made the connection — probably because I had thought of the non-fiction work as textbooks, and unless you’re an academic (which I wasn’t at the time), who remembers the authors of textbooks? But eventually, I put the pieces together.
And so, years later in Mondoville, when the time came for me to teach some classes in fiction writing, I started using Telling Lies and Spider with my students. And they loved the books for the very reason I did. This was stuff that answered the how-to-do-it questions they had as they started to take steps toward creating fiction.
By the late Oughts, I had taught from the books a few times, and had seen how much my kids had valued them. Since that sort of thing means a great deal to a teacher, I thought I might try to pass the news along. By this time, the Web was a thing, and sure enough, I found that LB had his own space there, so I wrote what amounted to a thank-you note, letting him know how much the kids had appreciated the books, and why they had. I wrote a brief e-mail and sent it to the address at the web page, figuring that some intermediary would read it and life would go on as usual, but at least I had put something positive into the world.
Who knew the guy read his own e-mail? Well, I didn’t, but within minutes he had sent a gracious reply. As it happened, the college was starting a visiting writer’s program, and what with one thing and another, in 2010 our freshpeeps read Eight Million Ways to Die and LB same down to talk to them about the book and about writing in general. A few years later, he mentioned an interest in doing a residency at a college somewhere, and my chair and I managed to lobby the administration into making that happen. He taught a fiction writing course to a selected group of our writers and English majors, and guess what?
They adored the class, and they adored him as well. Before the term was over, some of them had approached the regular faculty and asked if they could run a workshop along the same lines even after Larry had headed back to NYC. Folks, that just. Doesn’t. Happen, at least in Mondoville. But it did. The kids were learning and growing as writers, and at least one of them has gone on to thank LB for getting him to take something besides his sport seriously.
One afternoon during all of this, Larry, my chair (and fellow crime writer) David and I got together for a videotaped discussion about LB’s time in Newberry.
Along the way, Larry said that David and I are teachers, whereas he is simply a writer. He may want to think of himself that way, but he’s also a heck of a teacher, and I’ve seen it both within and outside the classroom, in books and in person, whether he wants to admit it or not.
Happy birthday, Mr. Block. Here’s to many more.
Professor Mondo 