Spider, Spin Me A Web: A Handbook for Fiction Writers
The  short essays included inSpider, Spin Me a Webwere culled  from Lawrence Block's long-running monthly column about fiction writing forWriter's Digestmagazine. Block, an incredibly prolific mystery writer with more  than 50 books to his name (at one point he was writing more than a book a month!),  employs a funny, conversational tone in addressing issues of technique, career strategy,  and living the fictioneer's life. He uses the analogy of the fiction writer as web spinner to  hold the many threads of his book together. "The writer of fiction," he says,  "is a spider. Drawing upon his inner resources and shaping them with his craft, he  spins out his guts to trap his dinner." Block strikes a realistic balance between  writing for oneself ("write what you yourself would most identify with, write  honestly and unsparingly and fearlessly") and writing with readers in mind  ("I try," he quotes his colleague Elmore Leonard as saying, "to leave  out the parts people skip"). Though Block's success has been mainly as a writer of  mysteries, his wisdom applies to all fiction writing; in fact, he is suspicious of the whole  concept of genre writing. "For all that their guidelines attempt to codify their  requirements," he confides, "I have heard no end of editors say that the  manuscript they most hope to find on their desks is the one that breaks all their own  unbreakable rules--but that grabs them so hard and moves them so much that they have to  buy it anyway."