“Sometimes a reviewer just can’t wait to write about a book. Even though Lawrence Block’s memoir, “A Writer Prepares,” isn’t available till June, I was recently sent an advance proof. Quite innocently, I started reading it — and couldn’t tear myself away….”
-Michael Dirda, Washington Post

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Lawrence Block’s memoir recalls a colorful writing career
-Hillel Italie, Associated Press

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“I’m happy that Block ultimately decided to finish and release this book. While Block has written several books about the craft of writing, I’ve always wanted to know more about just how one of my favorite authors got his start and A Writer Prepares allowed me to sit down and get to know him a little better.”
-Brandon Sears, Every Read Thing

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The main focus of the book though is the journey as a writer, with the personal snippets offered somewhat grudgingly to provide context for certain decisions taken and paths followed. I can understand and respect that public figures have private lives and not everyone wants or feels the need to unburden themselves. … A Writer Prepares was really enjoyable and not just one for the fans.
-Col’s Criminal Library

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Buffalo-born writer Lawrence Block’s latest autobiographical look-back doesn’t disappoint
-Buffalo News

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I’m a fan not only of Block’s fiction but also his capacity for insight into what he’s written and his ability to communicate it, to teach.

Though A Writer Prepares covers wide and multiple stretches of time, it’s told in the same down-to-earth, conversational tone as his popular writing manuals and again shows his knack for hooking readers.

I particularly appreciate A Writer Prepares after the pandemic year we’ve had, during which no doubt we’ve all pondered mortality, and on which Block also spontaneously touches.
-Gerald So

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The palimpsest nature of 2020 Block layered on 1994 Block looking back at 1956-1965 Block is fascinating: we all look back at our lives and consider what we did and why, but most of us aren’t as strong writers as Block is or have such rich material to work from.
-Andrew Wheeler, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent

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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.
-Professor Mondo

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“Lawrence Block has turned out another fascinating look into how he developed as a writer. (I say “another” because various pieces and books of his have given many glimpses [and I’ve enjoyed them all]).

“I note here that I first heard of Block when we were both readers on the same program at the late lamented Science Fiction, Mysteries and More bookstore in lower Manhattan. Block read a Bernie Rhodenbarr short story, and I was hooked. I tracked down all the Bernie books and stories I could, and — after that — began reading his other series and any of his stand-alones I could get my hands on. While I do not claim to be any kind of an expert on Block’s work I can assure the reader that the reason I enjoy it so much is that his prose is crisp, and NEVER gets in the way of the story.

“That is very true here, too. Block’s recollections are vivid (even when he is not sure he is remembering something accurately), and the various twists and turns his career has taken are an excellent reminder that following your interests can often lead to interesting tangents.

“I was a bit startled to see where he feels his “apprenticeship” ended, but it does make sense.

“Frankly, I hope Block is around for many more years, and that he keeps gracing us with his prose, his anthologies, and his joy in (and sense of privilege at) — in his own words — “making things out of words.”

“Anyway, as both a writer and a reader (and an unashamed fan of Block’s) I have had the great pleasure of reading this book. I hope you find it as enjoyable as I have.”
-Deb Wunder on Goodreads

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“First there was Batman Begins and now we have Block Begins.

“Lawrence Block seems like a permanent fixture in crime fiction to me so it’s hard to imagine that there was ever a time when someone couldn’t wander into any bookstore or library and find several shelves filled with his works. However, everybody has to start somewhere, and in this memoir of the early days of his writing life Mr. Block tells us how he got his.

It wasn’t exactly a straight line even if he knew what he wanted to do from the time he was fifteen years old and got encouragement from an English teacher. A job at a shady literary agency provided invaluable experience and contacts to start his career churning out material under various pen names, most of it erotica, but even after he had his start Mr. Block bounced around between college and sometimes worked other jobs even as he was paying the bills with his writing.

“This isn’t a traditional memoir. As Mr. Block explains, he began it in 1994 and wrote most of it one quick burst, but even though he had a publisher for it he set it aside and didn’t pick it up again until late in 2019 when he was going through old material to donate to a college. Rereading it sparked his interest, and he finished it up while leaving most of what he wrote back then intact.

“A writer looking back at his career in his fifties, and then revisiting that in his eighties is unique and fascinating. One of the more interesting aspects is how Mr. Block’s attitude towards his early work-for-hire output has changed. Back in the ‘90s he refused to acknowledge or sign anything he’d written back then. These days, he cheerfully has these books reprinted either via e-books or via publishers like Hard Case Crimes. While never going so far as to say that he was ashamed of this early writing, he had various reasons for not wanting to take credit for it either back then. So explaining that shift is one of the things that benefits from letting the book sit for that long.

“This is also most definitely NOT a biography. While certain aspects of his personal life come it’s always in relation to explaining something related to his writing. So there are some things mentioned like the death of his father and starting a family during his first marriage, but those aren’t the focus. It’s treated mainly as the backdrop to give a reader an understanding of what the situation was when Mr. Block made a choice regarding his writing.

“There’s also a lot of fun stories and details about things like how the work-for-hire game was played, and how the Scott Meredith agency profited off of keeping wannabe writers on the hook for more reading fees. One trick that Mr. Block shares is how he sometimes used dialogue which often features a character wandering off the point as a a way to easily stretch out a page count for a book. This ultimately became part of his writing style.

“Hard core fans should also be aware there isn’t anything about how he came up with his later creations like Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, or Keller. Here, the culmination of the story is how he was originally inspired to start his Evan Tanner novels, and how they became the next stage where he left

“What we end up with isn’t so much a full historical account of Mr. Block’s life or writing. Rather it’s him looking back at his youth from two different perspectives, and how the experiences then shaped him into the write he would become. What I loved about is the casual and sometimes wandering nature of it. It’s as if a reader sat down with Mr. Block over a cup of coffee and got to listen to him tell a bunch of stories about the old days. As a longtime fan of his, that’s a real treat.”
–Kemper on Goodreads

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“Halfway through A WRITER PREPARES and loving every word. It’s slow going because I keep stopping to read the funny parts out loud to my family.”
–Alex Kourvo, dedicated reviewer of books on writing

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“I’ve always been fascinated by writer’s memoirs. I’ve seen them criticized as being a series of “And then I wrote” recollections, but the best ones contain a lot more than that. Besides, I like reading about how certain books came to be written, the story behind the stories, if you will. This summer, Lawrence Block will release a memoir called A WRITER PREPARES, and I’ve been fortunate enough to read an advance copy of it. It’s a look at his college days and his early career as a writer, and how those two eras overlapped. He wrote a little more than half of it back in the mid-Nineties, then set it aside and never finished it until the past year. It makes for very interesting reading.

“Some of this information I’ve seen before in introductions to various of Block’s novels and in published interviews with him, but there’s plenty that’s new to me, too. He doesn’t spare himself, going into some detail about personal failings, possibly unwise business decisions, and the various sorts of screw-ups that plague all of us. But he doesn’t dwell on those things and keeps the focus primarily on his writing. I especially enjoyed the section about his brief stint working in the mail room of Pines Publications, publisher of some of my favorite Western pulps. Next time I pick up an issue of RANCH ROMANCES from 1956, I’ll think that Block may have been wheeling a mail cart around the editorial offices when that issue was being put together.

“There’s a lot of material about his time working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, his breaking into print with novels for Harry Shorten at Midwood under the pseudonym Sheldon Lord, his prolific output for William Hamling’s various soft-core imprints under the name Andrew Shaw, and his time writing medical case history books (which were almost all fictional) for Monarch, Lancer, and other publishers. All this makes me want to read more of those early books, and luckily I can since Block has reprinted most of them in the past decade. There are also sections about his friendship with Donald Westlake and Bill Coons (who ghosted a number of the Andrew Shaw novels for Block) and other authors, editors, and agents. It’s a vivid portrait of one little corner of the publishing business from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Sixties.

“A WRITER PREPARES ends at a logical point, when Block has pretty much left the pseudonymous work behind to concentrate on books under his own name. This is when he began his Evan Tanner series for Gold Medal, and as it happens, those Tanner books were the first ones by Block that I ever saw, bought, and read, picking up most of them from the spinner rack in Tompkins’ Drugstore, one of my regular stops for paperbacks and comic books. After that, I’ve kept up, more or less, with his career. So it’s nice to read about those early days. I really enjoyed A WRITER PREPARES. The e-book edition is already up for pre-order. I give it my highest recommendation. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I’ve been on a run of really great books, and this is another one in that streak.”
-James Reasoner, Rough Edges

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“The most interesting aspect of Lawrence Block’s new memoir of his early days as a working writer is that the book was published at all.

“Before he was the hardboiled genius behind alcoholic ex-cop Matthew Scudder, before gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, and before the perpetually wakeful knight-errant Evan Tanner, Block made a living pounding out softcore sex novels with titles like Sin Hellcat, Circle of Sinners, and High School Sex Club.

“For years, Block refused to acknowledge much of this earliest work, even going so far as to tell New Mexico-based publisher and all-around book maven Ernie Bulow that he would refuse to acknowledge or autograph any of the midcentury erotic novels that bore any of his various and sundry pen names. But as years passed, Block began to look at those works with a kinder eye. He has even released many of them himself, bypassing traditional publishing, as Kindle-exclusive titles.

“Block’s embrace of his salad days has resulted in a remarkable memoir: A Writer Prepares details Block’s early life, his time as a fee reader in the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and his career cranking out 50,000-word paperbacks for softcore publishers like Beacon and Monarch.

“The book was begun in February of 1994, while Block visited Ragdale, a writers’ colony in Illinois for a month-long stay to complete a new novel. When the book he was working on didn’t pan out, Block instead turned to the memories of his earliest days in publishing. Within a week, he had written more than 50,000 words of the memoir.

“The book was originally folded into a four-book deal with William Morrow and Co. (now an imprint of HarperCollins) in the mid-1990s. However, after the first half or so of the memoir, Block never finished it. He was able to regain the rights to the book, and in 2019 began — in fits and starts — to work on it again, a quarter of a century later.

“Had Block not referenced it in the book itself, it would be impossible to tell where the break in the writing occurred. Remember that Block has been writing narrative for publication — whether fiction or creative nonfiction — for more years than he’d likely care to count. In A Writer Prepares, he is by turns breezy, chatty, and completely candid. In other words, it’s prime Lawrence Block. He is, in almost every way that counts, a writer’s writer.

“The book is quintessential Block. Readers who enjoyed The Crime of Our Lives will find some familiar material here. While Block does nothing so gauche as re-hash his stories, he expands and explains. Most illustrative of how Block became a working writer is the passage on his time with Scott Meredith.

“Well, sort of with Scott Meredith. While Block did work as a fee reader for SMLA, he rarely if ever saw the man himself. Instead, Block’s job was to read and respond to unsolicited submissions, for which hopeful writers paid $5 for Meredith to read and review.

“It was a scam, of course. Long before the Association of Authors’ Representatives was even thought of, it was common for many agents to charge a reading fee, though it seems doubtful that anyone ever went to the lengths that Meredith did to fleece hopeful scribblers.

“Longtime agent Henry Morrison, who also worked for Meredith before hanging out his own shingle, has referred to SMLA as “a pirate ship,” and Block explains why in chilling detail.

“But working for Meredith also opened doors for Block. Publishers who paid a flat fee for books would often approach the agency looking for young writers, and Block was one of the mainstays, publishing novels under multiple aliases. Other notable writers of the time period like Evan Hunter (Ed McBain) and Donald Westlake did the same kind of work.

“Block knows how to write, and he knows how to tell a story (those things are often only tangentially related). His smooth style, honed to a fine cutting edge over the years, is on full display, even as he details surprising details about his life. He is candid about his substance abuse and subsequent sobriety, although those details are never dwelled upon. Perhaps Block felt that he may have already shared enough of that side of his life in the pages of the Scudder novels.

“Longtime Block fans will smile at mentions of Greenwich Village musician and unofficial mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave Van Ronk. The pair prowled the same coffee shops and bars during the same time period, and Block even co-wrote a song with Van Ronk.

“Block has been writing and publishing for more than 60 years at this point, and it might seem that he’s done everything there is to do. While he’s undoubtedly slowed down from the young man in a Village apartment pounding away at the typewriter keys, sometimes churning out three novels a month. Not only has he written four distinct and successful series of novels, he’s also instructed beginning writers in books as diverse as From Plot to Print to Pixel and Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. He’s a sought-after editor for crime fiction anthologies and his introductions and blurbs are still much-sought. And now with A Writer Prepares, Block has also conquered the memoir.

“What’s next for Block? In recent years, he has again taken control of his publishing destiny by going outside the traditional houses and self-publishing much of his back catalog as well as occasional new works like A Time to Scatter Stones and Dead Girl Blues. Whatever comes next, it figures to be a lot like all of his other work: eminently readable.

“Block’s memoir is honest about his foibles, direct about his writing, and gripping in its details. For writers who want to be the kind of professional (and artist) that Block is at the keyboard, and for longtime fans, A Writer Prepares is a must-read. For those new to Block, the book is still worthwhile for its explanation and detail of how a little-understood era in publishing actually operated.”
-Bobby Mathews at Goodreads

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Lawrence Block wasn’t always Lawrence Block. I mean that figuratively and literally. He wasn’t always a Grand Master of the mystery genre, and he wrote an incredible number of novels under secret pen names before ever putting his own name on a book. A WRITER PREPARES is a memoir of Block’s start, from his earliest writing attempts in high school and college up to the publication of the first novel under his own name.

In the late 1950s, while he was still in college, Block had a job writing rejection letters for the Scott Meredith Agency. It was a fee-charging agency that was very bad for writers but kind of great for Block, since it got him connected to his next job, which was writing short erotic novels. He had contracts with two publishers to deliver a book a month, for which he was paid a flat fee, and he continued doing that for a decade, during which time he got married and had two daughters. He took day jobs here and there, but still wrote erotica on the side until 1966, when he finally started writing crime novels in earnest, starting with The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep.

A WRITER PREPARES is incredibly smooth reading, written in Block’s conversational style. It’s also funny. I kept stopping to read parts of it out loud to my family, because they wanted to know why I was giggling my way through a memoir. Even the parts that were horrifying, such as the terrible treatment of writers by the Scott Meredith Agency, were hilarious in that whole “laugh so I don’t cry” way. Block puts a light spin on everything, reminding us that writing truly is the best job in the world.

A WRITER PREPARES might seem like an odd choice for this blog. I’m all about how-to books after all. But Block is a natural teacher, and he’s always giving writing lessons, whether he means to or not. I learned so much from this book—more than I can put in a review—but here’s a small taste.

Agents don’t care about writers or writers’ careers. They care about their own bottom line. The Scott Meredith Agency was particularly scammy, charging authors a reading fee, never sending work out, and lying to authors about their submissions. But are modern agents much better? To agents, writers are interchangeable. It’s not worth going to bat for one writer when there are plenty of others to fleece represent.

Write to market. Block learned this lesson early and well. He wrote his school compositions based on what he thought his teachers wanted, and won an eighth-grade essay contest by extolling the virtues of “Americanism” because he knew the judges were patriotic. His erotic novels were always the exact length and heat level the publisher wanted. He read every back issue of Manhunt he could find to understand what the editor was looking for when he sent them stories. When Block had the idea for The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, he sat on it until he was sure he had all the elements for a complete story that would appeal to mystery readers. There is nothing wrong with having original ideas that are wild and fun, but keeping the audience in mind is how a writer gets read.

Practice is never wasted. Block happily admits that he spent his twenties writing crap. All of it was under pen names for low-budget publishers and most of the time, he never saw a copy. But this served as a risk-free apprenticeship that made him the writer he is today. It allowed him to experiment, to pick up new skills, and to practice writing to a deadline. Writing a whole lot of bad fiction is a great way for a writer to learn to write good fiction.

Treat it like a job. Block may have written terrible fiction when he was just starting out, but he wrote a lot of it. He wrote while taking college classes, he wrote while editing the college newspaper, he wrote while working full time at a literary agency. Before he ever sold a word of fiction, he still wrote every day while rejection letters piled up. When he had to quit school and move back home for a semester, he wrote in his childhood bedroom. Block wasn’t a professional. He wasn’t getting paid. He wrote anyway.

Community is important. Block did his best work when surrounded by writers and publishing people. In New York, Block hung out with Donald Westlake, Hal Dresner and Robert Silverberg, and their shoptalk was vital to his success. At one point, Block moved his family to Buffalo to be near his aging mother, and his writing suffered. Pre-internet, a writer had to either live near other writers or write a whole lot of letters. Block tried the latter, but was happier with the former, and moved back to New York as soon as he could.

The book world has changed a lot since the 1950s. Or has it? There are still plenty of very bad literary agents out there, and new writers are strung along by empty promises every day. Writing erotica is different now, but with Kindle Unlimited, there are once again authors serving apprenticeships by publishing a short erotic novel each month. Writing to market is still important, as is not holding too tightly to early work. And no matter what, surrounding yourself with like-minded writers is still the best path to happiness and success.

Reading a writer’s memoir is always inspirational, but A WRITER PREPARES is both inspiring and instructive. It’s a delightful look back in time filled with lessons for the present day.
-Alex Kourvo, Writing Slices