One of the strange things about this book is that it's only the second Lawrence Block book I've ever read. The first one was Hit Man, which I loved at the time.

But even though that was great and Block is a great writer and when I read Hit Man I was working at The Mysterious Bookshop, owned by Block's friend Otto Penzler, and surrounded by Lawrence Block books, I never read anything else by Block until now.

(I did meet Lawrence Block at the bookshop. I didn't know who he was and I accused him of shoplifting. He was innocent of the charge, it turned out. He didn't seem much bothered by the incident.)

A Writer Prepares is mostly one big flow of memory that came out onto the page for Block in 1994 while spending time at an art colony. Those pages could have gone somewhere but ended up not doing so, until Block decided to pick up the thread in 2020 and finish the job.

He's very up front about the process and the tone is conversational and candid throughout. This is not just Block the writer or Block the memoirist but Block the engaging companion with a hundred interesting stories to tell that he can tell well.

He goes as far back to his early writing efforts while still in school, to submitting poems to magazines about farming, to working on a college newspaper, and of course finding his way to New York City where he finds employment at a dubious sort of literary agency, where he would eventually meet future famous writer and dear friend Donald Westlake.

The nuts and bolts of the actual writing are fascinating reading. Pseudonymous sex novels that can go only so far and no farther, how to inflate page counts, the trap of guilt-free procrastination, writing as a ghost and hiring ghosts, covering the walls first with rejection slips and then with the covers of published books…

There are several remarkable characters in here and also some real-life crime as well. Not to mention some of the straight-world jobs Block also held, such as working for a journal about coin collecting or the Erie County Comptroller's Office.

In general it's a fascinating document of a long-gone time and place. In addition to giving us glimpses of authors like Hal Ellson, Block can also tell us a bit about the 1950s folk music scene, of which he was enough of a part to contribtue some songs!

And the writing on pseudonyms alone should be of interest to Block and Westlake fans. You might know that Westlake was often Alan Marshall— and the story of how "Marshall" was contracted to write a biography of Elizabeth Taylor is quite amusing—and that Block was often Sheldon Lord—now that's a pen name!—but there turns out to be quite a bit more to the story than that, such as at least one book that they wrote together, alternating chapters, and hiring other writers to turn out Marshall and Lord books, instructing them how to add those little touches that would identify them as Marshall and/or Lord novels, thus wrongfooting future bibliographers who believe they can prove that some book or another is a genuine Block or Westlake when, in fact, it simply isnt'.

The more recently written parts of the book touch on thoughts about mortality, as Block notes the passing of many friends and considers his own place nearer the finish line than the starting post. Perhaps this is part of the impetus to finish this project, a natural tendency to look back and consider and also for there to be a record.

I wish there were more books like this and I wish Lawrence Block would write a follow-up to this one.

The first line is "Hello there".