Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (16 page)

Good typing makes a good impression. I have often wished to God that I
had taken a typing course instead of a story writing course far back in the dim
past.

And the sergeant was much surprised at her coming there at all. He said
that in fifteen years, she was the third to come there. And she was the only one who
really wanted information. He said that detective stories always made him squirm. He
wished the writers would find out what they wrote.

And so it is with almost every line. It is so easy to get good raw
materials that most writers consider it quite unnecessary.

Hence the errors which make your yarn unsalable. You wouldn't try to
write an article on steel without at least opening an encyclopedia, and yet I'll
wager that a fiction story which had steel in it would never occasion the writer a
bit of worry or thought.

You must have raw material. It gives you the edge on the field. And so,
one tries to get it by honest research. For a few stories, you may have looked far,
but for most of your yarns, you took your imagination for the textbook.

After all, you wouldn't try to make soap when you had no oil.

The fact that you write is a passport everywhere. You'll find very few
gentlemen refusing to accommodate your curiosity. Men in every and any line are
anxious to give a writer all the data he can use because, they reason, their line
will therefore be truly represented. You're apt to find more enmity in not examining
the facts.

Raw materials are more essential than fancy writing. Know your
subject.

But that is not the whole question. What do you write and sell best?

A writer tells me that she can write excellent marriage stories, likes
to write them and is eternally plagued to do them. But there are few markets for
marriage stories. To eat, she takes the next best thing— light love.

My agent makes it a principle never to handle a type of story which does
not possess at least five markets. That way he saves himself endless reading and he
saves his writers endless wordage. A story should have at least five good markets
because what one editor likes, another dislikes and what fits here will not fit
there. All due respect to editors, their minds change and their slant is never too
iron-bound. They are primarily interested in good stories. Sometimes they are
overbought. Sometimes they have need of a certain type which you do not fill. That
leaves four editors who may find the desired spot.

While no writer should do work he does not like, he must eat.

Therefore, instead of wasting your valuable manufacturing time peddling
your own manuscripts, why not let another handle the selling for you?

There's more to selling than knowing markets. The salesman should be in
constant contact with the buyer. A writer cannot be in constant contact with his
editors. It would cost money. Luncheons, cigars, all the rest. An agent takes care
of all that and the cost is split up among his writers so that no one of them feels
the burden too heavily.

An agent, if he is good, sells more than his ten percent extra. And he
acts as a buffer between you and the postman. Nothing is more terrible than the
brown envelope in the box. It's likely to kill the day. You're likely to file the
story and forget it. But the agent merely sends the yarn out again, and when it
comes home, out again it goes. He worries and doesn't tell you until you hold the
check in your hand.

The collaborating agent and the critic have no place here. They are
advisers and doctors. Your sales department should really have no function except
selling—and perhaps when a market is going sour, forward a few editorial comments
without any added by your agent. This tends for high morale and a writer's morale
must always be high. When we started, we assumed that you already could write.

By all means, get an agent. And if you get one and he is no good to you,
ditch him and try another. There are plenty of good agents. And they are worth far
more than 10 percent.

But a writer is his own walking advertisement. His reputation is his own
making. His actions count for more than his stories. His reliability is hard won
and, when won, is often the deciding factor in a sale. Editors must know you can
produce, that you are earnest in your attempt to work with them.

To show what actions can do, one writer recently made it a habit to bait
an editor as he went out to lunch. This writer met this editor every day, forced his
company on the editor and then, when they were eating, the writer would haul out
synopsis after synopsis. The answer is, the writer doesn't work there anymore.

If a check is due, several writers I know haunt the office. It fails to
hurry the check and it often puts an end to the contact when overdone. Many harry
their editors for early decisions, make themselves nuisances in the office. Soon
they stop selling there. Others always have a sob story handy.

Sob stories are pretty well taboo. It's hitting below the belt. And sob
stories from writer to writer are awful. One man I know has wrecked his friendship
with his formerly closest companions simply because he couldn't keep his troubles to
himself. It's actually hurt his sales. You see, he makes more money than anyone I
know and he can't live on it. Ye gods, ALL of us have troubles, but few
professionals use them to get checks or sympathy.

Reputation is everything.

It does not hurt to do extra work for an editor. Such as department
letters. Check it off to advertising. Answer all mail. Do a book for advertising.
Write articles. Your name is your trademark. The better known, the better sales.

Write too little and your facility departs. Write too much and your
quality drops. My own best wordage is seventy thousand a month. I make money at
that, sell in the upper percentage brackets. But let me do twenty thousand in a
month and I feel like an old machine trying to turn over just once more before it
expires. Let me do a hundred thousand in a month and I'm in possession of several
piles of tripe.

The economic balance is something of your own finding. But it takes
figures to find it. One month, when I was used to doing a hundred thousand per, I
was stricken with some vague illness which caused great pain and sent me to bed.

For a week I did nothing. Then, in the next, I laid there and thought
about stories. My average, so I thought, was shot to the devil. Toward the last of
the month, I had a small table made and, sitting up in bed, wrote a ten thousand
worder and two twenty thousand worders. That was all the work I did. I sold every
word and made more in eight days than I had in any previous month.

That taught me that there must be some mean of average. I found it and
the wage has stayed up.

There is no use keeping the factory staff standing by and the machinery
running when you have no raw material.

You can't sit down and stare at keys and wish you could write and swear
at your low average for the month. If you can't write that day, for God's sakes
don't write. The chances are, when tomorrow arrives, and you've spent the yesterday
groaning and doing nothing, you'll be as mentally sterile as before.

Forget what you read about having to work so many hours every day. No
writer I know has regular office hours. When you can't write, when it's raining and
the kid's crying, go see a movie, go talk to a cop, go dig up a book of fairy
stories. But don't sweat inactively over a mill. You're just keeping the staff
standing by and the machinery running, cutting into your overhead and putting out
nothing. You're costing yourself money.

Come back when you're fresh and work like hell. Two in the morning,
noon, eight at night, work if you feel like it and be damned to the noise you make.
After all, the people who have to hear you are probably fed by you and if they can't
stand it, let them do the supporting. I take sprees of working at night and then
sleep late into the day. Once in the country, farmers baited me every day with that
unforgivable late slumber. It didn't worry me so much after I remembered that I made
in a month what they made in a year. They think all writers are crazy. Take the
writer's license and make the best of it.

But don't pretend to temperament. It really doesn't exist. Irritation
does and is to be scrupulously avoided.

When all the arty scribblers (who made no money) talked to a young lady
and told her that they could not write unless they were near the mountains, or
unless they had the room a certain temperature, or unless they were served tea every
half hour, the young lady said with sober mien, “Me? Oh, I can never write unless
I'm in a balloon or in the Pacific Ocean.”

One thing to remember: It seems to work out that your writing machine
can stand just so much. After that the brain refuses to hand out plots and
ideas.

It's like getting a big contract to sell your soap to the navy. You make
bad soap, ruin the vats with a strong ingredient and let the finer machinery rust
away in its uselessness. Then, when the navy soap contract ceases to supply the
coffee and cakes, you discover that the plant is worthless for any other kind of
product.

Such is the case of the writer who sees a big living in cheap fiction,
turns it out to the expense of his vitality and, finally, years before his time,
discovers that he is through. Only one writer of my acquaintance can keep a high
word output. He is the exception and he is not burning himself out. He is built that
way.

But the rest of us shy away from too cheap a brand. We know that an
advanced wage will only find us spending more. Soon, when the target for our
unworthy efforts is taken down, we discover that we are unable to write anything
else. That's what's meant by a rut.

As soon as you start turning out stories which you do not respect, as
soon as you start turning them out wholesale over a period of time, as soon as your
wordage gets out of control, then look for lean years.

To get anywhere at all in the business, you should turn out the best
that's in you and keep turning it out. You'll never succeed in pulp unless you do,
much less in the slicks.

If you start at the lowest rung, do the best job of which you are
capable. Your product, according to economic law, will do the raising for you. Man
is not paid for the amount of work in labor-hours, he is paid for the quality of
that work.

Take a story published a month ago, written six months ago. Read it
over. If it seems to you that you could have done better, that you are doing better,
you can sit back with a feline smile and be secure in the knowledge that you are
coming up. Then sit forward and see to it that you do.

If you write insincerely, if you think the lowest pulp can be written
insincerely and still sell, then you're in for trouble unless your luck is terribly
good. And luck rarely strikes twice. Write sincerely and you are certain to write
better and better.

So much for making soap and writing. All this is merely my own findings
in an upward trail through the rough paper magazines. I have tested these things and
found them to be true and if someone had handed them to me a few years ago, I would
have saved myself a great deal of worry and more bills would have been paid.

Once, a professor of short story in a university gave me a course
because I was bored with being an engineer. The course did not help much outside of
the practice in writing. Recently I heard that professor address the radio audience
on the subject “This Business of Writing.” It was not until then that I realized how
much a writer had to learn. He knew nothing about the practical end of things and I
told him so. He made me give a lecture to his class and they did not believe me.

But none of them, like you and I, have to make the bread and butter
someway in this world. They had never realized that competition and business
economics had any place whatever in the writing world. They were complacent in some
intangible, ignorant quality they branded ART. They did not know, and perhaps will
someday find out, that art means, simply:

“The employment of means to the accomplishment of some end; the skillful
application and adaptation to some purpose or use of knowledge or power acquired
from Nature, especially in the production of beauty as in sculpture, etc.; a system
of rules and established methods to facilitate the performance of certain
actions.”