A Writer Prepares, page 7
I’d be at my desk at nine, or not too long thereafter, and I’d go to the file cabinet to select a handful of folders. Sid loaded them in from the back, and we were supposed to take the ones in front, but in actual practice a certain amount of selection went on. There was an advantage, for one thing, in getting as many first-timers as possible, because you could just about write a report on an initial submission without looking at the story.
This was literally true, and I did so on many occasions. Having read enough of the first page to know it was lousy, I would roll a sheet of paper into my typewriter, type the date and the author’s name and address, skip four lines, and get to it. I would thank him for sending us his story, tell him I could see he was no stranger to his typewriter—a most felicitous phrase which I’d found in a copy of a predecessor’s fee report, and which I used whenever I had the chance, never without wondering what people thought I meant by it. I would praise the story for virtues I was quite certain it lacked, and then I would talk about the importance of plotting and explain the sacred plot skeleton. “As I point out in my book, Writing to Sell,” I would begin, and I’d launch into a lengthy paragraph that scarcely varied from one report to the next.
By the time I was done with the plot skeleton, I was halfway down the second page. “Now let’s look at your story,” I would write. Whereupon I would indeed look at his story, scanning it for the names of the characters and a few specifics from the plot. Then I would turn back to the typewriter and criticize his plot in terms of the plot skeleton. A final paragraph softened the blow, urging him to get right back to that typewriter to which he was clearly no stranger. I would, I assured him, be looking forward to seeing more of his work soon. All best wishes, sucker.
When a writer came back for more and sent in a second story—or a third, or a tenth, or a twentieth—I had to be more creative in filling the space, and this meant reading the story more carefully so that I could be more specific. I might comment more on individual characters whom I’d found well-drawn, might even cite a happy turn of phrase if I could find one. Inevitably, however, I found something wrong with the plot.
“I know you’ve heard this before,” I might write, “but let me go over the Plot Skeleton with you one more time . . .”
I never had to redo a letter for lack of a way to pad it out to the bottom of the second page. But it was easier with first-time submissions, and I grabbed as many of those as I dared. Every other fee man soon reached the same conclusion, so nobody could hog the first-timers. Still, I made sure I got my share.
Another way to get ahead of the game was to grab up the books. A book, you recall, was worth five credits, a story but one. Since a book typically ran a minimum of 200 pages, while the stories averaged between five and ten, it would appear a book would take ten or twenty times as long to read. Thus a fee man, struggling to reach his quota or greedy to exceed it, would be better off with stories. Right?
Wrong. The reading was the least of it. It was the writing that took up your time. The fee report for a short story ran, as I’ve said, somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words. The four-page report that the author of a book got for his $25 ran around 1750. For a tad more than twice the writing, you’d get five times the compensation.
And what, after all, did the reading time amount to? Before long I learned to read a book-length manuscript in 15 or 20 minutes. I would focus on the center of the page, and my eyes would not move as I turned the pages. By the time I was done, I would have absorbed enough of the sense of the story to write my report. I wouldn’t retain what I’d read, and would have forgotten everything about it an hour after I’d written my report, but I considered that a definite plus. Who wanted to remember this crap?
This is not to say that I read every book this way. Often I wanted to take things a little easier and just sit back and read the thing. You worked hard writing fee reports, but the place wasn’t a sweatshop. If you could do the work in the first place, you could probably hit your quota every week without killing yourself.
And, every now and then, something came in that I could enjoy reading. This didn’t necessarily mean it was going to turn out to be salable. But I could still read it with a certain amount of enjoyment, even if I ultimately had to reject it.
After all these years, I can assure you that little of what I read at my desk has stayed with me. But there are a couple of writers whose work I recall with affection, if not quite with pleasure.
One was a husband and wife team who wrote novels. His name was Royce and hers was Nancy. I don’t recall the surname. They plotted the books together, he wrote them, and she wrote letters to Scott when she submitted them. (That at least is how they presented themselves. It would not have surprised me to learn that one of them existed as a figment of the other’s imagination.)
I got their first effort, and made sure I got the ones that followed it. I would have read them for free. I would have paid to read them.
The writing was smooth and lively, but that was the least of it. The books were positively incendiary, far more sexually provocative than anything available this side of Paris. This made them unpublishable, sad to say, even as it made me breathlessly eager to read more. I didn’t just want to read the books, either. I wanted to meet them, and I wanted to shoot Royce and run off with Nancy.
There was no point in telling them to tone down the sex, either, because without it there was nothing much left. Anyway, I didn’t want them to tone it down. I wanted them to heat it up.
Interestingly enough, Royce and Nancy were just a little bit ahead of their time. By the summer of ’58, Harry Shorten was getting ready to launch a line of sex novels at Midwood Tower. Less than a year later, Bill Hamling had Nightstand Books in gear. Royce and Nancy, saucy and prolific, would have been naturals. It would have been a piece of cake for them to turn out a book a month for one or the other of those houses.
I was out of SMLA by then, and writing sex novels of my own, but I’ve wondered over the years if anybody at the agency ever thought to recruit Royce and Nancy as pornographers-in-training. I hope so. God knows they had a calling.
• • •
Then there was Caswell Oden.
His story’s fresh in my mind, because I thought of him when I was putting Write For Your Life together, and I told his tale every single time I gave the seminar. It was instructive. And it never failed to bring down the house.
Mr. Oden had retired at a relatively early age after having made a pile in the oil business. He lived in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he dreamed of selling a story to a national publication. But he knew this would never happen, because he knew full well that New York editors had it in for him. They would never buy a story from him and that was that.
But this didn’t mean he was going to quit trying.
I don’t remember anything about his first story except that it was, alas, unsalable, and we bounced it back to him in timely fashion with the usual fee report attached. His next letter, attached to another story, lamented the fact that nobody would buy a story from him, and ended with a proposition. Scott represented a lot of big-time professional writers, guys who sold stories at will to the best markets. Suppose he got one of those guys to write a story and put Oden’s name on it? The magazine would buy it, the pro would get the money, Scott would get his commission, and Oden would pay a little more besides, all for the satisfaction of seeing his name in a major national publication.
Can’t do it, I told him. Wouldn’t be ethical. And I went on to explain that his latest story, while once again chockful of talent, just didn’t quite make the grade.
He came back with another proposition. His first idea was no good anyway, he said, because as soon as an editor saw his name, that would be the end of it—because the bastards had it in for him, and no editor would ever buy something he’d written, even if somebody else wrote it. So how about if we did it the other way around? He’d write the story, and we’d get one of our top writers to agree to put his name on it instead of Oden’s, and that way the magazine would take it. He wouldn’t have his name in the magazine, but he’d have his story in it, and that was even better; he’d know who’d written it, and it would be a nice private joke on the damn editors. How did that strike us? And, meanwhile, here’s another story.
We all shook our heads over that one, and then it was my job to tell him no, that wouldn’t be ethical either, and why didn’t he stop looking for short cuts and simply write a story we could sell to a good market? Oh, and by the way, this latest one wasn’t it.
His next communication was a letter, with no story enclosed. He thought my idea was a great one, but maybe he was going about it wrong, because his stories sure kept missing the mark. Was there some kind of story that was easier to sell than others, some market that might be particularly open to new talent? If so, we should just tell him what it was and he’d go for it. He didn’t care what it was, either, just so he could write for it with some reasonable hope of success.
We talked it over and agreed on the proper response. Confessions, we told him. That was the ticket. You wouldn’t find great literature in the confession magazines, and you’d never have the thrill of seeing your name in print, because confession stories didn’t carry bylines. The presumption was that the stories were all true, and that they’d been written by the persons who’d lived them. (Did the readers really believe this? I’ve often wondered.)
The confession market was a strong one, we explained, and had always been receptive to new talent. Although there were solid pros who sold every word they wrote to the top markets, there was no such thing as a big name, since no names appeared. If all he cared about was writing something and selling it, confessions looked like the way to go. And I went on to suggest that he pick up copies of all the major confession magazines, read their stories carefully, analyze their contents, and, if he felt so inclined, have a go at it.
He replied by return mail. He’d already dashed out and bought up every confession magazine available in Shreveport, and he was going through the stories like the Wehrmacht through Belgium. He was getting a good sense of the formula, and he wanted us to know he was going to follow it exactly. The story he produced might not be terribly inspired, but it would be right on target, exactly the thing they were looking for. And he felt really good about this, and we’d hear from him soon.
And we did.
In less than a week we received a manuscript from him. This was his right-down-the-middle formula story.
It was 15,000 words long.
The confession magazines of the day had very precise length requirements. The great majority of their stories ran 5–6000 words. In addition, most of them included one or perhaps two novelettes in an issue, running 10–12,000 words.
None of them ever ran anything 15,000 words long.
That was Strike One.
His story was told from a male viewpoint. The intended audience for confession magazines was exclusively female (and, I always thought, not terribly bright). While no one in the business cared who wrote the stuff, the protagonists of the stories were also almost invariably female (and, again, not terribly bright). Some of the magazines occasionally included a story with a male narrator, while other magazines had a policy against ever doing so.
None of the magazines, as far as anyone knew, had ever published a male-viewpoint novelette. Yet our Mr. Oden had produced an excessively long male-viewpoint novelette as his according-to-formula effort.
Strike Two.
But hey, that was nothing. We didn’t have to look at the word count to know this was not going to go down in history as Caswell Oden’s first sale. We didn’t have to determine the narrator’s gender. All we had to do was read the title.
First, though, I should prepare you by explaining that the confession magazines of the day were a prissy lot. The last I heard, they’d turned racy, much in the manner of soap operas and daytime talk shows and, indeed, the whole damned culture. But in the late fifties they were the farthest thing from racy.
The time-honored formula was Sin, Suffer and Repent. While the suffering was dire and the repentance profound, the sinning itself was off-stage and vague. There was no titillation in it, and you might well have had trouble figuring out just what it was that the protagonist did, or had done to her. There was never an off-color word, never a graphic scene, nothing you couldn’t have read aloud in church.
Here’s his title: “I Diddled My Wife’s Sister.”
In Write For Your Life, I used Caswell Oden’s saga to illustrate the way a strong negative belief manifests in one’s life. One harbors an irresistible urge to prove that it’s true. Our Man in Shreveport believed that no editor would ever buy a story from him, and while he would have told you he was struggling to overcome that reality, he was in fact doing everything he could to demonstrate its truth. He studied the confession market, he sat down at his typewriter and went to work, and he couldn’t have done a better job of writing a story that no editor would ever buy—from him or from anyone else.
“We all have our negative thoughts,” I would say. “We all struggle against them while making sure we prove them true. One way or another, every last one of us is diddling his wife’s sister.”
• • •
When I reached into the file cabinet, besides looking for first-timers and possible sources of titillation, I was always hoping to find something we could sell. The obvious motive was not hard to spot. When we accepted a story, I wrote a three-line response instead of hammering out two full pages.
Such an incentive might have led us to recommend everything, but we knew where that would get us. As it stood, the agency never took on a story simply on the basis of a fee man’s recommendation. All I could do, if I liked a piece of writing and thought it salable, was pass it on to the pro man—Jim Bohan at the onset, and Henry after a couple of months when Jim moved on to other things. (I’ve no idea what other things he may have moved on to. His departure was more a matter of moving away from something—i.e., Scott Meredith. I think the place was driving him crazy.)
If the pro man liked the story I passed on to him, we took it on—and I got to write my three-sentence note. If not, he frowned and gave it back to me. Since he was also reading and making marketing decisions about my own work, I had every reason to avoid making him frown. My job, after all, was not to look for diamonds in the gutter. My job was to get rid of the garbage.
Even so, now and then I read something terrific, and it would contrast so brilliantly with the sewage I’d been wading through that I could hardly let it go unrecommended. In my stint at SMLA, I actually did discover several writers who went on to have professional careers. Most were short stories that we sold to secondary markets, but I also found a first novel by a fellow named Charles Runyon; I liked it, the pro man liked it, and it was snapped up by Gold Medal, the first house we showed it to. Runyon, whom I met briefly at a Mystery Writers of America dinner many years later, went on to publish quite a few books of crime and science fiction.
I didn’t know much about the confession market, although I did know enough not to diddle my wife’s sister. One day the pile on my desk yielded a confession story from a first-timer named Barbara Bonham. I could tell it was good. Henry agreed, and I wrote her we were taking it on. She sent in another story by return mail, and the same day that I read it and prepared to try it on Henry, the editor to whom we’d sent the first story called up and said he was buying it. Her second story was just as good, and we sent her a contract. She made a nice living writing confessions, and I believe she went on to do quite well writing romance novels.
Another favorite of mine was a fellow named Grover Brinkman, who lived, if I remember correctly, somewhere in downstate Illinois. I didn’t discover Grover—he’d been a fee client for years, but unlike most of them he was damned good, and sent us stories we could sell. I didn’t take on everything he sent, but probably passed every other story to Henry, who more often than not agreed with my judgment. Most of his stories sold to the lesser crime-fiction magazines for $30 or $40 a pop, but Harold Straubing at True Men’s Stories liked the way Brinkman wrote, and bought a 3000-word short story from him now and then for $200.
Every now and then Brinkman would inquire hopefully about the possibility of being taken on as a professional client, and by all rights he should have been, but we always turned him down. I guess Scott felt there was no percentage in it. Since Brinkman seemed willing to continue as a fee client, why give up the $5-a-story he was paying?
I’ve often wondered what happened to Grover Brinkman, an unassuming fellow who earned his living operating a movie house and sat up late writing stories. He was a much better writer than I was that year, and with the right agent he could have made a decent living at it.
• • •
There are, it seems to me, a lot of side roads and detours on Memory Lane. I set out to take you through my daily routine, and I haven’t even had breakfast yet.
Around ten o’clock, when I’d already knocked off my first fee report of the day, Joan would phone the coffee shop across the street and order something for all of us. This coffee break was a perk—Scott picked up the tab—and it was a welcome one. I usually had an order of rye toast and a cup of hot chocolate.
We took an hour for lunch, and more often than not I’d have something quick across the street at Shelley’s. There were a lot of choices, especially on 47th Street between Sixth and Seventh, where you could eat well and inexpensively at Fundador, Gus & Andy’s, or the Alamo Chili House, which charged 15¢ extra for any dish ordered without beans. There was a lunch counter on Sixth Avenue called the Handy Kitchen that gave you a great bowl of stew for 95¢, and had hamburgers almost as good as the Red Chimney.
