Bryce Beattie's Blog, page 9

Issues 2 & 3 updates

I’ve now read all the submissions from this last round. I believe I’ve sent out acceptances for all of the stories which will appear in Issue 2. I still have a couple of decisions to make regarding issue 3, but I’ll do that and finish sending out the rest of the rejections and acceptances in the next few days. I already have cover art back, so things should rock and roll from here on out.

Also, if you’re signed up for the newsletter here or over on my author page, next week I’ll be sending out a free Sword & Sorcery short that I wrote a little while back.

 

Just some art.

I am reading through submissions and making progress. A couple more acceptances and a pile of (very kind) rejections will be going out in the next day or two.

While you’re waiting on me to reply about your submission, check out this little piece of art I just got back for a short story (one of mine, not one for the magazine.)

Submissions now Open

Submissions for StoryHack Action & Adventure are now open. Check out the submissions page for more info.

They’ll be open until Jan 20th, unless I am absolutely flooded with submissions. In that case I’ll close a bit sooner. Let me know if you have any questions.

I’m excited to see what you all come up with this time.

Podcast: The Nick Shurn Matter (Merged)

A little different something for the podcast this time. I’ve done a couple of merged Johnny Dollar episodes before, and now I’ve done it again.

But this time, it’s a Christmas episode! As in, it is implied that Christmas is actually about Jesus being born. Imagine a modern procedural show doing that today. You can’t, can you?

Here’s the synopsis:

Just before Christmas, a waitress is the only witness to a murder in a business partner squabble. When the murdering partner files an life insurance claim, Johnny Dollar is sent to investigate. But can he get to the waitress in time to save her and her daughter from being murdered, too?

It still has all the stuff you love about detective shows: mystery, action, and even a little romance. So ignore my best public radio voice, and enjoy listening to the Nick Shurn Matter.  It runs just a smidgen over an hour.

StoryHack Updates. (Subs open on the 20th.)

I have things set up to handle subscriptions. More on that when Issue 2 is actually close to launch.

Big news right now is that submissions will open again on December 20th, 2017 and run until about January 20th, 2018. I may close them early if I am inundated with great stories. Check the submissions page before submitting, though. I’m working on a new submission system which I hope will be operational enough for this issue, otherwise it’ll be via email again.

Draw me like one of your French girls chubby middle age guys…

…or “Painting my backside is an odd job.”

There’s this neighbor of mine who is a professional artist. He’s done all sorts of stuff. He’s done covers for Hard Case Crime. He painted half of one of the LDS Church’s Illustrated Scripture books (I think the New Testament.) He paints a ton of pop art now. I hope to someday be able to hire him to paint a cover for StoryHack. One project he’s recently done is some James Bond commissions. He needed to put Oddjob in one, so he called me up, took my picture, then painted me into the scene. Well, at least the back part of me.

 

Now if we’re ever at the same convention, you’ll be able to recognize me from behind. If I’m in a suit at least.

If you want to check out more of his work, go to PaulMannArtist.com.

Start Thinking “Issue 2”

For those of you who are writing types, I’m finally clearing some time and brainspace for publishing Issue 2 of StoryHack Action & Adventure. I’ll update the submissions page, but I wanted to give the blog-following-faithful a heads up first.

I’ve been lucky to get a good variety of genres as submissions, and I’d like to do a include a couple more. For instance:

A treasure/artifact/McGuffin hunt. Think Indiana Jones or National Treasure.
A solid espionage story. I’m not a huge fan of Deus Ex Machina style gadgets or Mission Impossible-style masks.

Also, I just don’t get enough submissions of modern thrillers or urban fantasy. Not nearly enough.

I’ll still publish sword & sorcery, because I love it, but there are now several places to publish that, so don’t expect to see more than one per issue. Cell Phones & Sorcery, as I mentioned, would be a go.

And I go back and forth on this, but I think I’m back into liking the longer stories (9-12K word) again. I’d even consider a novella here and there.

The Importance of Characters

This is part of the Writing Tips from the Pulp Era series. It was published in Writer’s Digest August, 1943, and is now in the public domain. This one is kind of light on how-to details, but is an important concept to consider. It’s hard to get someone to read a story if he isn’t interested in the characters. Marian ended up writing often for TV, including a few episodes from the original Batman TV show.

Breath of Life

Marian B. Cockrell

No one thing in writing fiction is so important that nothing else matters, but I think that making the characters in stories individuals who are real and believable, instead of male and female puppets moved about by the author arbitrarily for the purposes of his plot with no consideration for their feelings (and how can one consider their feelings if he doesn’t know what they are?) is so important that it is impossible to write a good story without it.

It is said that there are no new plots. But there are new people. No person in the world is exactly like another, and no character in a story, presented by a writer who knows him well, is exactly like any other that was ever depicted by anyone else. Even such fundamentally exciting things as violence and death are interesting in fiction only according to whom they happen to. If the reader doesn’t care whether a character lives or dies, then whether he does or not is completely unlimportant.

If there is a man on a submarine who likes to be on submarines, then the fact that he is on one is not very interesting in itself, and the reader waits impatiently for something to happen that will arouse his Interest. But if the man on the submarine suffers from claustrophobia, why the mere fact that he is there, before any action whatever takes place, produces the sense of anticipation in the reader that is so important in persuading him to finish the story.

A plot has to be credible and interesting. Its basis may be quite fantastic, but the story is made perfectly credible if the people engaged in the action are the kind of people who would act that way. Or the plot may be about things intrinsically dull and Commonplace, but made absorbing by the kind of people these dull things are happening to.

I read an article in the Writer’s Year Book called “Tag Your Characters” and the general idea was to be sure and give each character some individual idiosyncrasy, such as a habit of biting his nails, or always remembering names, or never getting a haircut, so that the reader could always tell them apart. I think that is a step in the right direction, but to my mind arbitrary tagging merely for purposes of identification is sliding lazily over the most important thing in the story. The reader should be able to tell the characters apart with ease, without the device of having different colored ribbons around their necks. Of course, people do have idiosyncrasies, and the ones the people in the story have should be included, but they should spring from the personality of the character, and the writer should know very definitely what that is.

I have written a good many short stories, and have sold about a third of them. I searched for interesting, unusual plots (none of them were, very) and some of the stories sold and some didn’t. They were all written with the same care and in much the same style. On looking them over and analysing the plots, I have come to the conclusion that if synopses were made of them all, of the bare fiction, no one on earth could possibly tell which were the ones that sold and which weren’t. But on reading the stories the difference is immediately apparent. The ones which sold were stories about real, living people (I don’t mean portraits from life) who aroused the reader’s interest and anticipation before they had done anything at all.

And a character doesn’t have to be particularly unusual to be the kind of person people like to read about. He simply has to be alive. He can be the village idiot and have the reader palpitating with anxiety because he can’t find his other shoe, if the reader knows what it means to him to find it. The reader has to know him as a person-not a type, not a shadowy shape.

I don’t mean that one should go into tedious detail about the life and appearance and psychology of every character in his story. There isn’t time, and it slows up action. But the writer should know so much about his character that he can indicate his personality and emotions with very few words.

Suppose one decides to write a story about Joe, a typical high school boy. He will do this and this. So it is written, and it was supposed to be funny, or tragic, but somehow it doesn’t quite come off. So-suppose we start over.

What is a typical high school boy? And of course the answer to that is, there isn’t any. Well, what is this particular boy, who happens to be going to high school, like? The practical thing to do is write a short biography, a character sketch. What kind of people are his parents, how much money have they, what kind of home, what does Joe think of them, what kind of girls does he like, who are his friends, how does he stand in school, what are his interests?

By the time the writer has done a page or so about Joe, probably completely extemporaneous, he knows things about him that never occurred to him when he was writing the story the first time. And when he writes it over he may suddenly say to himself, “But Joe wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t feel that way about it at all. And if this happens to him, what difference does it make? He doesn’t care. Let that happen to him instead. That would be terribly important to Joe.” And that is the time when he changes his plot, and when he doesn’t try to jam Joe into the one he had originally, because Joe wouldn’t be comfortable there.

The writer knows Joe so well by now that the reader knows him too, and if Joe is made to act or react unnaturally the reader will resent it. And there are things in the story about Joe that reveal his personality, things the writer couldn’t have put in the first time, because he didn’t know them himself.

If the writer is absolutely determined to use the original plot, why he must change Joe’s name (because by now he knows Joe too well-he’ll have to write it about someone else) and invent a boy who would do those things, and feel them; and then he’ll write with conviction and the reader will feel what he feels.

In writing a book, of course, convincing characters are even more important than in a short story, and one should be especially thorough in getting acquainted with his people before he starts writing. Even then they will grow and develop and sometimes run away with the plot entirely. And a plot that has been run away with is usually a good plot, for the people in it have had enough vigor in them to insist on being themselves.

These things apply to any kind of story. It is perfectly possible to lay down a detective story with a yawn in the midst of spouting blood and sudden death. I have read a great many detective and mystery stories where the sole interest of the reader could only be the mental problem of who done-it-and a few where the characters were so interesting to read about that the book would have been good whether anybody ever got murdered or not. And these are the best ones, and the most successful. They are interesting novels.

In writing any kind of story it is important to remember that in fiction nothing is important except in relation to the people it happens to. Anything can be important if it happens to, or is done by, the right person. If a writer has a character, or characters, who are interesting and unusual personalities, they can go through the most commonplace actions and incidents, and hold the reader’s interest completely. Or an unusual or exciting plot can be written about the most ordinary run-of-themill people, and if they are real and alive they can produce an absorbing story merely by their reactions to an unusual situation.

Having written the paragraph above, it occurs to me that of the two books I have written, the first was about ordinary people faced with an unusual situation, and the second was about an unusual girl’s reactions to the most everyday experiences possible.

A friend of mine, who has read innumerable books on writing, read the second book in manuscript form, and told me when she had finished, that if she didn’t know already that the book had been sold, she could tell me dozens of things that were wrong with it.

“The fact that it’s sold doesn’t mean that it’s perfect,” I said. “But did you find it interesting to read?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I was so afraid that girl was going to marry Martin. But

I think you should have more in it about Giles.”

“But he’s just a sub-character, and the rules you’ve been talking about-”

“I don’t care about the rules. I liked him. I want to know more about him.”

“There you are. There are dozens of things wrong with it. It would be a better book if there weren’t. I’ve written only two books and don’t know as much about novel construction as I should. But the characters are alive and make you intersted in them, and anxious to see what happens to them, and the book is going to be published because of that, and in spite of the dozens of things that are wrong with it. And if the construction were perfect and the characters dead it wouldn’t have been. Maybe next time I can get them both right, but the people in it are the part that has to be right no matter what. (I did put in more about Giles, because I had got interested in him too).

Successful fiction is fiction that is interesting to read, in which the people behave consistently and don’t let the reader down; and one may follow every rule of construction in all the books and still come up with something anyone would go to sleep over. Or one may write a story which contains flagrant violations of some of the rules of the how-to-write boys, and still know that it is right and the way it ought to be, and someone will buy it while his drawn-with-a-ruler stories are still making the weary rounds.

I don’t mean that one should ignore the sensible and helpful rules that are generally acknowledged to be good. But if a writer finds he can’t use them in a particular instance, he shouldn’t let them get in his hair.

If a writer with any ability to express himself knows his characters and presents them faithfully without trying to twist them out of shape to suit him, and has them do and experience things that are important to them, he has accomplished the most important thing in fiction writing. All the other things one has to learn are important too, but not that important.

Emotion and Storytelling

This is part of the Writing Tips from the Pulp Era collection. It’s from the October, 1940 issue of Writer’s Digest, which is in the public domain. This is the third and probably last article I’ll be posting from this issue.

TL;DR – Your readers will feel something while reading your work. So give them a protagonist to relate to with big emotions.

Let Yourself Go

James H. S. Moynahan

Roger Torrey, who does the Marge and McCarthy series in Black Mask, stopped over at the house one Sunday afternoon with Helen Ahern, and I asked Helen how she was doing on a story she’d been working on.

Roger winked at me. “She’s holding her own,” he said, mock-loyally. “She’s still on page 26!”

Helen joined in the general laughter. She knew the we all knew, too.

The casual quip started me thinking. Why do we strike those impasses, and what gets us out of them?

I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the most important factors is this: We stall because we don’t feel our story. We have a few rough ideas, but no strong emotional reaction to them.

Steve Fisher, whose stuff you have read in Liberty, Cosmo, and will read shortly in the Post, puts plenty of study into this business of what makes a yarn tick. After I saw the Dorothy Lamour picture Typhoon, which carries story credit in big letters on the screen for Steve, I asked him what, in his opinion, did he consider the most important factor in selling his stories.

“That’s easy,” he said. “Mood is easily the most important essential. Back in the days when I was writing pulp, I used to fly in the face of editorial tradition in a lot of offices by turning in stories that had a strong emotional pitch running through them. You had to write action to sell, of course, but I always tried to include that other element, an emotional tone that held throughout the story. Hit that and hold it, and your story writes itself.”

The story we had been reading and discussing was a mood-picture of the war in France, held together by a mounting sense of impending tragedy that reaches its peak in battle and hospital scenes. In these it was not difficult to feel the impact of the writer’s emotional reaction to his material.

He didn’t just report them mechanically; he threw himself into the soldier’s stat of mind; his desperation, his fury, his resignation, his despair.

Such writing calls for telling in the first person, as you would set down your feelings in a letter to a friend. In a third person story the same emotional writing would seem forced and patronizing, as if the reader were too stupid to gather what the hero’s emotions must have been from the recital of the events themselves.

So there you have it. Unless, that is, you think Steve doesn’t know himself why he sells!

For my part, I think he’s got something. I’d like to go a little further with it, though.

l’d like to see whether we can’t examine this business of mood, and discover just how to evoke it in the reader. Steve feels it–and he writes it as he feels it. I think you’ve got to do that, ultimately, but maybe there are some steps that precede the writing. Let’s see what does move people,

I’m not going to be chump enough to try and get you dabbing at your eyes over bits lifted from stories. So, even if you weep at card tricks, l don’t think I’m letting you in for any emotional orgy. What I hope to do is illustrate a principle, and show you how you can use it to lift the pitch of your own yarns, this excerpt’s from The Blue Light, Private Detective, August, 1939, by Henri St. Maur. The detective, Fort, has just phoned his client that the murder mystery has been cleaned up.

He hung up, turned to Judy, (His office assistant) “Well, sweet, that’s how it is. Now if you’ll tell me what Stoughton did with the pistol-the little twenty-five he had when you conked him this morning-we’ll have him sewed up.”

Judy started at him. “I conked him?”

Fort said impatiently: “Stop it. Stop it! Are you asking me to believe that a timid kid like this Armitage girl wouldn’t run for her life if she saw Stoughton in my office? No, what happened, darling, was that you saw him going for her, and you conked him. It wasn’t till after he’d worked on you with that Tyrone Power act of his that you fell, What’d he do-promise you a cut on the take if you planted the card on my desk?”

Judy’s lips peeled back from her teeth and she clawed the little gun out from the bosom of her dress. Fort jumped at her, slapped the gun down.

“Don’t make it worse, you little fool!” he said. His voice held only bitterness. He twisted the gun from her singers, put it in his pocket.

“Get out of here,” he said in a low, controlled voice. “Get out of here.”

The girl looked pitifully at him, “Oh, Al, I-”

“Get out,” he said between his teeth.

She looked at him, lowered her eyes, went through the door.

Fort, blood dripping from his slashed arm, watched her take her hat and coat from the rack, go out without looking back.

Behind him the Armitage girl said: “Oh, Mr. Fort, do you suppose they’ll get my things back?”

Fort said, not looking around: “Maybe.” His lips were shut white. His fists were knots.

She said: “Maybe you could work on it for me.”

Fort didn’t turn. “Maybe I could,” he said slowly. “Maybe I could.”

In Roger Torrey’s Party Murder, Black Mask, April, 1934, a police Captain has just learned of the death of his daughter.Dal Prentice is the hero, a lieutenant of detectives. He is phoning.

He could hear somebody say say: “Hold it!” then: “You, Dal?”

“Uh-huh!”

“Dal! They just picked up the… what’s left of my girl off Aldena Boulevard. She’s been dumped out of a car.”

“Oh… my… good… lord!”

“Dal! Doc says her head was just beaten in. Let that go and come down.”

After some discussion, Prentice hangs up.

The phone clicked and Prentice turned a somber face to his audience, (His two partners and a prisoner).

“Cap’s feeling bad, They found his girl for him.”

Peterson (one of the police detectives) said: “I’ve got two and I could hear what was said…”

Let’s start with these two illustrations. Can you see what they have in common? Can you see how, in the complete story they might tend to evoke enotion in the reader? And why?

The explanation for the reader’s emotional reaction is this: empathy-or, if you prefer, sympathy.

Have you over wondered why mob will react so violently to things that its members, as individuals, might very well ignore? Or why a comedy is funnier in a full house? Or why you can read a headline: Thousand Chinese Slaughtered in Battle, with dry eyes, and yet weep over a dead puppy of your own daughter’s?

The answer is sympathy. Emotion is catching. A loud, angry, furious voice makes us irritable even if it is not addressed to us at all. Its mere sound evokes anger in us.

Thus, in the examples above, we take our cue from the characters’ emotional reactions. Had the writers made the characters meet these emotional crises with indifference, we ourselves should not be moved, but should find ourselvesmeeting the challenge of the situation with the same emotional indifference.

For example, in the first excerpt, substite for words like “bitterness” words like “amusement,” “boredom,” “indifference.”Watch what happens to the emotional tone.

For: “His lips were shut white. His fists were knots,” substitute: “He glanced down idly at his nails. They were clean and smmetrical.”

High spot in the Torrey excerpt is the point where Peterson says: “I’ve got two and I could hear what was said…” Just as Peterson, himself a father, is quick to respond with ready sympathy to the news of his chief’s tragedy, so the spectacle of a fellow human being responding thus to a situation tends to make us automatically respond in the same fashion. And note here that we might have responded with anger, with indignation, with despair, with indifference, or any number of shades of emotional reaction. Later in the story, when other characters become angered over developments, we find our own pulse rising, too.

Now the point, for you, is this. If you write a beautiful scene, full of menace, terror, and fury, and in it you show no character reacting to these stimuli as you wish have your reader react, what do you do now?

You take the yarn out, and carefully write in passages showing how the characters react to your menace. And remember: The more moved they are by story developments, the more moved your reader is going to be. Up to a point.

That point is incredibility. If you go too far-if you have your heroine throwing a wing-ding at his frown, like Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt, then you must expect your reader to say: “Sa-a-ay! What is this! Take it easy, will you!”

The trick is to force the emotion, to make your characters react as violently as possible or as deeply as possible to a given situation, but only up to a point which is still logical, and credible. Overdo it, and your drama will spill over into laughs.

Now not all this depicting of your characters reacting emotionally will be done by saying to the reader in so many words: “My hero is gritting his teeth. He’s biting his lips.” I think some of the biggest kicks a writer gets out of his trade is working out more subtle ways of showing these reactions without describing them in so many words.

For example, the way Fort, in the first excerpt, reiterates: “Get out of here.” We don’t say he’s obsessed with that single idea, but can it be done more effectively? We could tell the reader that the Armitage girl is a silly, self-centered little fool who misses entirely the significance of what his secretary’s treachery means to Fort. But her insensibility, so necessary here for contrast, is brought out in her complete preoccupation with her own lousy little “things.”

Note, in the Torrey excerpt, that the reader is not beaten over the head with adjectives, the distracted father is only a voice, yet we sense his controlled agony better than if we were having it described to us. You can do a lot just with the use of a person’s first name, as you see here. And note the grimness of Peterson’s “l’ve got two, and I could hear what was said.” We can just see this big, human cop holding back his feelings and resolving to handle this murder as if it had been one of his own two kids that had been the victim.

Instead of cluttering up your next yar?n with long descriptions of your characters’ emotional throes, try seeing how much you can do with dialogue alone. Try figuring out how many devices you can hit upon to do the work instead. For example:

“B-but I can’t g-go in th-there! Do you want me to be k-killed!”

“John. Please, now, John! He’s just a child. John, ple-e-ase!”

“Will you shut up!”

“I… see. A wise guy, huh?”

“Why you, you… !”

And so on. Repetition, stammering and stuttering, meaningful pauses, desparing wails, little intimate, impulsive appeals-give dialogue first chance at delineating these.

Where you do find the need for pantomime, use it as sparingly as possible. That is to say: One good effect is worth ten mediocre ones. For economy of effect, James M. Cain’s The Postman. Always Rings Twice will well repay any study you may give it. You will find numberless effects such as the part where the new helper, finding himself alone with the Greek’s wife, locks the door and comes inside carrying a plate and fork as an excuse to make conversation. When he says: “The fork on the plate was rattling like a tamborine,” he’s told you everything.

One more thing. Rules for writing are never of much use until their employment has become second nature and you no longer think consciously about them. Don’t expect these suggestions to help you right away. They may even confuse you and upset your writing for a while.

But here’s one rule for evoking emotion I can give you that you can put to work right away, and one that won’t give you any trouble. It’s this:

Let yourself go. When you’re writing about emotion, throw yourself into the feeling you want the character to experience, and write out of your own emotion. If you can do that, then everything I’ve told you above is just the malarkey, because you’ll do it instinctively so much better that any rules, no matter how effective, must necessarily step aside for reality. Because that’s what you’ll be writing.

Become a Better Writer by Following this One Simple Rule

This is part of the series Writing Tips from the Pulp Era, which is a collection of now-public-domain articles. Click the link for a full list.

This one comes from the October, 1940 issue of Writer’s Digest, which is in the public domain. The short version is this: Always send out/publish the very best fiction you are capable of producing. No phoning it in.

A Very Simple System

by William Benton Johnston

I would rather sell a good story to Grit for five dollars than a bad one to Collier’s for five hundred dollars.

Screwy? In view of the fact that I ama professional writer-and plan to continue in this business-I think not. The good story would advance me toward my ultimate goal; the bad one would take me back a step. Against this, four hundred and ninety-five dollars loses significance. I’m no long-haired artist. I’m almost bald and an a hardworking “money writer”.

In the beginning, I evolved a very simple plan: to select a plot and write a story I around it, putting into every paragraph the very best of my ability.

You’ll probably say: “I’ve read some of your stuff that was awful tripe.”

True enough, but it was my best at the time and I have no apologies for it; only regrets.

After eight years and some two hundred and Seventy-five published stories-and read hundreds of theories–I’m using that same system. Perhaps it is because I am too dumb to learn a better method, or because te old one has supported me, and my family, all those years.

Some beginner, confused by so much varied and often complicated advice, may find the

simplicity of this one-rule system a steadying influence.

Using it, I do not write a pulp or a slick yarn; I write a story and do my damndest to make it good. This may seem artless and unorthodox, but here are some actual results:

(a) A short-short, written with a one cent market in mind, sold for forty cents per word.

(b) A western, intended for the pulps, landed me in one of the big weeklies, to which I have made three subsequent sales.

In 1933, I was doing a few yarns for All-America Sports, at twelve to fifteen dollars per story. I had such a script in my pocket, ready for mailing, one day when I met Henry G. Rhodes on the streets of Memphis. He read the story and suggested that I try a thirty-five cents slick with it. The yarn was bought and featured; since then I have sold that publication thousands of dollars worth of fiction, with only one rejection.

Doesn’t going over each story, putting everything you have into it, cut down on production? Yes, it does. My agent sometimes calls me on the carpet about this, but in other letters, he says:

(a) “Enclosed herewith is my check for the story which we sold to [X] last week. The story wasn’t so wonderful; the plot material was trite indeed, yet I must admit that excellent writing and careful characterization put it across…”

(b) “We felt all along that this one, despite the fact that you really dovetailed two stories into one, would sell, for it had the virtues of being beautifully written and of presenting real living human beings.”

In trying to prove that constant efforts at perfection pays, this article may seem, a personal success story. Nothing could be farther from truth. I’m nowhere near the top and I may never get any closer. I mentioned that my writing has supported a family for eight years. Supported, in this instance, is a flexible word. Sometimes the going was pretty tough, and the meals anything but pretty. The family’s attitude has been swell, taking the cornbread and peas along with the caviar-and no grumbling.

For the past eight years and a half, ít hasn’t been so bad, because I have been fortunate in having the assistance of an agent with a keen story sense and a broad knowledge of markets. So now I just write the yarns and he sees that my efforts are shown to the proper books. Even the dog, Amos, is getting fat.

All this in defense of my simple system. Now let’s see how it works-in practice.

Several years ago, I was writing a serial and having a hard time with the plot (long fiction has always been my nemesis). The finished story was far from satisfactory. In fact, the whole thing was so hopeless that I grumbled about the long and tedious work of rewriting it paragraph by paragraph, cutting out every word that I could and re-casting clumsy sentences.

A writer friend of mine said: “Send it out a time or two ‘as is’-maybe you’ll get a nibble.”

It was a temptation. That kind of re-write on a serial adds up to work. Yet I decided that anything was better than making too bad an impression on editors. It took a couple of weeks to go over the manuscript and polish it up.

Mark Mellen was editor of Post Time. I sent the story there. In due time, came a letter:

“Your ‘Valkyre of Cumberland Hall’ received and first installment has gone forward to illustrator…

“I had another serial on my desk, with perhaps a better plot, but not so well written as yours…”

I have that original script in my desk, together with the revised version. Let’s look at the changes. Not particular good writing ín eíther ínstance, but the differerence between a rejection and a substantial check.

(a) Original.

The sale of stock to Cumberland Hall was successful so far as attendance went and when ít was over, the old shedrow was empty save far the one occupied by Tallahatchie.

After the crowd had drift£ed away, Betty and Allen sat in the office. Allen’s face was clouded with worry.

“The auctioneer did his best,” he admitted “and we sold them all, still we lack $2,400 and the note is due tomorrow.”

Betty looked at her bank book.

“We have $1,900 here, Allen.”

“You need that for current expenses.”

“We’ll live on bread and water. Mr. Gray must be paid in full. For some reason he wants Cumberland Hall- and badly.”

Allen figured again. “All of which comes to-five hundred short.”

“You can cipher up the darndest things.” Betty laughed. “Here, take this, jump in your roadster, drive down to Nashville and sell it.” She slipped a diamond ring from her finger and passed it across the desk.

“But, Betts, that was your graduation present.”

“Never mind; Gray must be paid.”

Allen drove away and, in the late afternoon, hitch-hiked his way back to Cumberland Hall.

“Where is your car?” Betty asked when he walked up the graveled drive.

“A crazy guy in Benjestown offered me six hundred and fifty bucks for it. Imagine a goof that screwy!”

He took the ring from his pocket and” lessly tossed it to her.

“Here’s your glassware; we won’t need it now.”

With a little cry, Betty ran down and flung herself into his arms.

“That car was the only valuable possesion you had left. Allen, you should done it.”

She pushed him away and looked at him. “If I lost Cumberland Hall and everything else I have in the world, I’d be rich having you, Allen Lamar.”

(a) Revised Copy.

When the stock sale was over, Tallahatchie was all that was left of Cumberland Hall stables.

“The auctioneer did his best, Allen admitted to Betty, “and yet we’re five hundred short.”

She slipped a diamond ring off her finger and gave it to him. Take this to Nashville and sell it.

“But, Betts-”

She said it again, “Take it to Nashville and sell it.”

Allen returned in late afternoon, walking. “A guy in Benjestown bought my car,” he explained.

“Imagine, six hundred bucks for that old wreck!” He gave Betty back her ring. “We don’t need to sell it now.”

For a moment she stood there and stared at him, then came down the steps very slowly and put her arms around him.

“If I lose Cumberland Hall and everything else that I possess,” she said gently, “I’ll always be rich–as long as I have you.”

(b) Original.

Jed Huskins came around the beech tree and shook hands with Jurden.

“What you want with me?”

“I got a job for you.” Jurden told him.

“What is it?” Jurden took out a wallet and counted from it a hundred dollars. “Sometime this morning, Jed, a horse van from Cumberland Hall Stables is going to leave Benjestown for Louisville. Now, that van will have a big black horse with a white star in his face, aboard. I don’t want that horse to go a bit farther than these hills; I want him taken from the van and killed, see?”

Jed Huskins thoughtfally took a chew of home-made twist tobacco.

“That van will have to come close to here; it’ll have to come right along Durveen Pike,

the lonliest stretch of road in this country.”

“Exactly.” Jurden grinned evilly. “It ought not to be much trouble.”

Huskins reached out and took the money.

“It won’t be no trouble a-tall,” he drawled.

(b) Revised Copy.

Jed Huskins came around the beech tree.

Jurden said, “Jed, I’ve got a job for you.”

“What is it?”

Jurden opened his wallet and counted out a hundred dollars. “Sometime this morning, a Cumberland Hall van is leaving Benjestown for Louisville; a black horse with a star in his face will be aboard. I want that horse removed from the van and destroyed.”

Jed Huskins took out a plug of tobacco and bit off a chew. “The van will come along Durveen Pike, the lonsomest stretch of road in this here country.”

Jurden grinned. “Exactly-it ought not to be much trouble.”

Jed reached out and took the hundred dollars.

“No trouble a-tall,” he said.

~

Let me try to prove, in another way, that I write without the handicap of slants, pulp or slick. The opening paragraphs quoted below are from four of my stories: two pulps and two slicks. Can you denote any particular difference?

(1) The house was new and unmellowed, and the cleared ground around it made a brown scar on the green, far-reaching length of the valley. Yet there was already a home-like atmosphere here, manifest in bright curtains and planted flowers and consideration of small details which showed a woman’s care and pride.

It was a pretty place, too, with the up-sweep of the hills back of it and, beyond these, stony summits making their high, irregular pattern against the sky. Before it, the mesa ran into the far distance, smooth and flat and unbroken. (“Homesteader,” Dime Western, Feb., 1940.)

(2) Mrs. Molly Brown’s cottage stood on the outskirts of the little town of Barclay. It was a neat place, with orderly hedges and close-cropped lawn. In the rear, there were clean, well-arranged chicken runs and row after row of apple trees. Just outside the front gate, a sign announced that apples, fresh yard eggs and blooded Minorcas and Plymouth Rocks were for sale. (“The Eye of Death,” Secret Agent X, Feb., 1938.)

(3) White thunderheads lay like puffs of carnival taffy against the blue dome of the China sky. Wayne Driscoll, with a veteran’s instinct for advantage, lurked in the blindspot of the the sun and throttled the Curtiss combat ship to idling speed. The deadly little plane fretted as a high-strung thoroughbred fret under heavey, restraining wraps.

Wayne chuckled: a hell of a place to be thinking of horses. Seven thousand feet above the broad Yangtze, with Nanking sprawled like a helpless giant before the Japanese bombers coming over Pootung from their carriers anchored at the mouth of the Whangpoo.

Yet the human mind sometimes becomes strangely detached during crucial moments, groping into the past as if attempting to fix clearly old, familiar scenes against the endless stretch of eternity. (“No More Guns,” Turf ard Sports Digest, June, 1939.)

(4) There was an unrealness about the entire scene, as if someone had splashed gay

colors against a grim and sombre canvas.

First, the flowers blooming in the arid soil beside the walls of the old Territory prison. Then the little girl, with her deep blue eyes and bright print dress, leaning against those drab, tragedy-enclosing walls, laughing at something the Maricopa said as he lugged water up from the Colorado and filled a barrel at the garden’s edge. Then, too, the mere fact that the Kid was there, carrying water for flowers and making a little girl laugh and follow his movements with adoring eyes. (“A Well Remembered Kiss,” Liberty, June, 1940.)

~

I remember reading an article by a “million-words-a-year man” in which he ridiculed the idea of going over and rewriting pulp material. He said, in effect, “Rewriting or revising cent-a-word stuff is equivalent to getting half a cent for it—slave wages. Better to hammer it out, charge off your rejections and let volume take care of you.”

I watched the progress of this man for quite a time. I’ve forgotten his name, but he was contemporary of H. Bedford-Jones, Ernest Haycox and Cleve Adams. The conclusion is obvious, isn’t it?

I know the old gag about “An amateur writes a story and looks for a market; a professional looks at a market and writes a story.”

Naturally I “study markets”; a thing which every writer must do. But it doesn’t mean to study a small, fourth-rate one and then decide that you can meet its requirements without putting forth your best effort.

You are not writing for that particular magazine; you’re writing a story with your name signed to it. You’re laying a stone in the foundation upon which you hope to build a stairway to Liberty or Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post.

You are advertising yourself as a good or a poor writer. Every story is a vote one way or the other.