The Fiction Factory

by William Wallace Cook

William Wallace Cook was a famously prolific writer, turning out so much pulp fiction that he was called "the man who deforested Canada."
Best remembered today for his plot-generation book, Plotto, Cook also chronicled his first two decades as a high-volume pulp writer, The Fiction Factory. He tells how he got started as a fiction writer and the ups and downs of freelancing at the turn of the last century.
In addition to being fascinating reading in its own right, the book shows how much harder writing used to be. Cook was not only an early adopter of the typewriter, gratefully abandoning his fountain pen, but also of the index-card-based filing system, which made his precious collection of background material (newspaper and magazine clippings) far more accessible.
There's no better chronicle of an author writing quickly and with increasing ease, year after year.

162 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

US newspaper reporter and writer, sometimes as by John Milton Edwards, under which name he published The Fiction Factory (1912), a detailed account of his early career in magazine publishing; most of his many stories appeared after the turn of the century in such magazines as The Argosy, some of them only reaching book form after a decade or so, in a stapled format reminiscent of Dime-Novel SF; they are all, however, full-length novels.

Reviews

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writer/inventor of Plotto: The Masterbook of Plots was, himself, the fiction factory. His trope is well-chosen, however, because he indeed recounts each year's fiction production as almost of a ledger, showing what kind of fiction he sold to whom, and how those sales came about. Long before the proliferation of Writer's Market and the multitude of "How To Write to Sell" kinds of books, this memoir recounts a very matter-of-fact, unapologetic career in the old "dime novel" and serial story publishing world of the late 19th and early 20th century, with justifiable pride at being able to crank out entertaining stories for readers on demand. (Although his and publishers' various missteps are also recounted throughout, often to the author's and our amusement.) This is one of the first books, I think, that gave approbation to fiction whose sole motive is entertainment, tackling the prejudice against genre fiction as "not literary."

Having said all that, it is more of a curiosity and a description of the publishing world (in the U.S., at any rate) at the turn of the 20th century and just beyond than it is either literature or entertainment. It will appeal mostly to other writers, as seems to be its purpose. Amusing anecdotes (some not entirely clear to modern understanding) are peppered at the end of most chapters, and along the way I found several authors mentioned that I went to explore further on http://gutenberg.org, having an interest in early genre writing. (I found my version of this book on there, in fact, as it is in the public domain.)

[Lawrence Caldwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fun book about a pulp writer back in the day. The Fiction Factory was originally published in 1912, which makes the reading interesting, because it's a literary taste of the times. What I find most interesting about this book is the work flow of the author, and of course the anecdotes he has.

Some notable excerpts from the book:

"Bother the panic!" jeered Mrs. Edwards. "It won't interfere with your work. Pleasant fiction is more soothing than hard facts. People will read all the more just to forget their troubles."

A lot of authors, and more specifically Hollywood, could do to learn from this sentiment.


After a writer has once charged himself to the brim with "technique," he should cease to bother about it. If he has read to some purpose his work will be as near technical perfection as is necessary, for unconsciously he will follow the canons of the art; while if he loads and fires these "canons" too often, they will be quite apt to burst and blow him into that innocuous desuetude best described as "mechanical." He should exercise all the freedom possible within legitimate bounds, and so acquire individuality and "style"— whatever that is.

The sentiment which Edwards has tried to carry through every paragraph and line of this book is this, that "Writing is its own reward." His meaning is, that to the writer the joy of the work is something infinitely higher, finer and more satisfying than its pecuniary value to the editor who buys it. Material success, of course, is a necessity, unless—happy condition!—the writer has a private income on which to draw for meeting the sordid demands of life. But this also is true: A writer even of modest talent will have material success in a direct ratio with the joy he finds in his work!—Because, brother of the pen, when one takes pleasure in an effort, then that effort attracts merit inevitably. If any writing is a merciless grind the result will show it—and the editor will see it, and reject.

In that remarkable group of authors who made the dime novel famous, the late Col. Prentiss Ingraham was one of the giants. These "ready writers" thought nothing of turning out a thousand words of original matter in an hour, in the days when the click of the typewriter was unknown, and of keeping it up until a novel of 70,000 words was easily finished in a week. But to Col. Ingraham belongs the unique distinction of having composed and written out a complete story of 35,000 words with a fountain pen, between breakfast and breakfast. His equipment as a writer of stories for boys was most varied and valuable, garnered from his experience as an officer in the Confederate army, his service both on shore and sea in the Cuban war for independence, and in travels in Mexico, Austria, Greece and Africa. But he is best known and will be most loyally remembered for his Buffalo Bill tales, the number of which he himself scarcely knew, and which possessed peculiar value from his intimate personal friendship with Col. Cody.


Kind of makes you wonder about some writers of today and whether or not they even have work ethics, you know, some of those writers who write two books in their series and then ride the waves of their fame with five years passing and not a word or a hint on the next book revealed? Those aren't writers. They're "authors" who HAVE WRITTEN. Ha!