The Confession Story

( Originally Published 1944 )

That wisdom flies on accidental wing;

THE CONFESSION story is a form of literary perversion all by itself, invented by the most shady of American editors and publishers, and purveyed as America's only new contribution to world literature.

It is, as all established writers know, a "soft touch." Confession-story magazines pay more usually than most magazines taking cheap junk; and the filthy deed can remain anonymous.

I don't know how many confession stories I have sold; they have included confession stories published in all the large confession magazines since the day they were dubiously invented.

For the Big Name writer in a slump they are often a God-send whereby a little jack can be picked up fairly quickly without getting caught at it. You'd be astounded were you to learn which Big Name writers, temporarily broke in between mistresses, have written themselves out of a slump with confession stories.

Like any other form of writing, confession stories are hard to do. They have to be bad in the right way. If they are bad in the wrong way, or, what is worse, good, you can't sell them. Like any other sort of bad writing they take practice.

Time was when the confession formula was, simply, "Sin, Suffer, and Repent."

But the confession magazine has buffed itself up considerably since those days. The formula is still, mainly, Sin, Suffer, and Repent, but now it comes wrapped in cellophane.

The early confession stories always picked up with some poor girl outraged by a rich man. She sinned in asterisks with him, suffered like all get out with her nameless child, then married the stinker in the end, with the presumption that she would live happily ever after.

You can't do it that way any more; at least not for the large confession magazines. In fact, now and then you'll see some of the best writing in the country in the confession magazines stuff written by competent writers needing some quick dough for an abortion or something.

The theory, of course, is that these confession stories are "true." I doubt that there is anyone left in America who falls for that. They are never "true" in the sense that some outraged kitchen mechanic might sit down and tell the whole dirt about how the master of the house done her wrong. Such a true true-story would be rejected with contempt by every confession magazine in the country. The confession story has to be as untrue as any other kind of fiction; but it has to be untrue in a true way, if you know what I mean (and I'm not sure that I do).

The aim of the average short story is to intrigue the reader through conflict, surprise ending, and sun-dry tawdry tricks from the O. Henry grab-bag. The aim of the confession story is to intrigue only the reader's emotions.

You start a confession story by asking yourself what emotion you wish the reader to have as he reads it. In the old days you simply wanted him to have a sexual emotion, which was easy. Many years ago, shortly after the Civil War when I used to write a lot of confession stories, I decided that the one emotion I had never seen extolled in a confession magazine was the emotion of sadism.

There was a confession magazine then owned by a group of magazines to whose other publications I constantly contributed. I wrote the managing editor of this group and asked him if he would experiment with me. I wanted to see if the emotion of sadism would work in a confession magazine. He wrote back that he had talked to the sad-eyed maiden-lady who edited his confession magazine and that she didn't know what "sadism" meant any more than he did, but to go ahead and do it and he would tell her to "must" it and see what would happen.

There is nothing that will tweak one's libido faster than pain, administered to another. I wrote a confession story psychologically designed to tweak only the emotion of sadism in the reader. In order to get the story past the mail authorities I made the leading character a Lesbian, without naming her as such. I made her a stepmother and tricked her out with all the glandular and psychological traits of Lesbians who do not recognize themselves as such. The step-mother had in her charge the beautiful sixteen-yearold daughter of her husband. She hated the daughter. The father and husband had to go away on a trip. For long the stepmother had wished to lambast the kinder; when the old man was out of town she caught the kid coming from a bath, yanked off her kimono, tied her up, and whipped the hell out of her. The whole story was told from the viewpoint of the daughter and the pain she felt.

The managing editor damned near dropped dead when he saw the story. The editor of the confession magazine threatened to quit, and there was hell a-popping. But I have always been a disagreeable louse with whom to deal, as any editor in America will tell you. By bringing certain pressure to bear too complicated to go into here I forced the story into print in the confession magazine.

All hell broke loose. The confession magazine was new in those days (it wasn't True Story; it was one now no longer functioning, since absorbed by another outfit). Readers wrote in, drooling for more stories like that one. The editor and the managing editor were puzzled beyond words. They asked me for more similar stories, and I wrote damned near every story in the next issue of the magazine-and believe me held them up for a plenty stiff price for it. So the next issue contained a serial, a novelette, some lousy poetry, and five short stories. In them pretty boys and pretty girls were stabbed, beaten, flayed, macerated, and in every imaginable way tortured by ugly old men and women.

More hell broke loose. The issue sold out on the stands. Distributors and dealers wired in for more copies. Another issue was printed. That one also sold out there wasn't a cover returned on the two issues!

In another few months every confession magazine on the stands was filled with sadism from cover to cover. Then, of course, it all got too raw. The police stepped in; there were some devastating prosecutions; confession magazines were barred here and there but the circulation of confession magazines had jumped enormously all of them. To this day what will sell a confession story quicker than anything else is sadism; but the difference now is that you have to tuck in the edges ever so carefully.

If you are smart and want to take a bit of dough: from the confession magazines, make a deliberate study of sadism. Go to a library and look under the listing "Abnormal Psychology;" there you will find tons of books containing references to abnormal psychology. In each of these books you will find tedious exegeses, on sadism; be careful to study mainly mental sadism few magazines will now let you indulge in. forthright physical sadism of the sort that occurs in the Bible. But mental sadism will work just as well PROVIDED THAT THERE IS A CAREFULLY-COVERED-UP SEXUAL ANGLE TO IT SOMEWHERE.

ALL success in selling confession stories is due to the inculcating of an emotion in the reader's mind. It may be the religious emotion, i.e., superstition; the love emotion, i.e., sex in cellophane; the sadness emotion, i.e., manic-depressives made to seem sane; and so on. Whatever emotion it may be, for every confession story you see published you will see a story accentuating some one emotion, heavily (regardless of plot, denouement, characterization, conflict, crisis, or any of the other shabby tricks of the ACST) ; and in ninety percent of these the emotion will be sadism, in one form or another.

All of us are sadists at base. We practice sadism either upon others or upon ourselves. If we practice it upon others we usually prosper. If we practice it upon ourselves, as in the case of religious frenzies about supposed "sins," we go nuts in droves.

But the sadism we practice is usually (because of the police) mental sadism. The first requirement of a good confession writer is an inside-out knowledge of every form of mental sadism, how it works and how it is applied. Confession stories are really dishonest sex stories. That is, because of the mores which prevent us from ever being straightforward about anything, we cannot give simple wholesome sex in a clean form; we always have to disguise it in some way for public consumption (which engenders much physical consumption) ; and nowhere is the disguise so tricky as in the confession magazines.

There is another requirement for the confession story which is harder of achievement. The simpler a story is the harder it is to write; very many confession stories are deceivingly simple. They seem simple to simpletons who know nothing about writing because they are let us use the ghastly word "homey." I prefer to use the word "homey" in connection with confession stories instead of the word "realistic" because usually realistic writing connotes very fine writing. The writing in confession-story magazines is never really good writing, but it is plenty clever writing, and you have to be plenty clever to do it. Let us say, then, that you are going to invest some time in trying to make the confession editors.

Start by concentrating upon one confession magazine. It will have a slanted style which you can learn (subconsciously) by reading through a year's issue of it. Next note the length of the stories, being careful mathematically to calculate which length it most favors. Then decide what form of sadism you are going to put into your story and how you are going to do it.

One of the favorite forms of sadism presently is to have a pretty hero bleed to death while a beautiful girl his sweetheart or wife looks on and enjoys beaucoup sadism through buckets of tears. Let us say, then, that the sadism you will effectuate is an objective sadism inculcated by the sight of blood and agony. Next you must decide whether it is through your boy character or your girl character that the reader is to enjoy his gore sadistically.

Right here you can make a very bad mistake if you are not careful. In every sadistic story of any kind there must be one person or one group of persons who, exclusively, suffer; and there must be one person or one group of persons who, exclusively, enjoy the suffering. The reader identifies himself with one per-son or with one group of persons, of one sort or the other, according to whether he is a sadist, mostly, or a masochist, mostly. If the reader is mostly a sadist he identifies himself with the individual or group who watches. If he is mostly a masochist he identifies him-self with the individual or group who suffers. Your reader can therefore enjoy himself either way because every person who lives is latently either sadistic or masochistic often enough forthrightly so. But your big mistake can arise if you confuse your reader by letting both protagonists, individuals or groups, do some suffering and some enjoying.

Very often idiots send me confession stories to read, stories they think are swell, but which they couldn't sell. Because I, too, am an idiot I usually read them. Almost always the mistake which rendered the story unsalable occurred in confusing the reader as to the single masochistic or sadistic viewpoint.

You will simplify matters for yourself no end if you will select an individual instead of a group to provide the fun for the sadists and masochists among your readers. Not that they don't like to see groups suffer. But it takes a very good writer to get away with any such mass production as that.

Next think of how best to make your whipping-boy suffer most hideously. By blood, objectively; or by mental anguish. The latter is safer.

Here again you run into the possibility of a difficulty. Mothers are by nature masochists; they love exhibitionistically to flog themselves and whine in the presence of their children. (See Philip Wylie's excellent psychological delineation of this in the chapter on "Momism" in "Generation of Vipers.")

Hence a mother, in writing a confession story, almost never physically or mentally flogs the leading character sufficiently.

If you are a mother you'll run into this difficulty right away, so you had best make the leading character female and identify yourself as being mentally or physically flogged as the action progresses.

If you are not a mother you are safest in identifying yourself with the flogger.

(I hope none of you will get the idea that I am expressing psychological opinions of my own contriving here every psychologist in the country would agree with me one hundred per cent. If you are interested and wish to delve a good book for you would be Seabury's "Unmasking our Minds.")

Always keep the flogger and the floggee meticulously in separate compartments. If you do a confession story where both the flogger and the flogged suffer you have one hard to sell. Confession-story editors are usually low-grade morons and have no objective knowledge of why they accept or reject stories; but like all human beings they have still the intuitions that were not quite beaten out of them by the American educational system, so they act, unerringly most of the time, on their hunches. Any hunch, anywhere, any time, is worth a thousand times more than considered knowledge, because a hunch comes from the subconscious, but considered knowledge comes from the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is at least nine times as efficient as the conscious mind, which I never tire of stating.

Understand it is not necessary or even advisable to have the flogger actually do the flogging. You can think of the flogger, and better had, indeed, more as the one who observes (i.e., enjoys) the flogging, for the benefit of the reader who identifies himself inevitably with the flagellant or the one flagellated (two-dollar words for flogging).

Having decided upon the flogger and the floggee, your next step is to consider the situation which causes the mental or physical pain. This should come through a sex situation, since masochism and sadism are inextricably bound up with the procreative functions. Because, as I pointed out before, those who run America will permit no honesty or cleanliness or direct thinking in anything, you must always speak of sex as "love." In all American prose "love" is the code word for sex, since "love" in itself means nothing. "Love" is like laughter: it covers up things when you are embarrassed.

So you work toward a situation where a pretty boy or a pretty girl (always young) is flogged because of something having to do with "love;" i.e., sex.

The end of the story is "thrown away." Here is where the amateur confession writer over and over again makes another big mistake.

In other forms of stories it makes all the difference in the world how it comes out in the end. In the confession story it never makes the slightest difference how it comes out in the end. The flogging, mental or physical, is your confession story, lock, stock, and barrel. After the flogging You SHOULD END THE STORY QUICKLY in a paragraph, if you can, because the reader has sucked his fun from the flogging. When the flogging is over the story is over for him and he has lost interest in it. If you go into a long-winded or trick ending the confession-story editor will either run the story with the ending cut, if your flogging was good, or reject the story if it cannot be published without the long ending.

The beginning of your story is more important. The best sadistic writers spend pages "softening up" the one to be flogged, because they know that the more softening-up process applied to the boy or girl to be flogged, the more the reader will enjoy the lashes when they come.

Let us say, then, that you start out with two characters: the flogger (real or hypothetical reader-watcher) and the floggee. It makes little difference what you do with the flogger, or reader-watcher character; but it makes a whale of a difference what you do with the one to receive the flogging. He or she must be carefully softened, so that the blows will hurt more. If a man, he must be an exceptionally sensitive man; if a girl, she must be an exceptionally delicate girl who will bruise easily, mentally or physically. What becomes of the bitch after she has been beaten up the confession-magazine reader won't care a hoot. But the more you soften her the more he'll enjoy her flogging.

Your confession story, then, is divided, in percentages, about as follows:

Ending about ten percent, or less, and of no real consequence, so far as your chances of sale are concerned.

Beginning about twenty per cent, and important mainly for its softening-up process as applied to the one physically or mentally to be flogged.

Middle about fifty percent (really the whole story), consisting in mental or physical applied cruelty.

Above all about twenty percent of more or less specious "verisimilitude;" that is, little detailed matters of an objective and subjective sort which make the story seem true. This effect can be had by careful categorical description of physical objects in connection with the story, taken from real life.

It's a filthy business, but so is almost all writing. Confessions at least pay off better than most such junk, and they have the great advantage that they carry no byline.