Ten Things You Must

( Originally Published 1944 )

Shown the true path, am ever misdirected;

ONE: FIND OUT, always, by actual count or close estimation, the minimum and maximum word lengths that a given magazine editor will use.

You know then what is the shortest thing you can send him, and the longest thing you can send him.

More important, however, than either of these is his favorite length.

By ascertaining his favorite length you cut down the odds against you enormously.

Hundreds of thousands of people who know nothing about gambling percentages dedicate their slender talents yearly to writing short-short stories because they appear easy.

The percentage against them is man-killing. For one thing, a short-short story is much harder to write than a short story of regular length. For another, most magazines use only one short-short per issue; which, according to any gambling odds, turns the figures against you.

The same is true of novelettes. A good novelette is a whole lot easier to write than a short-short story or an average-length short story. If the magazine contains ten pieces, i.e., one novelette, one short-short, and eight other stories of average length, then the odds are eighty per cent against you if you write either a novelette or a short-short story, but eighty per cent in your favor if you write an average length short story; somewhat more than eighty per cent in your favor, as a matter of fact, because an average-length short story is easier to write than a short-short and faster to complete than a novelette.

If you tackle a serial there are several things to bear in mind. The magazine you want to crack uses serials of a certain length. This you can determine by picking up back numbers containing a full serial and estimating the wordage. Don't do this haphazardly. The serial will appear in installments, say five or six. Now turn back to your own serial. If it doesn't break naturally into the five or six installments of the correct length customarily used in the magazine; and if the editor doesn't find it out until he has bought your yarn, then he is stuck with the chore of editing each installment up or down to the right length, or changing the makeup of the whole issue. You'll be amazed at the sales resistance you'll have to buck when you approach the editor with your next serial.

Most writers' magazines list the requirements of other magazines as to serial lengths. All writers' magazines list invaluable data as to markets, rates of payment, types of material needed, recent changes, etc. Among such magazines currently on the newsstands are: Author & Journalist; The Writer; Writer's Digest; Writers' Journal; Writers' Markets & Methods; Writer's Monthly. There may be others, but the above are at least representative, and if you are not familiar with them you should be unless you are one of the puling Aht-and-Beauteh devotees. If you don't find in one issue exactly the information you require, wait for the next. Complete data are not listed monthly, as a rule more often quarterly. And please, for the sake of the so-sweet Jesus and the paper shortage, if not for me, will you stop asking me for a list of syndicate markets. You'll find such lists in the writers' magazines, in greater detail and much more accurate than I can give you.

Unless there is a specific admonition (which there seldom is) it is not necessary that you give a magazine asking for twelve-hundred-word short-short stories exactly twelve hundred words. When a magazine wants five- or seven-thousand-word short stories it does not mean that they have to be exactly that length; it does mean, however, that when they ask for serial sections of twenty-five hundred words they do have to be twenty-five hundred words.

Most editors do their frustrated prose writing back-wards; by that I mean that they are demon prosateurs when it comes negatively and destructively to taking something out of a manuscript (my present editor and publisher are no exception) ; but they are stuck completely when it comes to raising the word-content of a script that is a bit short. (Most of them couldn't write a ten-word telegram that would make sense.) So, if you skimp your story it is more likely to be rejected than if you overstuff it a little. Give an editor a couple of hundred words extra in a short-short, so that he can feel he is your collaborator by cutting something out of it; give him around five hundred words extra on an average-length five-thousand-word short story; a couple thousand words extra on a novelette; but nothing extra on a serial. If you go a thousand words over on a five-thousand-word short story, however, the editor, like Buridan's ass, which greatly he resembles, will not be able to make up his so-called mind as to whether it is an average-length five-thousand-word short story in the making, or a short-weight seven-thousand-word short story.

William Saroyan very truly said: "The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form." The Saturday Evening Post for many years insisted that every idea somehow had to be crammed, jammed, and rammed into exactly seven thousand words. Probably no more stupid and ridiculous gesture ever was adopted by a magazine. I am talking about the old Saturday Evening Post, by the way; the new Post is a whole lot more sensible advertising-catalogue.

Everybody raises hell with me for digressing. So what! I will digress.

William Saroyan is a case in point of what can happen to an author if he tells editors, publishers, producers, and movie mice to go to hell. That boy, from the day he started, wrote everything all "wrong," according to the dicta of all American publishers and their ilk, with the result that by sticking to his guns (like hundreds before him) he arrived far more quickly than he would had he sat down with some idiot of an editor and shaved a novelette into an average-sized short story; or blown up an idea good only for a five-hundred-word anecdote into a twelve-hundred-word short-short. I know Saroyan slightly I met him in his developing stages. Every editor he encountered was snorting at him grandly: "You've got something there, my boy; but the whole trouble with you is that you write like Saroyan. Now if you would write like me, instead (that is, if you would write as I would write if I had time for such nonsense), you could be great."

He told them all to go to hell, starved for a couple of years, but arrived with such fireworks that now he could buy most of those sniveling little editors; while other writers (some of whom I know) who started even with him and had as much talent are, after all these years, still crawling along and getting nowhere because they let editors bitch up their work.

But if you want to crawl instead of soar, and most of you, I know from experience, do, you had better pay strict attention to the lengths that editors want their literary sausage chopped off at.

TWO: Find out something about the nature of a given book publisher's list before sending him a book.

To the eternal credit of book publishers there are a few left who would rather sell five thousand copies of a book that could properly be classified as belles lettres than five hundred thousand copies of a book by Harold Bell Wright. Almost all publishers are "typed" as to what they will go for. Doubleday Doran, for instance, will go for anything, just so it is not belles lettres. A huge literary truss factory (believe me, I have no grudge against them; they are currently publishing two of my books), they want only what will sell no matter how badly it stinks.

They are at least honest about it, for which they deserve credit.

Alfred A. Knopf, on the other hand, won't touch a book unless it has some claim to. excellence, no matter how tricky it looks from a sales angle.

Scribner's goes in for stuff in the older traditions of prose, when the author went to visit his publisher in a full-dress suit at ten o'clock in the morning, and a stenographer held a spittoon under his chin while he conversed with the editor.

Another old publishing house jazzed itself up with an editor who has his letters to authors published in writers' magazines as examples of what kind of letters editors ought to write to authors. If you come across any of them do read them; they are perfect examples of what kind of letters editors ought not to write to authors.

Of one thing you may be certain: when you finish a book, no matter what kind of book it may be, there will be a type of publisher most likely to consider it. If you have any right to be a novelist at all you will know all good contemporary novels and publishers inside out; and you will understand the various bents of all book-publishing concerns. That is, you will if you are smart; and if you are not smart you ought to defenestrate yourself with all speed.

One way to get a quick understanding of publishers' requirements, if you have not kept up with the current output of prose sausage in novel lengths, is to go to a large book store and ask them to let you have some of their old book publisher's catalogues. If you know anything at all about American prose which you should before you try to become a novelist you will be able to apprehend the nature of each publisher's particular yen from a scrutiny of these catalogues.

A lot of smart novelists subscribe to the Publishers' Weekly. It is a trade magazine for book stores and other such lairs of Pegasus; but reading it sedulously is a great help to the aspiring novelist. It is somewhat depressing, to be sure; but hardly more so than the daily edition of any newspaper. If you are too lazy to do any of these ambitious things then you will need an agent. An agent has to know about such recondite matters.

THREE: Your manuscript should be mailed flat, unless it is so short that to do so would be ridiculous. It is always cheaper to send a manuscript by express if it is of any length; sending it thus you get a receipt, and can also insure it handily. Though as a matter of fact if you ever lose a manuscript you have insured all hell won't get you any money on your insurance from the Union Railway Express, because they have the smartest lawyers in the world and can easily prove to any court that even if your manuscript had reached its destination it wouldn't have been bought. But if you insure a manuscript for above the minimum insurance required for it the express company will when such excess insurance is provided handle it through the "money room" in a much more careful and safe manner than otherwise.

FOUR: When sending off a novel you have to instruct the publisher what to do with it if he wishes to reject it. No matter how long he has been in business he will not have the faintest idea what to do with a rejected manuscript unless you tell him. If it is a novel tell him specifically to return it express collect. His eyes will brighten up after fifty years in business —and he will say: "My word, that's right! There is an express company. There must be, because this manuscript came by express. And it must be possible so to return it collect, because the author says himself that express companies will take return manuscripts collect." In the case of a really fine old publisher tell him the name of the express company.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to enclosing return postage with mailed manuscripts. One says to put the minimum three-cent return stamp on the return envelope no matter how heavy the manuscript is, whereupon the mail man will often forget to charge for the postage due, especially if you are (a) a young, pretty, and complaisant lady who invites him in once in a while; or (b) a male liberal with cigars, cigarettes, and what not.

The other school puts the whole sum that will be due on the return envelope, thus wasting a lot of stamps every time an envelope comes back with a check in it.

A lot of these moot mechanical matters are rehearsed monthly in the Authors' League Bulletin, which is the most valuable of all the writers' magazines; but you cannot get it (it is confidential to members only) unless you join the Authors' League, which you ought to do. One thing the Authors' League is trying now to do is to force the Post Office to accept a manuscript as though it were printed matter, which it is. As I write this manuscript I do exactly what the printer will do when he sets it up in type; I push down keys on my typewriter, just as he pushes down keys on his linotype. A typewriter and a linotype are both printing devices; but the hoary flubdubs in the Post Office say that when I type it is my own handwriting and that any handwriting ex-pert could identify it as my handwriting, and that therefore the manuscript must go first-class. As against this absurdity the Authors' League is throwing itself full force; since it won out in many other things it will probably win out in this, at long last though if the matter ever does come to a showdown almost any sort of profound inanity may be promulgated. The notorious pronunciamento against Esquire is a case in point.

The address of the Authors' League is 6 East 39 St., New York, N. Y., in case you are interested, which I hope you are.

FIVE: Retype the manuscript when it becomes thoroughly obvious that it has been submitted a number of times. Editors hate to have manuscripts permanently fastened together. Therefore it is best to use clips; the trouble with clips, however, is that they mark the paper in a different place every time they are put on. In order to avoid this you can include a couple of extra blank sheets, fore and aft. Most editors will lose them; but some won't, and you can cut down your retyping somewhat in that way.

Editors are curiously captious about little things. They have an almost unerring sense for discerning the difference between the first submission of a manuscript and a not-first submission. They always view dubiously one that has made the rounds. Like clairvoyants the editorial fraternity are a sort of cult, recognizing each other's judgments as profound; they have to, since nobody else recognizes them as being any part of profound. Hence, if an editor suspects that a manuscript previously has been rejected by any other editor then functioning it will receive short shrift at his hands.

SIX: One of the things that particularly annoys an editor (one of the little things of which there are so many) is failure to leave ample margins. They love large-margin manuscripts because this enables them to do much more bitching up than they can do on a narrow-margin manuscript. You'd think if you left narrower margins you could keep their narrow minds to some extent away from the fixing up process but not so! No editor will have anything to do with any prose he can't bitch up. In many cases he will sulkily return a narrow-margin script, sometimes without even reading it, on the theory that your narrow margins are a hint that he keep his God-damned hands the hell off your script. Like all people with inferiority complexes editors are terrifically sensitive about picayune things.

SEVEN: Always keep a carbon copy. These days, I'm told, a lot of authors avoid the nuisance of carbon copies by photographing their scripts in miniature (like V-Mail letters), page by page. I must look into this. Carbon copies irk the hell out of me. No matter how expensive the photography might be it would be a great relief forever to forget carbons; besides, manuscript so photographed could be stored in very little space.

EIGHT: A few people (to my great envy) possess the ability to write beautifully in their own hand-writing. No matter how lovely your handwriting may be editors will resent it. You have to submit typed script. As to the type face you use it doesn't make much difference. Most editors prefer pica type; but I have used elite type for years in the hope that it would irritate editors, though I have never succeeded in irritating a single editor with it. Elite type, of course, makes a much prettier page.

There are various typewriters with trick type faces. To use them is a mistake. Editors, for some reason I could never fathom, resent them and childishly scowl at manuscript written with them. They consider it (like pink paper) an undue attempt to attract their attention. They like to think and have everybody else think that they could go to a pile of five hundred unread manuscripts, put out a hand and unerringly extract the one masterpiece therein.

Please do not get the idea from my verjuiced cracks that there is not an intelligent editor in the United States. I know something about editors, having dickered with practically every one in the country since shortly after the Civil War and have sold most of them something at one time or another. It simply isn't true that there isn't an intelligent editor in the United States. There is one, to my certain knowledge: Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, who has done more to elevate American magazines than any other ten editors who ever lived, and has every other editor in the country copying him.

A unique experiment was tried with Arnold Gingrich by his publisher, a revolutionary man full of new ideas. He threw overboard the dictum that a publisher had to hire as an editor a man who was a proven idiot and hired, instead, a genius the first time it was ever done in this country so far as I know. As a result Arnold Gingrich, the only full-time genius functioning as an editor in these United States, started a magazine at the worst low of the depression and, while other magazines were toppling all around him, built it up during the depression period. There is not a magazine in America today which does not show some change wrought in it by the excellent. standards of Esquire.

Genius, however, is not a dime a dozen. Arnold Gingrich gets terrific dough and is worth every cent of it. Most editors get pitiful salaries. Gingrich is a shining example of what can happen if the ironclad rule that an editor be an idiot is abandoned. He doesn't hate his authors. He has no inferiority complex as against writers, having proved his writing ability beyond question. If all magazines would abandon the time-worn convention that an editor must be an idiot we would see a flowering of prose in this country such as has not ever been seen' even in the early days of fine writing. However, practically every magazine publisher in America still, in reactionary, conservative fashion, insists that an editor be an idiot; and the moment one shows the faintest tincture of intelligence he is fired as a dangerous radical who might interfere with the advertising department by presuming to consider himself the equal of the advertising manager.

NINE: Never try a kick-back in any form by mail.

A "kick-back" accrues when an author arranges with an editor privately to return a part of the check delivered to him by the editor in payment for a manuscript. Not all editors are above indulging in this practice, which may be one reason why sometimes you see in magazines some strangely lousy stuff without even the benediction of a Big Name. If you can consummate this kick-back arrangement you can go ahead, but fast, in American prose. (It has been done with the editors of book houses, also.)

Usually it works like this: You sell the editor a few stories. Then you go to New York and meet him personally. (Always when you meet an editor let him do all the talking; he'll never forgive you if you out-dazzle him, especially in the presence of others.) After you've met him keep talking about anything under the sun if and when you can find an opening except contributing to his magazine. Just tell him you love him for himself alone. Get the bastard stinking drunk if you can. If you can lug along from your home town a swell lay for him your chances will be promoted no end. If you are yourself a good lay your chances are splendid. Keep him talking until he is talked out, then gently hint to him that it doesn't cost much to live where you come from. He will then go instantly and with delight into the favorite topic of all editors: that it costs like hell to live in New York and that he would rather be in your position, living in a smaller, better town, writing for a living. When he assures you that he will some day become a writer don't laugh in his face.

After he has finished with that subject gently ease him into this one: Tell him that with his help you feel that you are going through the formative years of your writing; you know that in years to come you'll owe him millions of dollars for the instruction he is giving you. (By the time you have really learned to write he will be back in the insurance business or what not.) Watch him for reactions; if at this point he perks up tell him that you really feel you should pay him something for buttering-up your work. If he's one of the few who won't go for a kick-back you'll see him stiffen here yet you haven't gone so far that you can't quickly add: "I mean not in money but in praise. Would you mind if I wrote an article about you for the Writer's Wrack?" This will make the buttered oaf beam again.

If he doesn't bridle, if he looks complacent, it's in the bag. Never say you want to kick back. Tell him you think it is only fair that, since he has spent a lot of time over and above the call of duty on your work, you should give him something for his services. You have been paying critical charlatans anyhow, and you might as well give it to him, the guy who is really teaching you to write.

Now you are on the most dangerous ground of all, and on your own from there on in. It should eventuate in this: When you leave him, unless you have already settled the 'matter as between you, casually ask him for his home-address. If he gives you his home-address, or the address of his mistress where he picks up mail he doesn't want his wife to open before he gets to it, you're in. Always send your kick-back in currency; don't register the letter; don't send it even by special delivery; don't make it possible for any record of it to be kept anywhere. If you send him this money on the theory that he is teaching you to write there is absolutely nothing illegal about it. The amount you send him should vary as to how much he increases his take of your stuff when it starts.

Plenty of struggling authors, in order to get going, have paid kick-backs to editors at one time or another. Most of them kicked back around fifty per cent of the additional stuff they planted this way, or the raise in word-rate they got this way. I've known authors to kick back the whole check in order to get started; and I know Big-Name free-lances who for years have paid editors a ten-percent kick-back.

As a rule slick-paper editors will not do this; although one of them ten years ago got caught at it when he had made himself rich through it. All they did was can him from the magazine; but so help me he is back editing another slick-paper magazine right now. Usually it is the editors of smaller magazines who do this. They get salaries that are positively not even a living wage. There are pulp editors in New York right now getting fifty bucks a week salary and living in apartments renting for around three hundred a month. They always explain it by saying that the wife has an income; although in not a few cases, if the wife has an income if they have a wife she must make it in forthright but not obvious ways.

Over and over again beginning writers try to establish the kick-back awkwardly; because they know of arrived authors who do kick back. There is no way on earth that it can be done by mail, and any attempt to do it by mail, however subtly, will get you barred from the magazine. If you get good at it you can make yourself ten grand a year without ever writing a line of anything, simply by establishing a lot of kick-backs all over New York, under various pen-names, with varying editors, and then hiring some-body for around fifty a week to write your stuff. It will be stuff you couldn't sell except on a kick-back basis; but you can easily sell it and steadily, that way year after year. Hacks who do that sort of writing on a salary simply go out and get old copies of magazines and rewrite the stories in them, changing them sufficiently to make it impossible to call them plagiarized stories.

Within a half-mile of me lives a guy who has never written or had published anything in his life under his own name. Writers who live in Hollywood and kick back pay him year in and year out for kick-back stuff on a piece-work basis. He averages around a hundred a week.

Please don't be shocked; I do not for one moment infer that writing is any more crooked than anything else in this country. Every sharpshooter in the country has a racket and lives largely on some sort of graft. What I have just described is the writing graft and the angle-boys pendent thereto. You'll be smarter if you don't do it but if you want to do it well, that's your racket. You have a right to expect from me for the dough you paid for this book complete honesty as to the writing racket. I doubt if anyone in the country knows it better than I do. I make that claim not by way of intimating that I am a very wise guy (which I am not) but merely to affirm that I would be a stupid cluck indeed if I had spent twenty-seven years in one business, in all branches of that business, without getting hep to most of the angles.