Lure, Luster, And Lucre

( Originally Published 1944 )

Naked I am, apparelled like a king;

FIFTY years ago anyone who wrote a book under the title "How to Write for Money" would have been hanged.

For long writing was considered a sacred sort of thing to be done only for glory. This, no doubt, was a delusion fostered by publishers and editors. Publishers and editors are the natural enemies of writers. Today, however, there are many writers so rich they are treated as equals even by rich slobs who never did anything in their lives but inherit money. I, myself, once even received a letter from a thirty-second cousin of a Rockefeller. The letter was worded every bit as though it had been sent to an equal. In replying I observed a fitting obsequiousness, rhetorically touched my forelock and syntactically bowed from the waist. I never heard from the collateral Rockefeller again though, so I must not have been polite enough. If I had heard from her again I would have touched her, not emotionally, but practically, for dough.

Yet, to the other side notwithstanding, there is something to be said for writing for glory, or God, or to express your own ego; or whatever the hell it is that you do when you do not really write for money.

When you set your mind deliberately to writing for money you recognize certain formulas of writing. This, of course, is considered a great sin by the aesthetes. In such a frame of mind you write deliberately toward the observed requirements of the established market. Curiously enough this does not too often work out as one hopes it would, as I implied earlier. That is to say, if you decide to become a literary prostitute you are in somewhat the same position as a literal prostitute. Some prostitutes run into beaucoup jack and buy apartment buildings; others get run in by the cops. The difference lies in the capacity of the individual. Following formulas slavishly will not guarantee you the dough. It will, however, lead you nearer to it than writing for glory will. It, to some extent, cuts down the chances of total loss; although it raises the chances of total triumph not too high. There are hundreds of writers in this country writing for money who make a living at it, but no more.

On the other hand writing "honestly" (as it is put —not by me) may lead to the folding cash even more flamboyantly and quickly than deliberately writing for money. Many of the richest authors today started out by writing what they damned well wanted to write, in their own way, with no eye whatsoever to market formulas or stereotyped methods of execution. They, in fact, often set the style for the money-writing that comes afterward. That is, when their novels or plays turn out to be great successes producers and publishers will direct their "trained seals," or Money Writers, to emulate them.

The difference lies in the fact that almost anyone who sets his mind to it, as he would toward any other career, can become some kind of money-writer; while, on the other hand, he cannot decide to become a "worthy" writer, and do so, unless he has unusual talent at the outset.

I do not believe, for instance, that John Steinbeck ever thought of money when he started to write. Yet now he is so rich he could even afford to become a Communist if he wanted to. (Which, by the way, he is not.)

There are, today, principally two schools of thought in writing, involving a choice which you have to make at the very outset of your writing career.

Writing, during the past three or four decades, has become Big Business.

Editors and publishers have streamlined it, as a business. Authors, on the other hand, have not; though they have made a valiant start toward doing .so through the Authors' League of America.

In the old days of writing editors and publishers were Big Shots, flicking the author crumbs from their sumptuous tables.

Baudelaire once sadly remarked, in this connection: "If a poet asked the State for the right to have a few bourgeois in his stable, there would be considerable surprise while, if a bourgeois asked for a roast poet, it would seem quite natural."

For a century or so before the founding of authors' organizations writers lived in garrets and starved while publishers got rich. What saved the authors at last was the dishonesty of the publishers among themselves. They started stealing authors from each other, and, of course, like movie producers stealing stars from each other, they had to tempt the authors away with more money.

'We are all more or less familiar with this condition in our own Hollywood. Americans currently make the worst motion pictures in the world; but since motion pictures are the ultimate lair of escapism the public restlessly wishes to see any motion picture, how-ever bad; so the business keeps moving along despite anything it can do to itself. One of the most successful of the Hollywood producers, explaining this to a lesser producer-friend of mine, put it this way:

"If I hire a great director like Du Pont, give him a great writer like Thomas Mann, and a great actor like Orson Welles, what happens? They turn out a picture that is not standard. This picture is so different from and so superior to the average picture that the public is then dissatisfied with the average picture. Since there are only a few such directors, writers, and actors, not enough to go around this lot, let alone the other Hollywood lots, I cannot make my other pictures come up to that standard. Therefore it is safest to maintain a level of good salable mediocrity."

The producer who said this is, of course, absolutely right. That is, he is right according to our American standards which count nothing but dollars as whole-some and throw all else into the national dust-bin. You, however, as a young writer, cannot change the national mores. Or, to put it more explicitly, the national morons.

By following this policy, accustoming the American public to mediocre pictures, the motion-picture fraternity have managed to invest complete control in one small clique; which, as time goes by, can drive payments to actors and writers downward. When anyone can write mediocre material it matters not who does it. When it no longer matters who does it, then payments to actors and writers can push, them back into their garrets again unless their organizations in the meantime fight Hollywood, the radio, the stage, and American publishers like mad.

The American novel has been ruined by the same sort of tactics. Writers are paid as low as one hundred and fifty dollars to write what is called a circulating-library novel. Writers, in order to write such novels, must necessarily write a lot of them to make a living. They must write them at high speed, without thought. Presently the country's circulating libraries are glutted with such trash. The American public, eventually, will be cured of the habit of reading novels.

Currently, however, a great many American novelists, because they insist upon being individualists and battlers, are forcing publishers to pay high prices for good novels. The publishers, in turn, will get together and try to force these good writers out of publication so that the whole product can be made mediocre and dangerous comparisons will not arise to embarrass the publishers of hack writers. Eventually, if permitted to occur, this will lead to the control of American publishing by one small clique, to the great detriment of publishing and to the driving out of business of worthy writers.

This has already happened in radio, or do you ever listen to the deluge of bilge that is your daily radio fare? It is bilge all of a standard quality, however, so we put up with it, thinking nothing better can be obtained, until an Orson Welles comes along, insists upon being an individualist, and scares the pants off the Biggies of Bilge. Whereupon the Biggies of Bilge do all they can to force him out of radio so that he can't continue to cast such a reflection over the rest of the product as to make it stink louder than naturally it does.

So standard is this production of radio crap that you will hear the following scene, repeated over and over again, from every station in the United States-the scene where the girl says something harsh; then going into febrile dramaturgy screams that she is glad she said it:

"Glad!-Glad!—I'm Glad!
I'm Glad! I tell you, that I said it.
I'm Glad!—Do you hear?"

Tune in on any station, listen for a half-hour, and you'll hear it. Always in the exact wording I have set forth above. There are at least fifty thousand scenes, similarly worded, that are standard in radio and used daily without fail, with hell on Sunday.

Fine writers like Philip Wylie are constrained to write unadulterated junk in order to be published. Wylie obediently wrote such junk about affaires, plane wrecks, and villains tripped until, fed up, he said: "The temptation to compose a book of my thoughts, a book without an affaire, a plane wreck, or a villain tripped, becomes irresistible." So Philip Wylie published such a book in, "Generation of Vipers" (Farrar & Rinehart), a book every young writer should read before he sets a word on paper.

Nearly everyone at one time or another tries to write; but practically no one is aware of what writing, in a country which respects nothing but money, connotes. At the outset of your writing you have to make up your mind whether to be a writer, really, or a publisher's pimp. If you want to make starvation wages as a writer, and work harder at writing than you worked at the job from which you hope to escape into writing, then you can become some publisher's or editor's pimp, "slanting" your work to suit some editor and his magazine or some publisher and his books. The uncomfortable thing about it is that you will know yourself for a louse, just as all pimps do, and this in the end will make you hate yourself.

It doesn't much matter, psychologically, how you get along with other people, but if you cannot get along with yourself your case will be depressing-leading to nervous twitches and physical tizzies.

When I started to write I had the devil's own facility for putting words end to end on paper. I sold the first story I wrote; and for a period of years I, sold practically every word I could process through my typewriter. It then occurred to me that I had twin choices before me. I could quit posturing in public for money and write what I felt like writing; or I could go on being an editor's pimp and get rich. For a long time I wavered. I like money. For me writing is shamefully easy both the writing and the selling. What finally settled the matter was the fact that I have a tough beard. If you have a tough beard, you can't very well be a literary pimp. Literary pimping and .tough beards simply will not go together: with a tough beard you have to look yourself squarely in the face in a mirror for a long time every day. So, solely because of my beard, I had to stop public gesticulation, to a degree, and write what gave me some feeling of decency. Of course I made less money; but, if you stick to your guns, in the long run you come through.

THE FIRST PRINCIPAL OF HONEST WRITING IS THAT YOU EMPLOY IT AS AN AVOCATION.

If you are facile with words you can go into the commercial writing business, become a pimp on the staff of some magazine as a regular contributor, or a repeating novelist for some publishing house, and live as do high-class successful pimps the whole world over. But you can't do that and write honestly too.

All publishers will do everything in their power to force a writer to write unlike the way in which he wishes to write, and to write in the way the editor and publisher wish him to write. Their reasons for doing this are sound, commercially, and one cannot in the least blame them, because the whole of publishing is all wrong. The author should be his own publisher, and one day will be. But that day is far off, and only a few authors have the bigness of soul and the guts to fight through the convention that books are like hand-me-down clothes and should be merchandised in the same way.

Unfortunately the first impulse of the beginning writer, after he has sold something, is to quit his job.

More agony has resulted from this than from any other one mistake fledgling writers make. Even the writer who intends to become a commercial pimp, purveying standardized bullcon, has to wait until he has be-come an efficient pimp. That is, he has to wait until he can write stories exactly like the stories he sees published, but with some little element (perhaps fifty words or so) of difference to keep the product out of the realm of plagiarism. Plagiarism, as now construed by the American courts in recent cases, means a word-for-word copy of about seventy-five per cent of the material plagiarized.

In Hollywood there is a unique defense against plagiarism about which few people know. There are story experts in Hollywood who, when their studio is threatened with a plagiarism suit, can dig up, back to the beginning of American publishing, story after story OF THE SAME SORT WITH THE SAME PLOT published prior to the story allegedly plagiarized. This nearly always stops plagiarism suits.

When functioning as a commercial writing pimp you could not possibly write any sort of plot that has not already been published from a hundred to a thousand times.

Very often Old Bags write me letters that purport to be on the subject of writing (in which case I al-ways help them if I can) and then, when they find out that I am divorced and have a little dough, try to go on writing me in another vein, looking to nailing me as a meal ticket for life by hanging out the unappetizing lure of their carious old carcasses. One of these not long ago started telling me how nice it would be for my daughter to have a second mother the usual crap I get a hundred times a year from such harpies and I cut her throat in a letter. She bled considerably. She bled over into a writer's magazine, wherein, in denouncing me, she took the only course she knew would really hurt me. She accused a poor crippled boy a friend of mine of being a plagiarist. She could have accused me of being a necrophile and it wouldn't have turned a hair of my head. She knew I was impregnable on most scores, so she turned on this friend of mine (knowing at the time that he was my friend).

The poor chap had committed no plagiarism, but he lives out of the country, and hence could not refute by suing her: a fact which she also knew at the time she wrote the article.

I was so enraged that I had some other friends of mine get me her syndicate output. This I turned over, with a fee, to one of the Hollywood experts on such things, to be checked. He is working on it still, and so far he has found from one to twenty versions of every story she ever wrote during her short writing life. Among these similar versions are ones with the identical plots she used; some of them so similar that when I finally forward the whole collection to her various editors she will be out of the commercial pimping business permanently. She actually did borrow in plagiaristic form the plot of every story she ever wrote, quite calmly and directly and unashamedly. Yet if I had not bestirred myself she could have gone on doing it for years; many writers do, without ever getting caught, because the whole product of American subsidized prose is so bad that few would notice plagiarism unless for some especial reason someone, as in the case of which I am telling you, took the trouble, and the not inconsiderable expense, to unearth the evidence.

The great trouble comes, in commercial writing, when the neophyte absolutely refuses to wait until he is "ripe." Waiting, and writing, a whole year before you send in your first story may put your commercial writing career forward ten years.

Richard English told me that he studied Collier's for two years and tried for two years to approximate its style before he sent in his first story to them; which story was accepted by telegraph, with a request for more. From that time on he sold Collier's every story he wrote for them, because he had the brains and the patience to wait until he was "ready." If he had sent the first story he ever wrote to Collier's, and the second, third, tenth, and twentieth, during those two years, and had them all rejected, the Collier's editors, groaning at sight of the name "Richard English," would have been so thoroughly conditioned to rejecting manuscripts with his name on them that only by the merest chance could he ever have clicked.

To be even a very bad writer you have to be a hell of a lot smarter than those around you. The almost invariable rule in all departments of writing is that those who made good at something else before they tackled writing also make good at writing; while those who failed at everything else fail at writing, too.

If you wish to be a real writer, then don't read the work of anyone else for style or approximation.

Do, definitely, try to write, however, the sort of thing you like to read. Write only when you feel like writing, and only, then, what you want to write. Don't take the word of God or man that it is good writing or bad writing. Send it out; and when it comes back (after you've had a period away from it) write it again, and keep rewriting it, until you are sure you have given it everything you can. Keep sending it out for years, if necessary, while you write more in the same way. Get it published at your own expense, if you have to and can afford it.

Do anything with it, in short, except let anyone tell you that it should be less like you want it and more like they want it.

As I said, you can only do this as an avocation. It often pays off in the end far more handsomely than does commercial pimping.

Not one person in a hundred thousand can write well. If you cannot make a writer out of yourself, you should simply go on writing for the hell of it, taking what comes philosophically.

Almost anyone, however, given time and determination, can do it. I have never seen a story so bad that it couldn't get published eventually somewhere. The average story in the average American magazine is so very bad today that if you start imitating the very worst of them and work up from there your chances of eventual success are pretty good, providing you give yourself the same amount of time to learn this profesion that you would naturally expect to give yourself to learn the other professions medicine, law, ministry.

Some people have an amazing natural faculty for writing. They do it salably at once. If you are lucky in that respect you'll also have along with it the brains to know when you have approximated a given magazine's style. If you are not lucky like that you will have confusion and uncertainty in your mind, and you will traipse around to critics and pay them to tell you what's what.

In all the years I have been a writer myself-and my books on writing are about one-tenth of one per cent of the other material I have sold I think I have never seen any sort of writer, either a commercial trained seal or a real writer, who had any doubts about himself at any time. That is, a man who has the writing knack does not for a moment himself ever doubt it. He, knows he's got it. He hasn't the slightest interest in anyone's opinion about his being able, or not able, to write. He looks at writing, says to himself: "This I can do." And does it.

When an established writer is approached by a beginning writer who asks him: "Read this and tell me if I am a writer," he knows at once that the supplicant is not a writer. I have never known it to fail. It. holds true of every department of human endeavor: it always has, it always will.

Would you for Crisakes walk in on a banker and say to him: "Look at me and tell me if I am a banker?"

When I wrote my first short story I knew it was salable. I sent it in, and expected a check. The check came. If, instead, I had taken the story to some other writer and asked him if I were a writer, the very fact that I had the impulse to do such a thing would in itself have been the answer I would have been no writer.

Not that I am any great shakes as a writer anyway, Heaven knows, but I have made a living out of it since that first short story, and I have made a living out of it by working about one hour a day, on the average, during the past twenty-seven years; and not seldom getting what I wished to say in print at that. All my writing books are all wrong, according to the standard technique on how to write a book on writing, but I always find somebody to publish them because I insist that they be published as they are or not at all, and they have always outsold all other writing books because they are at least honest. Publishers whine and snarl at me about them, telling me they're all wrong, and that they should be written more like other books on writing. They insist that I must not use any form of Free Speech in them, and all that; but when they publish them they come back for more because they outsell all other writing books writ-ten as publishers wished them written.

Incidentally, one of my worst habits in writing books on writing is a hopeless discursiveness. In the which momentarily we shall indulge, because I feel like it, and the hell with you.

The publisher I have now is the most liberal I have ever had, but there are plenty of things he would bitterly object to my saying. Yet ask him if he "believes" in Free Speech and, like all Americans, he would answer "Yes." Ask him to define it and he would grin at me, ruffle his hair and say: "Now, Jack!" And I would giggle nervously, touch him for some more dough, and that would be that.

In short, then, the twin choices I mentioned when I began this are simply the choice between literary pimphood and literary fun. Don't misunderstand me. Often the man who writes for the hell of it (and not for the dough) comes out on top even so far as the dough is concerned. But you do definitely have to realize precisely what it is that you are doing.

Perversely enough, when you have crashed through willy nilly, publishers will embrace you; but until then you had better never think of your writing as a source of income. Hold, but tenaciously, to your livelihood, however demeaning and boring it may be, until you know indubitably that you can dispense with it utterly and finally.

Lots of beginning writers attempt to straddle the fence: to be both honest and money-minded. The two things cannot be brought together. I have seen this double intent crack up endless writers. They say to themselves: "I will write pure corn for popular magazines, but into this corn I will put something of me!"

Commercial editors and publishers will always catch you at that immediately. They will not tolerate one grain of honesty anywhere in commercial prose. The only thing any magazine editor is interested in is the take from the advertising department. It is advertising, not the editorial content, that keeps his magazine alive. And since his advertisers are out to mulct the public to sell them gadgets anything approaching realism infuriates these advertisers. If the advertisers are infuriated they withdraw; if they with-draw, the magazine fails. Book publishers will give you much more latitude, but still not anything approaching utter auctorial carte blanche.

Perhaps you should boil it all down in your mind to this: Since we have no law in the United States except the law of dollars, the rule of dollars, and the worship of dollars, have you got enough dollars to be able to do your writing as an avocation? If you have, swell. But if you are poor and need your spare time to make extra money or to study your trade, then you have no right to begin writing even as an avocation. If you have a family to support and your food and lodging depend upon your job, then you simply can't write, and oughtn't to try, until you have enough money to make the experiment.

Those of you who have brains enough to become any kind of writer at all will at once see through everything I have said in this chapter. If you are a writer, you'll write; and not even I can stop you, no matter what I have here said. You have no decision, really, to make. "Fate" will take care of the whole thing.