Benzedrine Versus The Short Story And The Approach To Both

( Originally Published 1944 )

I stand light-hearted, overborne with care

A GREAT many people are being weaned from the American Commercial Short Story by a drug called Benzedrine which has the same effect, costs about the same, and. can be had in many states with-out prescription. The fact of the matter is that Benzedrine is much preferable as a drug, since it affects only the body. The American short story has left such an effect upon the American mass mind that there are those who say it is today a greater menace than G.P.I. (General Paralysis of the Insane).

Those of you who decide to take up Benzedrine instead of the American Commercial Short Story will find it in a convenient little "sniffer" container. It is marked "Brand of Amphetamine." The sniffer is packed with amphetamine, 325 mg.; oil of lavender, 97 mg.; menthol 32 mg. It shrinks, fortunately, only the nasal mucosa. It is manufactured by Smith, Kline & French, at Philadelphia, and, like the Saturday Evening Post, may be obtained at most any drugstore. (If you order it from Smith, Kline & French direct, do not send stamps.)

I do not know what Amphetamine may be, but I would back it across the board as compared to the amorphous junk that goes into American Commercial Short Stories. Amphetamine sounds to me not unlike the "Oomph" in American short stories but much more admirable, I am sure. Amphetamine gives me a lift; while the average American Commercial Short Story makes me feel as though I had fallen through an open manhole. You will also find that the American Commercial Short Story contains a great deal of lavender, but in a far less cleanly form.

The American Commercial Short Story, which we shall hereafter call ACST, along with the jolly con-temporary habit of dropping all but the first letters of words, has only one purpose: it is supposed to convince all wives that, although their own husbands are stupid dopes, other husbands are noble fellows; and vice versa. It is intended to convince little car hops who, as a matter of fact, service their best-tipping customers in a manner more piquant than conventional, that all other working girls remain virgins until they are married. It is, in short, contrived to convince everyone in the United States that everyone but himself is virtuous, noble, unselfish, praiseworthy, and altogether an inhuman monster with gaudy Christmas tree ornaments of a metaphysical sort all over him. In the entire history of the world's literature nothing more ridiculous has ever been seen in print than ACST and I am sure (with a sigh of relief) that never again will such stuff appear in print, after Benzedrine has made an end of it. Yet, in the interim, while more and more thousands desert the ACST in favor of Benzedrine, there is a lot of money yet in those mines.

There are various types of ACST. The most highly paid is the Slick Paper Story. This is so called because it appears for the most part in magazines printed upon glazed paper. (Not always, however.) The main difference between this type of story and other types is that it brings higher prices because of a higher "buffing." This buffing consists for the most part in style. Out of the ruck of smaller magazines, yearly, there emerge certain writers who, after a period of apprenticeship in the pulp magazines, develop this polished style. They so develop because to begin with they were better writers (for commercial purposes) than those who failed to make the grade. They were better possibly because they were born with trickier minds; or, perhaps, only because they had sense enough not to take courses in how to write short stories.

The pulp magazines are so called because they are printed on rough paper. In some instances far better stories, considered as such, and not as exercises in smart writing, appear in the pulp magazines than in the slick magazines. Both pulp magazines and slick-paper magazines contain practically identical stories. The difference is in style, or in slanting.

For decades teachers of the short story have frightened youngsters about "plot," in connection with them. Plot is not at all the important thing. An ACST must contain conflict. If it does contain conflict, plot will also be present as a natural by-product. Conflict must usually be as between human beings or if not as between human beings, then as between one human being and some other element, such as his mother-in-law or an earthquake. For one human character there must be sympathy and "involvement." You have probably never seen the word "involvement" used this way; it is a hell of a way to use it, but since I am in no position to coin anything else tonight, why not coin a word?

By involvement I mean the reader must carry on an affaire of some sort with one of the characters so that he may be vitally concerned about him or her. In most cases the reader should project his own personality into the personality of the sympathetic character and live with him. (Esquire- Magazine might have Varga illustrate this handily and I hereby bequeath the idea to Arnold Gingrich for what it is worth not less than fifty bucks, I hope.)

When the short story writer has involved the reader with a character in the story, through sympathetic wanglings of a devious sort, he must then involve the character in conflict, which means that he will have involved the reader in conflict. And, since the author is not around so that the reader can beat the hell out of him for such a nasty trick, the reader must finish the story to see how he (the reader) comes out of the complication, or conflict, in the end.

I have written mountains of dizzy guff about how to write, and I have read mountains of dizzy guff about how to write but as the years go on, and my beard has reached my knees, the more ashamed I am of some of my earlier instructions to authors, some of my earlier beliefs about writing; and some of the millions of words of academic piffle I have read about.

Actually, this is all there is to the ACST. Involvement of the reader with a character, involvement of the character in conflict. Do that only that and you can forget all the other rules and never go wrong; in fact you have far less chance of going wrong if you know only this one rule. Forget plot altogether. It cannot help but flow out of conflict. A conflict always has a start. That is the beginning of your story. Conflict always either stops at once or gets worse. If it stops at once you might as well throw your short story away. If it gets worse your story gets more hectic. Conflict always comes to an end if it is between human beings it would have to come to an end somewhere because human beings, fortunately, come to an end. It is hardly wise, however, to let your "involvement" (sympathetic) character come to an end; because if you do, then the reader with whom you have involved the character may start out next morning with a "tic" from subconscious ditherings about his own death.

Of course the simplest and I do mean simplest, in all connotations of the word short story is the old one about the boy and the girl. Since you wish to keep both of these characters in nice shape through-out, and can't have the more devastating of the conflict come from either one of them usually, it is well to include a villain.

The ACST villain is the strangest creature the world has ever seen; in fact the world has probably not ever seen any of him at all.

If you happen to have had an education even one of those they give you along with a State university sheepskin, you will, today, know something about the psychology of the human mind.

How the ACST could have continued with its villains after the intensive knowledge of human psychology that has been strewn around is a mystery to me.

Obviously a man who wishes to grab the heroine by the neck and chew off her ear is not a villain at all. He is a sick man. One should feel sorry for him in-stead of hating him, just as if he had a carbuncle on the back of his neck. But still the ACST features all villains as men and women of heavy moral turpitude instead of clearly sick people and it is that way you will have to view them until the science of psychology struggles out from under the Church and into cleanly human everyday practice.

Actually in the ACST the hero and heroine usually have a far more psychopathic stench than the villain. At least you can do something about the villain. You can have him arrested, and the police will beat the hell out of him, and he will be locked up where he cannot get in the way for awhile unless he has money, in which case he will not stay locked up for long.

But the hero, reeking of psychopathic exhibitionistic nobility, and the heroine, smelling to high Heaven of an unhealthy virtue that would make a cat sick, nobody can do anything about. If such dreadful people appeared in real life there would be nothing to do with them but do away with them. Humanity couldn't endure them. I have studied people sedulously all my life; I have made a living writing for a quarter century; but I have never yet seen a human being anywhere who was in the faintest way like a hero, heroine, or villain, in an ACST. I have asked some of the most prominent ACST writers in this country if they ever had they never had.

The general idea seems to have been, at the outset, that if you create fictive people who show signs of a maudlin morality that might be convenient to large advertisers, such people will by some magic appear. They haven't. They won't. But you cannot write the ACST successfully without playing that nauseating game and unless you face up to this terrific, terrifying, but inescapable fact, and take account of it, it will promptly take account of you and hit you in the back of the neck.

Totally unlike the novel hero, your ACST hero must be unlike life; so must your heroine, and your villain. Where are you to find such romantic robots? Very simple. In the pages of the magazine to which you hope to contribute. If you will notice carefully —especially through a considerable file of a given magazine you will find the same sort of people pictured in their short stories. That is because the writers who write for a given magazine, or group of magazines, go to them for their characters. That is what you must do also in order to find out what type of conflict to use. In this manner also you must find your stylistic approach. About this Puckish manner of approach you will be allowed no latitude. All American editors of magazines work on the same theory. They decide that certain types of stories will do best in their magazines. They keep making their authors write the same stories over and over again until the readers in boredom turn to other magazines; where upon the circulation goes down, the editor gets fired, and another editor comes in and does the same thing all over again. This applies to the slick magazines, the pulp magazines, the religious magazines, the communist magazines, the highbrow magazines all magazines!

Probably the single most important thing that you can be told about writing the ACST is not to get the matter damnably complicated and obfuscated in your mind. Successful writers of the ACST know nothing about complicated rules or formulas. They take their tips from the magazines to which they wish to contribute, follow the general pattern, always' being sure that there is conflict present in the story. That's all there is to it EXCEPT that unless you have unusual gifts right at the start you will have to practice quite a bit to get hold of a competent prose corner-cutting style.

The greatest possible confusion exists among tyro writers because when their stories are rejected because of faulty style (simple lack of confirmed writing practice) they imagine it is because there is something the matter with their "plots." The goofy ones, when they get this idea, spend years going from one story doctor to another trying to learn how to "plot." All story doctors know perfectly well that plot doesn't matter a damn, but it can be made to seem the bete noir to the amateur; and the amateur, through that notion, can be made to pay off endlessly. One of the reasons why l have written this book is to help you avoid the necessity of paying off any more.