RZ: Mr. Nuetzel, authors are often asked in interviews about their in-fluences. Well, here the question is again: what writers would you say had the strongest influence on what you wrote and how you wrote?
CAN: Gosh and golly, I’m going to appear very narrow and limited. Edgar Rice Burroughs. ERB, ERB, and ERB. But then there was Ray Bradbury, though not so much on the literary level as on another level. He is the first writer I ever met. He approached me in a book store asking if I’d read anything by Ray Bradbury. Apparently he noticed I was interested in sci-fi. I was a sci-fi virgin and Ray “intercoursed” me about Forry Acker-man and science fiction fandom, and about the LASFAS—the Los Angeles Science Fiction and Fantasy Society. I thus met Forry. There are other writers from the real world of literature, but I don’t think they count. Plus, there aren’t many. W. Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up and Call It Experience by Erskine Caldwell influenced my thinking about writing and writers. They had a very strong effect on my general thinking. But as to style of writing, I was more attracted to the commercial hacks rather than the grand literary giants. I don’t suggest that this is to my credit; it is just the way things were. Being a Grand and Wonderful Literary author of the Great American Novels, or whatever, never entered my mind. All I wanted to do was write a lot of books and have a bookshelf full of them. I admired the ERBs and the Erle Stanley Gardners. I would have been happy with half their success. The commercial “hacks” were my personal “idols.” But ERB, Bradbury, and Forry Ackerman had the most immediate effect over my writing career.
RZ: As opposed to the techniques of actually putting words down on paper?
CAN: Yes. That came from other places.
RZ: Such as?
CAN: Outside of wanting to write. Outside of actually putting words to paper, like all would-be writers. Outside of dreaming and wishing. And reading books on writing, like the ones already mentioned. Beyond that, most writers end up being helped by some person who is already a profes-sional. For me it was a man named E. Everett Evans, who was a profes-sional writer who became a personal friend. It was casual until I bought the manuscript of his first book, Man of Many Minds, at my first sci-fi conven-tion. There were a few pages missing so I called him and he said come on over. He hunted and pecked the three pages out right then and there for me. It was the beginning. Ev (he was known as that, though I always called him Mr. Evans—I was under twenty-one) would give me his working drafts to read and make any written comments on that I wanted to. He also read my first serious story, “Terror by Night,” which was something like 12,000 words long. He made comments like “it doesn’t have a subplot,” and helped me rewrite and rewrite and rewrite the damn thing. It was, naturally, never published. Nor meant to be. It was part of the normal “learning” period of writing. Of course, Forry Ackerman helped. He really worked with me once I had reached a level where an agent could consider struggling to develop a writer from beginner to professional. Boy, did he help. That first year he had to read through some 100 manuscripts. But I learned a lot of the basics from the Palmer Institute of Authorship. It was a blatantly commercial hack course on writing that taught plot and narrative hooks and such. It was cheap and two years by mail. I took it because the ads for it said A. E. van Vogt had taken it. This was good as a way to train oneself. One of the instructors, a sci-fi writer who I had requested (and who stayed on for only a short time), told me privately that: while one should not take the course “too seriously” it could be helpful in developing writing skills and understanding the raw basics. He was merely admitting what seemed obvious enough: this course made more money for the “school” than it did for the “students.” But it worked so well for me that I was selling long before I finished the last assignments.
RZ: What about your reading habits during your “formative” years?
CAN: I actually went through a very long period of reading nothing but Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’m what is known as a compulsive. I dive in and completely submerge myself in whatever catches my interest. With ERB, after I’d read through all the books I could get my hands on, I started over because there just weren’t any more new ones around at that time. This is the period before the 1960s pocket book boom in his works. There were less than thirty of his books in print. I have two autographed books by Bur-roughs, both signed by the author and by his illustrator son—John Coleman Burroughs. M. Jenson, ERB’s secretary for many years, told me that the books I had were the last ERB signed. He did them in the hospital when he was ill, not long before dying. I never met the man. A book store dealer got them for me. So, I started as a serious ERB fan and finally, before I stopped writing, managed to put out a few of those types of novels. They might have served as the beginning of several series, but I retired before any of that came about.
RZ: Yes, you mentioned in private exchanges with me about being re-tired, but also said you were working now on an article concerning the use of pen names. What do you mean by retired?
CAN: Retiring from writing is somewhat of a problem. The ability to write is always there, haunting you daily. So I carry a card in my wallet to remind me, which says: “Author—Retired.” It actually works almost all the time.
RZ: Your agent during much of your writing career was Forrest Ackerman. You already mentioned meeting him through the Los Angeles Science Fiction Fan Club, but can you tell us a little about your relationship with Mr. Ackerman?
CAN: He is one of those truly nice fellows. And thousands or more people know him, and he treats them as if he remembers who they are. Ob-viously, you gotta work really hard to be in Forry’s inner circle. I’m one of the lucky ones who has been there. But then, I wouldn’t know my wife without the Forry connection. His wife, Wendy, was German. So is Brigit-te. Though they met through Forry. My father did a lot of artwork for Forry’s art collection; plus, he has much of the stuff Dad did for sci-fi mags. Forry was noted for being a sci-fi agent, collector, writer, editor. He started as a pre-teenage reader in the ’20s and developed into a major early fan and collector. After World War II he decided to turn his interest and knowledge and experience into a means of making a living. Thus, the Ackerman Agency. Everything else, (i.e., Famous Monsters of Filmland and such) is aftermath, only to become a major career direction for him. As you know, he invented the term sci-fi, a play on the popular hi-fi. But he never really retired the Ackerman Agency during all this period. That first year as my agent he sold twenty-four short manuscripts from some 100 I wrote. In the following years he sold most of the other stuff. In fact, for many years almost ninety-nine percent of my written material was pub-lished. You certainly know the story about Ray Bradbury and his first two million words. He might have hated “Firemen” in his book on the subject, but he set fire to his first two million words so that when he was famous and dead somebody wouldn’t find and publish them. I weren’t so smart. I let the fools publish my stuff. If I had burned my first two million words I would have only had a little over that many published.
RZ: You mentioned having a twin brother, who died soon after birth. And you used his name, Albert Augustus Jr., as a pen name. How did that come about?
CAN: My father died in 1969. The Slaves of Lomooro was published after his death. I dedicated the book to my mother and used my brother’s byline as a kind of double tribute. The dedication went this way: “To my mother, Betty, this first science fiction book is lovingly dedicated.” It was the first sci-fi novel I ever wrote. I had a typical ERB ending, which got my people through their first adventures on the planet where they would be stuck forever. Because it was my first sci-fi book and I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it, I gave it to my “elder” brother, and thus created another pen name that I used a few more times on pocket books.
RZ: I understand that because you were making your living at writing you often had to write fast and to some very tough deadlines. What do you mean by writing fast? A novel a month? A week?
CAN: I’m gonna have fun with this question! You have hit on the very hea
rt of the way I worked. While some people are very talented (like Ray Bradbury), who rewrite and rewrite, even after something has been pub-lished and is about to be reprinted (I actually did rewriting this way too), then there are guys like me who write under the pressure of deadlines and “hack it out as fast as possible.” So, here’s the basic method I used during my writing career. I suggest new writers consider this approach in some manner or other. It worked for me, and for others I know. Get ten reams of paper. (In case people have forgotten, that’s about 5,000 sheets.) Start by opening ream number 1 and taking a sheet of paper and slipping it into the typewriter. Then type: Page 1 on the upper left hand corner. Then type some title like Warriors of Noomas, drop down several double spaces and then center CHAPTER ONE, and drop down a few lines and write some-thing. Anything that pops into your head. And then develop it into a narra-tive hook. After that, just keep typing away as fast as possible without looking back. Rewriting can come later, if necessary. When I started out I had a manual typewriter and managed around four pages an hour. When I turned to an electric with no automatic carriage return I leaped forward to around six pages an hour. When I went full electric with auto return I was doing something like six to eight pages an hour, depending on how inspired I was and how the storyline was developing. I did learn to crank out the writing as fast as possible. First draft and never looked back. In some ways this wasn’t too good for my reputation. It is sloppy writing, sometimes. But, on the other hand, the ability to grind out a book on deadline, giving the editors something to publish, even if they had to correct grammar and typos and stuff like that, gave me another kind of reputation that worked. Plus, editors (with a small “e” as opposed to a big “E”) have to do some-thing to learn their living. I mean, aren’t editors supposed to edit? And, an-yway, it gives them something to complain about. Plus, every editor is go-ing to change copy one way or another. Makes them feel grand and im-portant. (And, quite frankly, authors can learn a lot from their editors; many of whom are highly talented and more than willing to help beginning—and even high established—authors polish or fix or improve their “literary” output.) But first come the words, as fast as possible, onto the page. And as many pages as possible.
RZ: So, four-to-eight pages an hour comes out to be...what? In words a day? Or pages a year?
CAN: Well, I could hardly put out four-to-eight pages an hour, eight hours a day, forty days a week, could I? I never said I spent twenty-four hours a day writing, or 365 days a year. Writing fast means, to me, being able, when called upon, to do a 45,000-50,000 word book in a week, at about 10,000 words a day, first draft, no retyping, and as little editing as possible. It means hitting the deadline, no matter what. But it does not mean doing a book each and every week of the year. It means knowing very realistically how long it takes to write a book and not promising any-thing to the buyer or to yourself that you can’t deliver. Then you deliver. Or you don’t eat. As simple and direct as that. The long and the short is that I averaged around ten novels a year. When I finally learned something about my realistic output, I made a chart which assigned me five pages a day, each and every day of the year, minus two weeks for that ol’ vacation time. That meant, of course, 1,255 pages a year, or seven to eight books. Each day I would give myself credit for every five pages I did. If I wrote thirty pages then it was six days of writing, thus giving me five days off. Over the long haul of the year, I ended up doing seven and one-half pages a day. That gave me something like ten books a year.
RZ: What process did you use to discipline yourself to write each day?
CAN: Whips and chains. Of course. Mike Knerr (a fellow “hack” writer who was one of Forry’s clients, too) pointed out, that “we used to chain ourselves to the typewriter.” Sometimes, though, it was necessary to use the whip. Other times it was necessary to simply say: Sit there and write anything that pops into your head and then continue along those lines, fol-lowing one word with another, one paragraph with another. And finish what you start—no matter how difficult, no matter how terrible the results. Sometimes my huge waste basket would be filled with balled up pieces of paper. But that was, you have to remember, a loss of profits. And you gotta eat. And, like every guy and gal you gotta sit right down and do your job. The job of writing is writing. When you don’t write you aren’t working. That is evil. And since you don’t want to be evil you force yourself to write at all costs; no matter how difficult. Rule #1: WRITERS WRITE. (And what that means for me is they write for publishers who pay cold hard cash.) When you break that rule you aren’t a writer anymore. But first of all you always meet agreed-upon deadlines. No matter what. The publisher doesn’t care how you do it; just so you deliver.
RZ: What is about the fastest that you ever wrote a book?
CAN: David Zentner called me one Friday and asked if I might have a book to give him by Monday morning. I had started a book that day. I had learned long before with David that he was flexible about the “when” of deadlines, but in so far as making them he was unbendingly rigid. If you promised to deliver, you delivered. So I gulped and said: “Not Monday, but Tuesday.” Well, by the time I had finished the first forty pages I had written myself into a blind alley. I could not find a way out and quite obviously didn’t have time to write a new forty pages. So I rushed to my friendly agent man, Forry, and screamed at the top of my voice: Help! He read the pages and suggested a new direction. That saved the day. I typed away and delivered the book. I think it was published as Passionate Trio by John Davidson. The writing of a book in one week isn’t all that difficult if you kind of lock yourself in a room long enough each day to get the right amount of pages run through the typewriter. Of course, you gotta have a very clear and focused idea of where you are going. There was a four-week period where I wrote four books. All of which were quickly bought. I started a fifth and when I got about halfway through it I almost picked up the typewriter and tossed it against the wall. I had had it. I had to go off to a friendly hotel and hide away with a bit of “hard” unwinding drinking. In those days I enjoyed booze, but not while writing. I had a very hard rule about that. No drinking in any way while writing. But when the writing was over for the day, that was another matter. Haven’t touched the stuff for some twenty-one years.
RZ: But you drank quite a bit during the years that you were writing those hundred or so books. How did you keep the drinking and the writing separate?
CAN: Early on my style developed, insofar as hard writing and “hard” drinking, when I got a “pad” of my own. I stocked up on enough booze, wine, beer, and hard liquor, to cover the next six months or so. I had a VA pension check coming in monthly which supplied just enough money to deal with the bare basic expenses. What I brought in from writing would offer the “goodies.” But booze was something one needed to survive; and mostly, at night, to “turn off” the mind. This was my schedule: get up and write. Write until it was too hot to continue, then have some drinks while listening to Dave Brubeck or Sinatra. I would continue to “unwind” until sleep slipped over consciousness. Then I’d get up the next morning and start all over again. This took place daily, seven days a week. And it meant something like 10,000 words a day. Much of my stuff, I now realize, was done on what one could consider a hangover, which was seldom felt. Once a week I had some buddies come over for an evening of drinks and conver-sation. For the most part this drinking was “controlled” and managed to not go much beyond “high.” Or so I believed. To some degree, this pattern of using booze to unwind, turn off my mind, was a very active part of my pro-fessional writing career. I managed to manage the drinking, and kept it sec-tioned off to [non-writing] hours. Though this might sound like I was walk-ing around half stoned, that just ain’t the facts. I smoked more than I drank: three packs a day. And, of course, while I didn’t drink all the time I smoked, I certainly smoked while I was drinking. The point about drinking is that the roller coaster ride that writing demands, the total dedication, the total obsessive focus, the exhaustive use of everyth
ing, makes it necessary to turn yourself off at night. Actually, I did a pretty good job; never got into any real trouble; was a “safe” driver. But then, I never left the garage, either. Well, that ain’t quite so. But I’d learned not to drive drunk. A tiny bit high, now and then, but, heck, fellows, you gotta give a good guy a break. And, anyway, this ain’t no “drunk a log.” Enough to say that not everybody that drinks finds it necessary, sometime along the way, to stop. For the “normal” drinker the issue of “controlling” their drinking doesn’t even exist. But for compulsives, like me, there comes a time where you stop or end up brain dead or really dead. I didn’t want to kill any more brain cells than was necessary. There came a time where I had to stop the downhill slide before it really got out of control. But that’s another million stories.
RZ: I understand that you knew Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame.
CAN: Actually Dad came to know him casually, at first. The editors of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories managed a couple of collaborations between Dad and Bloch. They assigned Robert Bloch the job of creating stories around a couple of Dad’s covers. I remember how the two of them had their picture taken together at one of Forry’s parties. But for me, I think the most interesting event that took place with Bloch was at the Twentieth Century Plaza, at a party that Galaxy magazine was giving for writers. They had finger food and plenty of champagne, and a little social fun. Well, the champagne flowed. There was the general mix of beginning and established sci-fi writers, and the stars like Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch who told a story about Ray, which was really funny. The event they talked about was when Ray was a young fan and Bob a famous writer. So here they were at a party at Bloch’s home and Ray apparently managed to really feel his drinks a bit more than he should have. His host felt he should stay overnight. So what’d they do? They put him to bed. But there was a catch. He woke the next morning to find himself with a major hangover. In a strange bedroom. In a strange bed. In a bed with a woman. And the woman was Bob Bloch’s wife. One can only imagine what went through this young fan’s mind. Or the scream of open horror as he leaped out of that there bed. Ray and Bob told this story with glee and delight. Of course, Robert Bloch was famous for his dry humor.