RZ: Did you ever talk to Robert Bloch about writing?
CAN: Well, at one point I was sitting on the floor with him and some other writers. And we were talking about, guess what, writing. I don’t know how it came about, but I related how I had written a book in three days and the price I paid for it. Bloch pointed out that the problem was: when you do a book in three days you think you have to do a book every three days. That point stuck with me.
RZ: You mentioned something to me once about a tale of “seven titles; seven stories,” involving you and Forry. Could you retell that tale here?
CAN: I had been at a party one Saturday evening. Forry was there. As a gag, he took a small cocktail napkin (by the way he never drinks booze, never has) and wrote down seven pun titles like “Suddenly Lust Summer” and handed them to me as story ideas. I left the party that night and flip-pantly said: “Seven titles, seven stories. See you Monday morning.” And as a “gag” I beat the typewriter until I had seven stories to deliver and there I was Monday morning at his doorstep, envelope crammed with the required number of completed manuscripts. That really impressed him. It was a great gag. And he actually sold most of them, if not all. As a result of all this, a month or so later Forry called me saying: “Publisher Dave Zentner needs a book rapid fast. And considering those seven titles, seven stories, I thought you might want to try your hand on a novel. He would need to see 20,000 words in one week. Interested?” I pointed out rather bluntly that I’d never done a book before. He suggested I try it. Well, it worked this way. I ran 34-45 pages through the typewriter each day, hand delivered the unread first draft to Forry and called the next morning to say: “How’s it going.” “Just fine, keep up the good work,” says he. I had the total first draft fin-ished in that week. Later I had to do a second draft, but heck-a-roo, what do you want? It was, after all, my first novel. But it sold. It was published as Hot Cargo by John Davidson (before the singer).
RZ: You were saying that your father was an illustrator, and did some covers for science fiction magazines and pocket books. Was he a sci-fi fan?
CAN: No. A commercial artist who got talked into doing covers as a favor to his son. I did an article about Dad, titled “Dreamer of Tomorrow,” published in the first issue of the “all slick” Vertex. While I titled it “Dreamer of Tomorrow,” it was a slant job because he wasn’t really all that interested in science fiction or fantasy. He did the first covers [for me] be-cause I wanted a sci-fi cover and couldn’t afford to buy one. I did the mar-keting of it and sold it to Ray Palmer who used it on Science Stories. Palm-er asked for an autobiography and I was the one who wrote it, as if it were by Dad. Later, when the editors of Vertex learned that I was Dad’s son, and a writer, they asked for an article about him. They published black and white reproductions of his cover art, using as the opening his cover to my Images of Tomorrow. Seldom does a son get the chance to do something like that for his father. Dad, sadly, was not alive at that time. He died a couple of weeks before man landed on the moon. Dad was not a cover artist by nature. What he did in this field was in many cases collaborations with me, right from the start. We learned the cover business together. I designed several of his covers that went on Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories. Many, of course, he came up with all by himself. But he wasn’t a sci-fi fan. He was a very professional artist who could do what was necessary to meet requirements. He’d been working in the motion picture business for most of his life. Dad always said that you should be commercial; he had contempt for the artist that lived in an attic painting for himself. “Arty Poo stuff” was not his style. He was very fast and quite good. Obviously. In any case, the story of my father and me is a story about love. He was a quiet man who expressed himself with a paint brush. We worked together in the cover work; we loved one another. And I got the chance to write about him.
RZ: At first as a professional you wrote mostly short stories—that first 100 manuscripts—then suddenly turned to novels and sold the very first one. On assignment, too. How did you make that transition so easily?
CAN: Well, as noted, I had learned how to deal with short manuscripts. With this first novel I had to come up with a method that would work—somehow. In fact it worked so good I continued using it, in various ways, for most of my books. Of course, like all “tricks” it implies less than it really is. The trick was to simplify the method into an easy to understand plan of operation. Instead of following the rule of starting a story and finishing it in something like twelve pages, I now went about writing incomplete stories, one after another. I called these “Chapters,” which led to the final climax: a completed “short story.” In other words, I developed a “trick” way of writing books: Write a series of incidents that lead up to a “short story.” I’ve told this to other professional writers, only to be shot down, or at best answered with: “an interesting idea.” But, quite frankly, most novel writers think this is too simple, not complete, misleading and “nice” words to that effect. And, of course, they are right. One has to consider subplots and multiple storylines and themes that all must come together by the end to be tied up into a neat little package offering all the answers to all the questions. A novel gives the writer more space to move around in; more areas to explore; and more places to say more things of importance to the writer. But, no matter what, the basic concept is to write incomplete stories and call them “Chapters.” Each Chapter has a storyline arc and the questions normally raised in a story, without the final “answer” that a story would have. The Chapters, in turn, form peaks and valleys along the plot line that brings the reader, finally, to a concluding climax that can, for our purposes, be considered a “complete” short story that ties everything, finally and at last, together.
RZ: Do you have a favorite book from among your own works? In oth-er words: What book or books of your’s do you remember most fondly?
CAN: I think the short answer to your question is probably: Images of Tomorrow and the Noomas books [Warriors of Noomas and Raiders of Noomas] and Swordmen of Vistar and Whodunit? Hollywood Style. Proba-bly in that order. Images of Tomorrow was a selection of my “better” sci-fi short stories; and the short novel The Ersatz was included. It had my fa-ther’s last cover for one of my own books. And it was probably his best. “The Nova Incident” and “The World the Womb Made” were also in this collection. The first was a poke in the eye at hard-line Presidents, war, and politics, and I got exactly the effect I wanted. “Womb” is, perhaps, my fa-vorite story in that I really did a number on the people who follow the rule books. WOMB meant “World Operational Mechanical Brain,” and it knew EVERYTHING about everybody so that it could supply all your needs even before you knew you needed something. WOMB did everything for you. Only, our hero was a man who wanted to make his own decisions, even if they were wrong. As to others, there are books I like for strange reasons: Jungle Nymph because that was an updated ERB-type female “Tarzan” story. There was Sex Queen, which was done in three days. And, of course, the Noomas books and Swordmen of Vistar. I really wanted to continue with the adventures of Torlo Hannis [from the Noomas books]. And I wanted to continue with the Thoris series [the character from Swordmen]. Then there is the unpublished book The Wall Book. Completely non-commercial. But a personal kick in the head. If I ever get it polished, and/or in some shape, I’d love to find a small publisher and a good illustra-tor who wanted to publish a “small” fairy-tale satire for adults. But, of course, that won’t happen. [Author note 2006: the book has now been re-leased by Wildside Press as The Epic Dialogs of Mhyo.]
RZ: You mentioned reading a lot of ERB when you were younger, and that as soon as you finished all of his books that were in print you started reading them over again. Makes it sound like you were a compulsive reader. Is that the case?
CAN: Yes, then, I was a compulsive reader who wanted to be a writer, and became a compulsive writer who drove himself. But things do change.
RZ: In what way?
CAN: After I started writing full time I r
ead other writer’s fiction only as required in order to know what the publisher wanted. I didn’t have the time to read for pleasure. Plus, I was exhausted after a day of struggling with the typewriter and staring at the wall. You know, those bloody terrible periods between typing sessions which are, in effect, both the most active creative period, and also the deadest. Typewriter time is just placing ideas and words to paper; first you have to develop the ideas. That’s what I call staring at the wall. By evening I wanted to escape in booze, TV, or Jazz. Even Robert Bloch told me that he didn’t read fiction any more, only fact. By the end of my writing professionally I started reading about the history of the universe. I figured it was time to get a better education. I began with the Big Bang and worked my way forward though time. All that ancient history was quite exciting. But the closer I came to written “history” the less interested I was. It becomes sad when you know too much about an-cient civilizations. The less you knew about the details the more your imag-ination can fill in the blanks. Then, around the opening of the Christian Era I simply burned out on that, too. Another cold hard point: The more I wrote the more I understood what the writer was doing or where the story was going. If the writer was very, very good, I didn’t want to be exposed to it and be depressed to the point that I would never write again because I weren’t no damn good! Today, reading is something I am relearning. But it is on the Internet. And not fiction. If I turned to enjoying the fiction experience it would be for professional purposes, not pleasure. That’s part of the price tag [of being a writer]. Right now I get my “fictional” experience through movies and TV. I know. Horrible. I know, a book of fiction has more to say. And in fiction the writer can offer deeper insights. So? Oh, hell, I’ve been through that. I know how it works. I realize the writer is not God, just some jerk like me trying to make a fast buck. No matter how educated and literary. The fact of the matter is that we’re all human; we all, so to speak, have to put our legs into our pants one at a time. We all love, eat, have sex. We all exist and we all dream. And die. Sure some minds are better than others, some talents greater than others. But, in the end, it is ego or money or mere necessity of one kind or another that drives the writer to put words on paper. And as for the writers with great and true talent, I don’t wanna know about them. That hurts too much. I’m sticking my tongue through my cheek a bit here, but I won’t tell where it actually protrudes and where it is all illusion.
RZ: Why did you quit writing?
CAN: Well, to be truthful, when it comes to writing I take it too seri-ously to lie. But I do have a viewpoint, and a bias. And the experience. This all drove me to the point where I decided that if I had anything more to say—in print—it will be on my terms or not at all. I’ve not been writing for some years; I have not been published for some years. But then, I don’t drink Martinis and edit manuscripts that make me wanna vomit. Either. When I got to the point where booze was necessary to edit some of my stuff, where it weren’t no fun to add just one more book to a shelf-full of books, where the payoff in thrills and whatever reached the point of dimin-ishing returns...I simply stopped! I stopped drinking, stopped smoking. I decided I’d never write anything that I didn’t want to write. If I couldn’t sell it my way, forget it. Thus the rumor that Charles Nuetzel had died came about. And in some strange way that was, kinda, a half-truth. Clearly, I had burned out at one level and was not willing to pay the price to make another giant step upwards. And, of course, markets change. But my atti-tude changed at this point. The facts are: I simply didn’t care enough to work that hard, simply to continue repeating what I had already done. I really was burned out. But only after a five million words run. I got to the point where I couldn’t look at the typewriter without having problems—I learned to hate the monster, as I thought of it. I simply hung up the type-writer. Better than throwing it against the wall, which had been a tempta-tion many a day. You call it a day before the day calls you into the grave.
RZ: So, would you say that the “process” by which you wrote broke down?
CAN: That’s exactly the right word. The process of writing broke down over a period of years. It is difficult to tell the difference between a dry spell and a dried up period, or the end is near kind of thing. As I continued NOT writing and learned how to hate the typewriter and consider it a mon-ster, I suddenly realized I was breaking rule #1: WRITERS WRITE. That is why, by the way, on my “card” I have author retired. Not “writer” retired. An author is somebody who has “authored” a book; a writer is somebody who is active in writing. When I started writing to please myself rather than please the paying market I stopped being commercially viable. I stopped being a professional. But there were other things going on in my life. Mid-life crisis, perhaps. I think I had about said everything there was to say on the level and subject I had been covering for so many years. Perhaps, for the period, I was finished. But it took a long time to realize this truth and even longer to accept it. Writing is like filling one’s self full of a vast and wonderful feast, then burning it up in energy and getting rid of the waste product—in this case on the printed page. Then you have to refill yourself. Once you have emptied your guts, you gotta load them up again. Some-times it takes time to find the “food” and convert it into new, interesting, exciting ideas. You gotta catch your breath. Sometimes the “catching” takes longer than you expected. Sometimes you can pick up the chain and lock yourself to the typewriter. Sometimes you gotta get away. And you finally learn that you have reached the end. That’s what happened I think. For then.
RZ: Do you think you’ll ever take up the typewriter seriously again?
CAN: And toss it against wall? No. I have a computer, now, anyway.
RZ: Well, put another way: is there more writing in Charles Nuetzel’s future?
CAN: Considering this bloody computer contraption with its multiple word processors, such a question is difficult to answer completely in the negative. Maybe the long dry spell might be ending now; perhaps I’ll start playing with a few words here and there. If I’m lucky something useful will magically arrange itself on the word processor and I’ll find it impossible not to submit it for publication somewhere. But such an idea isn’t as attractive as it once was, in the beginning. I would have to do it for fun. I am not certain how much fun it is. Perhaps I’ll find out in the near future. Perhaps.
Razored Zen Interview: Here’s Part Two of the interview that I started last time. This deals more with the publishing rather than the personal.
RZ: Can you tell us about your involvement with Powell Publications, which printed many of your Science Fiction and Fantasy books under its Powell Sci-Fi imprint? Powell was also a publisher of various adult works. Did you do much writing for their adult line?
CAN: Bill Trotter [founder of Powell Books] was an elderly man, small, nice fellow. He’d been in the distribution business for years, connected to, among others, Playboy. He had developed personal contacts with wholesalers across the nation. He came out west and made a deal with a guy we will call Richard, which was his first name. They created Venice Books, which did adult books of a “factual” nature. Richard did the pub-lishing/packaging side and Bill set up the distribution. Richard bought the books, the art, and put it all together for the printer. He also paid his au-thors immediately on delivery. In fact, I developed a deal where he sent me a check a week, each and every week, and I’d walk into the office to deliv-er a book before the last check was due. I did some twenty books [for them] under the Carson Davis byline. They were supposed to be “true case histories” concerning men’s and women’s sexual experiences and problems. Well, in any case, I went to the offices of Venice and it was here I met Bill Trotter, who, being a very social fellow, invited me into his private office. This was around 1968, and by now I knew something about the editorial end of publishing. I had sold Dad’s cover, and had ended up packaging, in 1964, the Scorpion Books line (books with a sting), eight in all, two a month. I had done a book called If This Goes On, in which I collected st
o-ries from Richard Matheson, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown, Fritz Leiber, Willy Ley, Donald Wollheim, and A. E. van Vogt, with an introduction by Forry Ackerman, a long story by Marion Zimmer Bradley—and a story by Ray Bradbury, which the publishers “screwed” up by not including it inside the book, though it was mentioned on the cover. Well, back to Bill Trotter, pre-Powell Books. We talked and he revealed plans for forming a company of his own. In the very near future. So I casually said I’d be interested and made a point of mentioning my past experience. Especially the book pack-aging stuff and the sci-fi anthology. So he took my name and phone num-ber, saying he’d be in contact soon. Sure, said I, hopefully, fingers crossed. I forgot about it. Around six months later he called and said he was now publishing, and did I have anything for him. I believe we met that very day and talked a deal. I ended up walking out with total control of the “packag-es.” I’d deliver the manuscripts and art and cover lines to the printer. I’d get paid on delivery (though later that worked out to a check a week on account). The first time around I showed him everything in advance, as a kind of “sales pitch” to reassure him that everything would meet his approval. After that he never saw anything until it was already printed and bound. The deal was two books a month, reprints which at first I sexed up to meet current market demands.