While no writer should do work he does not like, he must eat.
Sales Department
If you had a warehouse filled with sweet-smelling soap and you were unable to sell it, what would you do? You would hire a man who could. And if your business was manufacturing soap, your selling could not wholly be done by yourself. It’s too much to ask. This selling is highly complex, very expensive.
Therefore, instead of wasting your valuable manufacturing time peddling your own manuscripts, why not let another handle the selling for you?
There’s more to selling than knowing markets. The salesman should be in constant contact with the buyer. A writer cannot be in constant contact with his editors. It would cost money. Luncheons, cigars, all the rest. An agent takes care of all that and the cost is split up among his writers so that no one of them feels the burden too heavily.
An agent, if he is good, sells more than his ten percent extra. And he acts as a buffer between you and the postman. Nothing is more terrible than the brown envelope in the box. It’s likely to kill the day. You’re likely to file the story and forget it. But the agent merely sends the yarn out again, and when it comes home, out again it goes. He worries and doesn’t tell you until you hold the check in your hand.
The collaborating agent and the critic have no place here. They are advisers and doctors. Your sales department should really have no function except selling—and perhaps when a market is going sour, forward a few editorial comments without any added by your agent. This tends for high morale and a writer’s morale must always be high. When we started, we assumed that you already could write.
By all means, get an agent. And if you get one and he is no good to you, ditch him and try another. There are plenty of good agents. And they are worth far more than 10 percent.
Advertising
Your agent is your advertising department. He can tell the editor things which you, out of modesty, cannot. He can keep you in the minds of the men who count.
But a writer is his own walking advertisement. His reputation is his own making. His actions count for more than his stories. His reliability is hard won and, when won, is often the deciding factor in a sale. Editors must know you can produce, that you are earnest in your attempt to work with them.
To show what actions can do, one writer recently made it a habit to bait an editor as he went out to lunch. This writer met this editor every day, forced his company on the editor and then, when they were eating, the writer would haul out synopsis after synopsis. The answer is, the writer doesn’t work there anymore.
If a check is due, several writers I know haunt the office. It fails to hurry the check and it often puts an end to the contact when overdone. Many harry their editors for early decisions, make themselves nuisances in the office. Soon they stop selling there. Others always have a sob story handy.
Sob stories are pretty well taboo. It’s hitting below the belt. And sob stories from writer to writer are awful. One man I know has wrecked his friendship with his formerly closest companions simply because he couldn’t keep his troubles to himself. It’s actually hurt his sales. You see, he makes more money than anyone I know and he can’t live on it. Ye gods, ALL of us have troubles, but few professionals use them to get checks or sympathy.
Reputation is everything.
It does not hurt to do extra work for an editor. Such as department letters. Check it off to advertising. Answer all mail. Do a book for advertising. Write articles. Your name is your trademark. The better known, the better sales.
Quality Versus Quantity
I maintain that there is a medium ground for quantity and quality. One goes up, the other comes down.
The ground is your own finding. You know your best wordage and your best work. If you don’t keep track of both, you should.
Write too little and your facility departs. Write too much and your quality drops. My own best wordage is seventy thousand a month. I make money at that, sell in the upper percentage brackets. But let me do twenty thousand in a month and I feel like an old machine trying to turn over just once more before it expires. Let me do a hundred thousand in a month and I’m in possession of several piles of tripe.
The economic balance is something of your own finding. But it takes figures to find it. One month, when I was used to doing a hundred thousand per, I was stricken with some vague illness which caused great pain and sent me to bed.
For a week I did nothing. Then, in the next, I laid there and thought about stories. My average, so I thought, was shot to the devil. Toward the last of the month, I had a small table made and, sitting up in bed, wrote a ten thousand worder and two twenty thousand worders. That was all the work I did. I sold every word and made more in eight days than I had in any previous month.
That taught me that there must be some mean of average. I found it and the wage has stayed up.
There is no use keeping the factory staff standing by and the machinery running when you have no raw material.
You can’t sit down and stare at keys and wish you could write and swear at your low average for the month. If you can’t write that day, for God’s sakes don’t write. The chances are, when tomorrow arrives, and you’ve spent the yesterday groaning and doing nothing, you’ll be as mentally sterile as before.
Forget what you read about having to work so many hours every day. No writer I know has regular office hours. When you can’t write, when it’s raining and the kid’s crying, go see a movie, go talk to a cop, go dig up a book of fairy stories. But don’t sweat inactively over a mill. You’re just keeping the staff standing by and the machinery running, cutting into your overhead and putting out nothing. You’re costing yourself money.
Come back when you’re fresh and work like hell. Two in the morning, noon, eight at night, work if you feel like it and be damned to the noise you make. After all, the people who have to hear you are probably fed by you and if they can’t stand it, let them do the supporting. I take sprees of working at night and then sleep late into the day. Once in the country, farmers baited me every day with that unforgivable late slumber. It didn’t worry me so much after I remembered that I made in a month what they made in a year. They think all writers are crazy. Take the writer’s license and make the best of it.
But don’t pretend to temperament. It really doesn’t exist. Irritation does and is to be scrupulously avoided.
When all the arty scribblers (who made no money) talked to a young lady and told her that they could not write unless they were near the mountains, or unless they had the room a certain temperature, or unless they were served tea every half hour, the young lady said with sober mien, “Me? Oh, I can never write unless I’m in a balloon or in the Pacific Ocean.”
One thing to remember: It seems to work out that your writing machine can stand just so much. After that the brain refuses to hand out plots and ideas.
It’s like getting a big contract to sell your soap to the navy. You make bad soap, ruin the vats with a strong ingredient and let the finer machinery rust away in its uselessness. Then, when the navy soap contract ceases to supply the coffee and cakes, you discover that the plant is worthless for any other kind of product.
Such is the case of the writer who sees a big living in cheap fiction, turns it out to the expense of his vitality and, finally, years before his time, discovers that he is through. Only one writer of my acquaintance can keep a high word output. He is the exception and he is not burning himself out. He is built that way.
But the rest of us shy away from too cheap a brand. We know that an advanced wage will only find us spending more. Soon, when the targe
t for our unworthy efforts is taken down, we discover that we are unable to write anything else. That’s what’s meant by a rut.
As soon as you start turning out stories which you do not respect, as soon as you start turning them out wholesale over a period of time, as soon as your wordage gets out of control, then look for lean years.
To get anywhere at all in the business, you should turn out the best that’s in you and keep turning it out. You’ll never succeed in pulp unless you do, much less in the slicks.
If you start at the lowest rung, do the best job of which you are capable. Your product, according to economic law, will do the raising for you. Man is not paid for the amount of work in labor-hours, he is paid for the quality of that work.
Improvement of Product
With experience, your stories should improve. If they do not, then you yourself are not advancing. It’s impossible not to advance, it’s impossible to stand still. You must move, and you must slide back.
Take a story published a month ago, written six months ago. Read it over. If it seems to you that you could have done better, that you are doing better, you can sit back with a feline smile and be secure in the knowledge that you are coming up. Then sit forward and see to it that you do.
If you write insincerely, if you think the lowest pulp can be written insincerely and still sell, then you’re in for trouble unless your luck is terribly good. And luck rarely strikes twice. Write sincerely and you are certain to write better and better.
So much for making soap and writing. All this is merely my own findings in an upward trail through the rough paper magazines. I have tested these things and found them to be true and if someone had handed them to me a few years ago, I would have saved myself a great deal of worry and more bills would have been paid.
Once, a professor of short story in a university gave me a course because I was bored with being an engineer. The course did not help much outside of the practice in writing. Recently I heard that professor address the radio audience on the subject “This Business of Writing.” It was not until then that I realized how much a writer had to learn. He knew nothing about the practical end of things and I told him so. He made me give a lecture to his class and they did not believe me.
But none of them, like you and I, have to make the bread and butter someway in this world. They had never realized that competition and business economics had any place whatever in the writing world. They were complacent in some intangible, ignorant quality they branded ART. They did not know, and perhaps will someday find out, that art means, simply:
“The employment of means to the accomplishment of some end; the skillful application and adaptation to some purpose or use of knowledge or power acquired from Nature, especially in the production of beauty as in sculpture, etc.; a system of rules and established methods to facilitate the performance of certain actions.”
They saw nothing praiseworthy in work well done. They had their hearts fixed on some goal even they did not understand. To them, writing was not a supreme source of expression, not a means of entertaining, not a means of living and enjoying work while one lived. If you wrote for a living, they branded you a hack. But they will never write.
Poor fools, they haven’t the stamina, the courage, the intelligence, the knowledge of life’s necessity, the mental capacity to realize that whatever you do in this life you must do well and that whatever talent you have is expressly given you to provide your food and your comfort.
My writing is not a game. It is a business, a hardheaded enterprise which fails only when I fail, which provides me with an energy outlet I need, which gives me the house I live in, which lets me keep my wife and boy. I am a manuscript factory but not—and damn those who so intimate it—an insincere hack, peddling verbal belly-wash with my tongue in my cheek. And I eat only so long as my factory runs economically, only so long as I remember the things I have learned about this writing business.
The Grande Complication
written by
Christopher Reynaga
illustrated by
OLIVIA XU
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Reynaga’s earliest memories are of telling stories about the magical world around us to the grownups who seemed so unaware of it. “I would tell my parents, and they would laugh, but I would tell my grandmother, and she believed. I was a child, and she an old woman, but we were both the right age to understand—my youthful belief and intuition that all children possess, and her old traditions of Mexico and the Yaqui. Miracles and magic existed alongside baseball, bicycles and skinned knees—this was the way the world worked.”
Christopher grew up in a normal American neighborhood where all the houses were the same, only differing in color. He read everything, including his parents’ college textbooks. When he was nine, he had a dream that he would grow up to be a writer—a dream that is starting to come true.
He is a graduate of Clarion West and winner of both first place for L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future and a Bazzanella Literary Award. He has stories in The Book of Cthulhu 2, GigaNotoSaurus, The Drabblecast, Cemetery Dance, and the American River Literary Review. Follow him at ChristopherReynaga.com.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Olivia Xu lived in Nanjing, China—a historical city with beautiful sycamore trees—for twenty-two years before moving to New York for graduate school in 2011. When she was little, she would imitate her grandmother’s traditional Chinese paintings. She believes that’s where she inherited her artistic talent. Admittedly, she was quite a troublemaker as a kid, and the only time she sat still was when she was doodling. Olivia went to an art-oriented high school and later entered an animation program in college. Animation has been the love of her life. She is always fascinated by its unique way of storytelling and its capacity and independence as an art form.
Currently Olivia is attending the 3-D animation and motion art program at Pratt Institute. She is enthusiastic about illustration and sees it as more of a “snapshot” from a story. She likes to make her illustrations exquisite in terms of color balance and detail, while keeping the story/concept a little ambiguous. Olivia wants her audience to feel the story but be unable to tell it from her illustration. Constantly she is inspired by the lives of people around her. She loves making illustrated cards for her friends, hoping her small artwork can bring happiness to the people she cares about. In the near future, Olivia hopes to work as a 3-D lighter or generalist, but she will never give up her passion for illustration.
The Grande Complication
The moment that the world stopped, Neil was trying to yank his hand free of Miss Dutton’s grip. He would have thrown the suitcase of what little he owned onto the train station steps, but his keeper would have dragged him on without it, even as she warned him, “I’ve slapped many a nine-year-old boy in the mouth, thank you very much.” Instead, Neil swung the heavy suitcase at her ankle and loosed a scream for the death of a world that had taken his home and dragged him alone and frightened into this cold October dawn. Neil howled, but the world howled louder as it ceased with a sound no boy would have ever imagined.
The London air clattered with a jangle like spilled silverware. The rattle of the windows was a dying engine. The people crowded in Greenwich Station glanced around as if expecting the gray clouds to split open and rain pig’s blood. A startled flock of pigeons burst into the air as the beat of their hearts pulsed arrhythmically, then stopped.
Everything stopped. The people stopped midstride. The train rolling into the station stopped midscreech. The birds hung motionless in the air, their feathers splayed out to catch a frozen wind.
A silence followed so profound that, had there bee
n anyone left to witness it, they would have felt the ever-present heart-thrum of the world go out.
Neil was such a boy.
His fingers ached, trapped in Miss Dutton’s grip. He fell silent now, lungs spent. Only the shift of his head gave him away as he gaped at the silent world. At Miss Dutton’s lower lip tucked into a snarl. At the way his suitcase hung in the air when he released the leather grip.
The birds captured his attention the most—eyes wild, wings outstretched.
After a time, a soft grinding rhythm returned to the world. Approaching footsteps.
Neil squinted into the sunlight above Greenwich Station. A man with a gray cap and grayer beard walked toward him, shoulder slumped at the weight of the black valise that hung in his hand like a dark fruit.
Neil froze as the old man circled the birds and started up the station steps. His gray eyes didn’t glance down at him. The man paused next to Miss Dutton, captured by the way her glare had frozen as if to stare right at him. He touched Miss Dutton’s hand almost reverently.
“Won’t be a minute,” he said to her with a graveled voice. “Two at most—two minutes lost.”
Neil scrambled backward, as far as his pinned fingers allowed.
The old man gasped and dropped his valise. “Did, did you…say something?” asked the old man.
“No,” said Neil.
“By grace,” said the old man, stepping back. “I’ve never seen a person fall out before.”
“Are you here to take me away?” Neil asked in a small voice. “Did I make the world stop?”
“No,” said the old man. “I didn’t come to take you, and you didn’t break the world. It’s been doing that well enough on its own.” The old man doffed his cap with trembling fingers. “I am here to fix it.”