Everybody tells themselves stories. When we have had an experience (or imagined one) that we like to go over and over in our minds, we rearrange our memories of the experience so that they are in the most satisfying order to us. This is not necessarily chronological order. The rearrangement (I am speaking of a perfectly normal, universal practice which is a perfectly natural operation of the mind) changes the emphasis upon incidents, changes the order in which we recall them, and brings out the things — perhaps barely noticed at the time —
which were actually important, so that at the end of this rearrangement we have discovered the pattern, the organization, the meaning of the total experience. We like to recall it because it is meaningful.
It is notorious that very many people write one damned good story, and sell it, and can never write another. The reason is that they concocted the one story for their own satisfaction, went over and over it in pleasurable recollection, and then wrote it down the way they liked to remember it. But when it got printed and they got paid for it, they didn’t repeat the process for fun, but for cash, fame, kudos, or status. Some people can write for cash, fame, kudos, or status.
I still have to kid myself that my stuff is worth writing. The chances are, though, that the way to start writing is to invent or recall a story you like to tell yourself and tell it to yourself until you practically don’t change it any more. Then you’ll want to write it, to share it. But writing is a fine way to engage in reverie.
The fact that a science fiction story is simply a synthetic memory; that in a reverie we have the same kind of experience (aesthetic experience) that we have when reading a story. This gives an infinite amount of information about stories.
For example, in memories of events we do not narrate them to ourselves in words. We remember sensory impressions; how things looked, felt, tasted or sounded.
We recall facts (that so-and-so came from Cincinnati, for example) but a story is conveyed in terms of sensory and emotional experiences with only such declaratory stated facts as are needed to make those sensory and emotional experiences understandable. You can say that a story is never narrated but portrayed.
(I’ve sold straight narratives, but it ain’t easy.) You can narrate facts, but you have to portray experiences to convey them to your reader.
Since the aesthetic experience of reading a story and engaging in a reverie are (to my mind) identical, it follows that:
(a) the viewpoint one has toward the events of a story is the viewpoint one would have toward the events in a reverie.
(b) that no two people who’ve been through the identical experiences would write them — or reverie them — in just the same way. They’d have different viewpoints and ultimately different emotional reactions. So (and this is the important Eleven • On Writing
169
part here) the “tone of voice” of the stories they’d write would differ just as the
“tone of voice” of the reveries they’d engage in would be different.
Letter to Jo-an, November 4, 1963
He gave similar advice on writing to his granddaughters as in the following letter to Billee’s daughter Gail Stallings when she was in high school.
“Ardudwy,” Gloucester, VA.
Feb. 26, 1966
Dear Gail,
Some great man once observed that it is the privilege of grandfathers to be oratorical, but not many have as good an excuse as you’ve given me. You’re assigned to do the job of writing a short-story. You invite advice. I do not think that advice — certainly in the sense of detailed instruction — does anybody’s writing any good. But your invitation to be oratorical can be stretched into an invitation to be oracular, and I accept it in that meaning.
(a) A story is an entirely different thing from a report. When in school you are told to write a “composition”— which is another name for a report — the school authorities have asked you to tackle one of the most difficult kinds of writing. It’s usually considered the most difficult. An “essay” is notoriously hard to write well. Think of the great fiction-writers and compare their number with adequate essayists, and you’ll see that. So.... To write a story you throw away all you’ve learned about writing compositions or essays or reports. Compositions and reports and essays are supposed to tell you about something. To inform you.
To give you facts. A fiction story is something else entirely.
(b) In writing a fiction story you are not being informative. You are not being factual. You are not telling anybody about a subject like railroads, space-travel or how to make onion soup. They are subjects to write a reports or compositions or essays about. In a fiction story you’re doing something else with them. Suppose you tell about a railroad. People will know more — we hope — for having read and assimilated the information, if it is an essay. But think of a story about a railroad. Somebody once wrote a story about a farmer’s wife somewhere in the middle west, miles from a town or even a neighbor. Everything about her life was drab and deadly. But there was a railroad track that ran beside the farm.
Every evening, at dusk, she went down to watch the 20th Century Limited go by. It was ultra-modern, stainless steel. The cars were brightly lighted. She saw well-dressed people talking. Presently the dining-car came along. She could glimpse in the windows the white table-cloths and shining silver and the people dining. It was like fairyland to her. And this night she went down to the fence, and it went by. It had never looked so brilliant, so splendid, so glamorous. She yearned over it as never before. It went on. And she went back to the farmhouse wringing her hands. Because the railroad had made a new line, cutting off miles of distance to be run. And this was the last time the 20th Century Limited would run past the farm. From now on, until they tore up the track, the rails would be empty.
(c) A story is not about a subject. It is about an experience. The imaginary composition about a railroad would be to some extent about all railroads. It is about all the things that fit into the class of railroad information, though you may limit it to steam railroads, electric railroads, or even the wind-driven railroads 170
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
which on one or two of the guano islands have the empty cars pushed to where they’re loaded with fertilizer and then have sails hoisted and the wind propels them to where they’re to be unloaded. You can, as I said, limit the subject-matter of a report. But the subject-matter of an experience is inherently limited to the person or people, the place, the time, and the event involved. The woman in that railroad story had an experience. The writer of that story made you see, smell, feel, touch, and taste the experience. But much more than that, he made you see what the experience, meant to the person who had it.
(d) To share an experience, you write quite differently from the way you write a report. A story is actually a sort of artificial memory, with the happenings in it arranged sometimes out of chronological order because they are more satisfying to remember them that way, but it is also like a memory in that it calls up an experience. Nobody remembers a party or a swim or a cook-out as a set of words. One remembers sights, sounds, smells, feelings, touches and tastes. To use words to call up sights, sounds, smells, etc. to reproduce those sensations or experiences is the important thing, if the story is to seem like a remembered experience. One of the especially good tricks for doing this, by the way, is to assume everything you mention is alive. Suppose you saw a crooked tree at the edge of a cliff. There was a crooked tree at the end of a cliff. But the impression you’d get and I really shouldn’t have to tell you this (because you do it so often in your poetry) would be that there was a gnarled and crooked tree clinging to the edge of a cliff. A golf-ball isn’t alive when somebody drives through the air. But it is when it goes whistling through the air. And so on and so on and so on.
(e) An experience is inevitably a happening of some sort, even if it’s as limited as the farm-woman going down to watch the luxury-train go by for the last time, and if the action is limited to the wringing
of her hands. Therefore, a story begins when the reader knows that something has to happen; that the state of things in being at the opening is unstable; that it can’t keep on that way; that something is bound to take place. Look at printed stories and you’ll find that this is true. A story begins when something is going to happen so that somebody will have an experience. And it follows that
(f ) A story ends when something can go on indefinitely; when it’s stable; when nothing more is bound to happen. You don’t have to tell the story and then go on like the Arabian Nights to say; “And they lived on until they were separated by the Terminator of Delights and Separator of Companions.” When the thing that has happened has wound itself up,— the story is ended no matter how much you write after it.
(g) I could go on indefinitely. I would like to be oracular and oratorical about the tail-end of a story always being a summing-up of what the experience just told of meant to the person or persons who had it. In my personal writing I always try to have the last lines amount to that. But I do not “report” what it meant to them. I do not, as the author, analyze the significance of what has happened. I try to show the reader what it meant. There’s a high-school book,
“Learning Life from Literature” which has one of my stories in it. It’s about a boy on a whaling ship, and four things that happened to him in it. He wanted to be grown up and a man like the rest of the crew. But they treated him like a boy. (Which he was.) They called him “Tommy.” The last of the four events made him think like a man, though he didn’t realize it. But when the other Eleven • On Writing
171
sailors called him “Tom” he knew he was a man,— and how he’d gotten to be a man. Other men recognized the fact, too.
The last item stems from that. Never tell, in a story, anything you can show, except when you are trying to get by some facts that have to be known before some experience can be experienced. Never say that somebody was a mean person. Show him doing something mean. You can do it simply by saying, “as usual, he twisted the meaning of what Sam had told him, so Sam would get into trouble.” And so on and so on and so on.
If you want more of this, say so. But I suspect this is too much. Anyhow I’ve been oratorical and oracular, and I conclude by being, Tuyo affmo abuelo, Granddaddy
Because she was studying Spanish at the time and because of his love of playing with language, he tried his hand at signing it in Spanish. Later, when she was studying French, he sent her a foreign language copy of Invaders of Space ( L’Astronef Pirate) inscribed in French: A Gail, Ce n’est pas convenable à dire (Ma petit chou) mais c’est convenable à dire (Ma petite fille,— que charmante!) Mais, tiens, Il y a beaucoup de raison!
Grandpère “Murray Leinster” (Will F. Jenkins)
Will was generous with his advice and tips on writing and did not limit it to family and friends. Strangers wrote to him or visited, often bringing stories for critique. He was frustrated with those he felt did not try to understand the market and were rigid about what they wanted to write and how they wanted to write it. Yet they wanted “to hit the big magazines, make a lot of money and be famous.” Will always said he was a professional, like any other professional, and to be a professional you had to sell. He always knew the market, which gave people what they wanted to read, and that was what kept him writing and selling for over 50 years.
In a July 1953 essay on writing for The Writer magazine called “What’s in a Pro,” Will explained:
The professional touch is unmistakable. One cannot miss it in a published story. The amateur touch is also unmistakable. One can only fail to see it in a story of one’s own.
The difference between “professional” and “amateur” is that of perspective, viewpoint, attitude towards the story itself.... An amateur tends to think of a story as a series of incidents which will add up to a narrative, while a professional thinks of a story as a whole — a sum — which can be broken down into incidents for writing. The amateur thinks that if he puts down enough interesting things they will add up to a sum. The professional thinks of a sum and then finds out what parts will add up to it. An amateur writes as he reads someone else’s work, zestfully following his own charming take to find out what is coming next. Most professionals read other people’s work as they write their own; fitting pieces together, as readers, to arrive at a whole.
172
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
This was followed by an exercise in which he invited the aspiring writer to edit a professional, published story.
You are going to edit this story so that it will contain only what the narrator or the protagonist would have known at the moment each incident happened.
For example, you might take Conrad’s “Youth.” The story is about the narrator’s youth, but told where he is much older. You would edit it down to the narrative the boy might have written in the boat before he stepped ashore in the Far East.
Take the first paragraph of your chosen story and cross out every word, every statement, every thought, every implication that would not have been written with no more knowledge than the reader had at the beginning of the tale.
Assume that you are in the exact time and place of the beginning. Cross out everything that you would not put down under exactly those circumstances.
Then go through the story doing the same thing.
You won’t blue-pencil many paragraphs before you see what’s happening to the yarn. It’s losing all organization. It’s ceasing to become a story. It’s becoming a mere sequence of events which don’t seem to be heading somewhere or having any point. Actually you are making the story much more amateurish.... You’ll cut out the difference between amateur and professional writing to such a degree that it will seem nobody could write so badly.
The process goes further. Take the blue-penciled yarn and put it back together again. Restore the blue-penciled parts. But play fair. Restore the stuff you have cut out only when, as, and if you see why it’s there. If you don’t see why it was put there in the first place, leave it out.
I give you a test so you can catch yourself cheating. If you feel inclined to put back everything the original author wrote, you are probably cheating; if you don’t want to put in something the author left out, you are probably cheating.
No two persons, writing honestly, will ever make exactly the same set of incidents say the same thing.
Nobody likes to work. Amateur writers like it less than anybody else, as I should know. But by taking out of a story everything but the narrative (which many amateurs think is the whole story) and then restoring, one discovers what else a good yarn contains — call it hindsight or perspective or point of view or whatever you please. Put two or three or 10 stories through the mill I have described and you are bound to glimpse the professional attitude, the professional touch.
Ned Brooks, editor of the fanzine “It Goes on the Shelf,” lived near Will in Virginia for a while, and was one of the many young fans who visited Clay Bank. Brooks remembers receiving writing advice from Will during one visit that was similar to the blue-penciling of a favorite story discussed above.
“He described a process that he claimed always worked — you would copy out in longhand six times a story by a good writer of the sort you wanted to write, then try to write your story. I have never heard if anyone tried it, or how well it worked.”
It has been estimated that only 5 percent to 10 ten percent of Will’s work Eleven • On Writing
173
was science fiction, despite his importance in that genre, and, as he often said, he wrote it because he loved to read it and to write it.
As he said in an essay on “Writing Science Fiction Today” in the May 1968 issue of The Writer:
There was a time when one had only to write about fantastic places and incredible events and it was called science fiction.... [Now] it has improved out of all recognition. So far as attracting and holding an audience is concerned, it is incomparable. There are countless science fict
ion fan clubs, with regular meetings, annual conventions (up to a thousand people attending), awards, orations and other forms of to-do about the stories which unite science fiction readers into an enthusiastic babbling fellowship.... I have copies of no fewer than fifty strictly amateur magazines put out by science fiction addicts at more or less regular intervals. And I myself have a “Hugo,” rating among science fictioneers with the movie Oscars and the TV Emmy awards. If somebody wants a loyal following, let him write science fiction. A single outstanding story can make his reputation.
But writing of fantastic places and incredible events is no longer the way to break into print. One has only to read the science fiction fans gloat over to notice it. There is still trash, of course, there always will be. But modern science fiction trends to be very solid reading matter.
I think of a fictional “article” by Isaac Asimov, which was called “Pate de Foie Gras.” In this piece, he gravely made a scientific report on the nuclear physics setup which caused an imaginary goose to lay golden eggs. The science was magnificent. It instantly inspired actual nuclear physicists to write the magazine suggesting means — highly technical and beautifully plausible — by which the theoretically sterile golden-egg-laying good could be developed into a breed. For science fiction fans, it was very good fun....
Just before Sputnik crossed our skies, there were more than twenty science fiction magazines on the newsstands. Only a few months later there were three.
(There are more now.) It is one guess that a lot of people were reading those magazines as fantasy only, and they got scared. Another guess is that real science fiction fans felt they had been sold out. They had been reading stories in which artificial satellites were being examined as imaginary, and then they were confronted with them as facts. Satellites had been a matter for speculation, and suddenly they were subjects of newspaper feature articles, which spoiled the fun.
I think Sputnik changed all science fiction. Nowadays a science fiction story very rarely deals with a remarkable gadget whipped up with a pink of this and a dab of that to meet some emergency. A new convention has developed. Just as a detective story writer has to give his readers all the clues he uses to solve his mystery ... so a science fiction writer has to give his readers all the “science” they want to think about the story....
Murray Leinster Page 22