How to be a Successful Writer
(or even an editor - well this is how I did it)
by
Barbara Hayes
Published by Bretwalda Books at Smashwords
Copyright © Barbara Hayes 2010
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ISBN 978-1-907791-13-0
Contents
Introduction
Starting off Right
Good General Advice
First Writing Steps
Style
More General Advice
What to do if you are Losing Readers
More Basic Rules and Writer’s Block
To Work through an Agent or Not
Talent, Facts and Ghosts
Useful Survival Hints and Writing to Length
How to Work with Artists
And Talking of Drunks...
How to Write for Picture Strips
Identical Scripts, Pranksters and Other Problems
Horrors in your Path
How to Answer Readers’ Letters
Isn’t it all Strange?
Conclusion
Published Works written by Barbara Hayes
Introduction
Do you know the difference between an author and a writer?
An author seeks the fame and the glory, but a writer expects to be paid.
Always remember, you want to be a writer.
In the old days my type of writer was called a Fleet Street Hack, but with the arrival of computers the word ‘hack’ has come to have a completely different meaning.
So perhaps we should be talking about ‘jobbing writers’ - I will try to remember. In any case we mean someone who has no grand ideas, but who takes any legitimate writing job going - and glad of it.
The old Fleet Street Hacks I did know gave me a lot of good advice including - “Never trust anyone, especially newspaper people.” (and newspaper people said: “Never trust television people!”) - and - “Listen dear, until you know what the fee is, don’t even take the cover off your typewriter”.
Now in the beginning I was a poor little girl from Watford, near London, who went to the local Grammar School, became head girl, took a six months secretarial and accountancy course and then went to work in the Big City.
This book contains the hints and cunning tricks (like working hard) which helped me to become a well paid writer, who now lives in comfortable retirement.
I have already passed on my words of wisdom to my son, who has had over 200 books published.
So something I am saying must be correct.
By the way, I spent most of my working life in magazines, so forgive me if I sometimes talk about magazines. The hints I give work just as well for newspapers, radio stations and other forms of writing.
I hope these hints will help you too.
Good luck!
Chapter 1
Starting off Right
Get a job in a publishing house(or in the same building will do.)
For an aspiring writer, this is the best advice in the world
The only jobbing writers I ever knew all started off working on the staff in editorial. This a cruel fact, but true. Starting any other way is a long hard haul and you have to pitch up in editorial in the end. At the Amalgamated Press we were paid a fairly low basic salary for doing our regular jobs - secretary, sub editor, art editor, editing weeklies, editing annuals or summer specials - whatever, but we were paid extra fees if we got any writing or artwork accepted and which was published in one of the publications. After a while I was doubling and trebling my salary with ‘freelance’ work.
So there you are - if you possibly can, even if you are sweeping the floor or making the tea, get into the premises of a publishing house.
If Daddy owns the company and you can start at the top, so much the better.
But even starting at the very bottom is good. If you are in the office where the magazines/books/newspapers are being put to press, you will see what sort of work is wanted, in what form it is wanted, who is commissioning/accepting/rejecting it.
Once you are in the building, try to work near the person who is commissioning some simple work which there is a remote chance you might be able to produce. That is to say the writing concerns something you know about.
Make yourself useful. Offer to do anything - retype someone else’s manuscript - count pages - go to see a writer/artist in your own time to pick up late work - fetch the doughnuts - anything which needs doing.
For weeks be happy to look at the work being accepted from other people. You will see the format and style the editor likes.
Getting your first job of real paid-for writing is extremely difficult.
Don’t be discouraged if it takes a long time. Remember everyone else is trying to get paid work - and most of them were there before you. Also you should realize that getting a publication ready for the printers is a relentless and merciless task. Everyone already established on the staff will always be busy getting work ready for press day.
Well-paid-for-work will already be assigned to experienced writers.
Trying to get anyone to consider your efforts is firstly pushing an existing writer out of a job and secondly embarrassing your fellow workers, because any colleague who looks at your work will need to tell you where you are going wrong.
As going wrong you will be.
Asking for work is no way to make friends, however one good way into writing is to offer to do the work that absolutely no one else wants to do - And that is to answer readers’ letters.
If you are in a publishing house with large circulation magazines or newspapers, there will be special departments for answering readers’ letters. Correspondence Departments we used to call them. These departments normally have quite a staff turnover as the work is tedious and depressing. So there is a good place to apply for a job when you are trying to find a way into, or at least nearby, editorial.
Even being in the same building as editorial is a step in the right Direction.
You meet people going up and down in the lift. You chat to them in the staff canteen. And of course you always look smart, clean and act well-behaved.
Answering readers’ letters may not be your idea of literary fulfilment. Your work will not be published, but you will most certainly be writing and all writing is good practice. At the end of this book I will give you some brief guidance on how to answer readers’ letters. Long, long ago I worked for two years in the Correspondence Department of a national woman’s magazine, then selling some three million copies every week in Great Britain and receiving readers’ letters by the sackful - so I do know what I am talking about.
But now back to the editorial office and how you are struggling to get your start. Incidentally all this ambitious effort would have to take place in a non-union house. Don’t even start me on the old Fleet Street print unions - let us hope you never have to struggle with the likes of them.
Anyway, if you are working on a small publication which does not usually invite readers’ letters there will be ten to twenty of them arriving a week anyway - all kicking from one person’s desk to another with everyone too busy to deal with them.
Look at them. Write a sample reply. Show this to the editor/sub editor/whoever.
Offer to answer all the readers’ letters as well as doing your normal work. Or of course if your office never gets readers’ letter, offer to do some other type of boring, unglamourous work which no one else wants to do.
You will be greeted like a saint from heaven.
Assuming you are answering letters, give drafts of your replies to the letters to whoever has the authority to sign them. Don’t forget to read the advice I give you at the end of the book. Readers’ letters are a minefield, believe me, but that is why everyone will be so grateful to you for dealing with them.
If the drafts are approved, put them through the computer on the correct headed notepaper. Get them signed by someone really in authority.
Importantly, no one with any experience or sense ever signs a letter to a reader with their own personal name. Always use and notice that other people always use the pseudonym of the agony column or the name of the character in the set to whom the reader has written. e.g. from Aunt Agatha or from Furry Bunny’s Human Secretary - whatever.
Keep a note of the names and addresses of the people to whom you send letters and which person superior to you okayed them.
If for some reason a reader sues, you want to be covered.
I must say again: Never ever answer a reader’s letter on your own authority however old the letters are nor however much they need clearing up. Readers can be dynamite and are capable of seizing on anything unwary, wrong, or misspelt you might have written and spreading it around to get themselves on television, in the national press, you sacked from your job - anything to bring some colour into their dull lives.
In spite of these risks, offering to shoulder the burden of dealing with readers’ letters or some other piece of drudgery, is always a good move. If you keep the office clear of readers’ letters everyone will love you. You will be showing the editor a sample of your creative writing and more important you will be getting good lessons in what the readers are thinking.
What to do if you do not Live near a Publishing House
If you do not live near a publishing house and have no chance of getting a job in editorial, your task is more difficult.
Sending in samples of your masterpieces to magazines/book publishers is rarely productive. Remember, the people who have finally made it into editorial are busy writing copy themselves or giving spare work to their friends and established writers.
Why should they bother with licking into shape anything you send in from the back of beyond? There is nothing in that for them. They are not going to do it, are they! Would you?
However do not despair.
Go to the bookshops and magazine stalls. Look at what is being published. Look at what sells the most. See in what form it is written. Practice writing the same sort of thing to the same length. Then read all the following general and writing advice and if you really cannot get near a publishing house, send some short work in by post.
It must be short because you do not want to spend a lot of time working on something for which you will not be paid - because you won’t be - and because the editor or office boy or whoever reads it will not bother to read more than a few words.
If they think you are any good, they might offer you some work - especially if you have some sort of specialised knowledge.
In this market place of life, it is always good to have something to offer.
So while you are waiting to become the twenty-first century’s gift to literature, work at something else which will increase your knowledge of human nature - like being a waitress or a brain surgeon - whatever life puts in your path.
Get specialised knowledge which everyone else would love to have but never gets round to learning, like how to cook meals without generating washing up or how to fix your computer when it goes wrong.
All knowledge of this cruel, unforgiving world will help you with writing. Earning a wage at doing something else will enable you to eat while you are waiting for writing commissions.
If at your long distance from centres of literature you are ever offered any writing commissions take them whatever they are. That is if they are legal and non pornographic.
Always staying respectable and without sin is the second rule of jobbing writing. When you are a successful newspaper columnist and the whole world is out to get you, starting with the fellow at the next desk who wants your job, but there is nothing in your past on which they can get you, then you will thank me for the foregoing advice.
But now let us get back to those who live within reach of the big city and editorial offices. Hopefully by now you are working diligently at your lowly, modest editorial job.
Chapter 2
Good General Advice
Know how to write correct grammatical English.
Whether everyone else likes it or not English is the world language. All writing that makes any real money is sold internationally. It may be translated into and printed in the local language in most countries, but the master copy which goes from the original publisher to all the little printing presses in every tiny island or great continent must be written in English. It must be in correct, grammatical English so that every translator who may or may not be all that experienced has a good chance of making a correct translation and even catching a flavour of the emotion and or humour of the original.
Correct grammatical English is becoming quite rare. I read terrible mistakes in national newspapers and hear them on the BBC, but that is no reason why your standards should slip. Get yourself a book of English grammar preferably published sometime in the 1930s. That will put you right.However your problems will not be over even when you have studied your book from cover to cover.
To write picture strips or chatty, friendly books, you will need to speak correct Colloquial English - much, much more difficult.
If you are not a natural English speaker you can find yourself saying things as in these notices seen in hotel rooms around the world:
The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.
You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.
If this is your first visit to China, you are welcome to it.
And again only a few days ago on the radio I heard a Frenchman speaking really good English with scarcely an accent. He was talking about corruption in French politics and commented “What a shame!”
No English person would use that phrase in that connection. When speaking of corruption in politics an English person would say that “It was shameful”. These differences are small, but they scream off the page.
If you write this sort of thing your work will become a laughing stock and will probably influence any struggling translator to make yet further mistakes.
By the way - if you saw nothing wrong with the above quotations then you have a long, hard road to travel. So if you are not a natural English speaker, but you are writing in English always get your work read through by an English person if you can.
Incidentally, do not believe the Scots when (as they never tire of doing) they tell you that they speak better, clearer English than English people do. They don’t. They merely think they do because they are used to hearing each other’s accents.
If you want to improve your colloquial English, you will need to spend time talking to English people, preferably from the south and near London. Scots, Welsh, Irish and people from the regions may be beautiful human beings, but southern, standard English is what you need for your success.
Home Counties English can be understood wherever English is spoken or read. Regional British accents or accents from other continents cannot. That is a brutal fact of life. Witness the failure of telephone call centres for Britain located abroad.
However if you are not a correct or chatty English speaker, do not give up hope. If you come from a land like China which has a huge population and therefore a large potential readership of its own - enough to buy your writing and keep you in the comfort to which you would like to become accustomed, then do not worry so much about any lack of English. But be sure you speak the most prevalent language of your target market area and write it correctly.
Learn to touch type. If you are being paid by the thousand words, the sooner you get them down on paper or on a file through the email or whatever the latest system is, the sooner the cheque will come plopping through your letterbox or the money transfer will get to your bank..
While we are talking about money:
Here is some financial advice:
Always keep proper account books and keep them up to date.
It is well worth going to a few lessons in accountancy.
Always make proper tax returns. (See above about not leaving anything bad in your past.)
As cheques, internet transfers, whatever, come in, put the tax percentage aside in a special bank account which you never touch until tax paying time arrives. Remember it is not your money.
The above suggestions may seem to counsel the most obvious sensible behaviour, but the financial tragedies some free lances make of their lives are beyond belief.
But we were talking about touch typing and the like:
Always be up to date with modern inventions.
The intellectual elite authors may say that writing with pencil in a notebook is the only way to communicate with your muse, but believe me editors with jobs on offer and money to pay for them expect your work on files sent through email from a Quarkxpress programme on an AppleMac computer or on a Word file compatible to .docx files. (Those editors I know at the time of writing this do anyway.) More modern methods may prevail at your time of reading. Whatever the most modern method is - learn it.
Some Essential Advice
Know and respect your potential readers.
If you are going to make money, you must write for the mass market. That is to say you are writing for the working classes/blue collar workers/farm labourers or whatever they are called where you come from. There are more of them than any other group. You should know instinctively what will warm these peoples’ hearts.
Ideally you yourself should be working class and have gone through the state education system, like your readers.
If your name is Sharon, Tracy or Wayne you start with a better chance at being a mass market writer than do Jeremy, Arabella or Fiona.
(This is an in joke for English people).
If there is the tiniest thought in your head that you will be writing this everyday material only to get a start and that one glorious day you will write the novel of the century and win literary prizes, stop now.
You must want to write for the labouring masses or you will never be any good at it. If you are writing in downmarket journalism forget yourself and write to please your readers.
Look at them as you travel on the underground or trudge around doing your shopping. Go into a newsagents’ shop and notice the people who are buying the publications for which you hope to write.
These are the people you must please. What are they like?
On the train, bus or underground on the way home they are mostly tired. Three quarters of them are pale, pasty faced with bad complexions as if they do not eat sensibly. Few are well dressed. Not many are good looking. Their hair is not shampooed frequently enough. Their shoes are scuffed. (Of course this does not apply to Italians who are a race apart where self-presentation is concerned.)
But don’t knock these people in their scruffy mediocrity. The most unlikely people can behave with a bravery, nobility and steadfastness you would never believe to look at them.
I saw people of all classes and types behaving magnificently for six weary years when my country was at war. The experience left me with a great respect for my fellow men.I also realised that you will never know how people will react until they are actually put to the test.
The folk you thought would be brave can sit there shaking.
The mildest mice, as you thought them, stroll around amongst the falling bombs and flying shrapnel organising rescues as if they were drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches.
But then sometimes those you thought would be brave are brave and those you thought would panic do panic.
You never know until it happens.
So respect even the most frivolous people you see around you and remember that you can write stories of their steadfastly enduring adversity, acting with foolhardy courage or cracking up over nothing because they are capable of all of it.
But let us get back to thinking of what these not very well off people will want to read so much that they will actually take money out of their pockets and put it down on the counter.
They will want something that comes in short bites and easy reading because they are tired. Also the washing machine awaits its next load of dirty clothes, someone has to vacuum up sometime and the beds can’t stay unchanged for another week. There is not much time for sitting around.
If they are to be tempted to read, your audience needs something which will make them feel good; something to lift them out of themselves and with enough relevance to their own lives to engage their sympathy.
They need something they can pick up and put down and read in short bursts.
Now you know the people you must please, here is how to set about becoming a published writer. Not a great writer, not one who is changing the face of publishing, but one who is getting paid.
When an editor desperately needs some copy and it does not have to be great literature, but it has to be the right length and in by Friday, you want to reach the situation when he immediately thinks of you. The idea of contacting anyone else should not cross his mind. He should grab the phone and dial your number at once.
That is the sort of writer you need to be.
And proud of it.
Chapter 3
First Writing Steps
By now let us hope you have moved up from answering readers’ letters or making the tea and are a sub-editor on the least glamourous lowest circulation magazine in the company. No one else wants to work on it. That is how you got the job.
Perhaps it is called:
How to knit your own school uniform cardigan.
And believe me, if you were good enough, you could turn that into the country’s best seller.
I’ve known people who could.
You are thrilled with your little job. You are helpful to all and every morning arrive on time and tidily dressed.
Your English grammar is perfect and whenever copy runs short by a line or half a line or someone has forgotten to write under the Join the Dots puzzle, that in order to see the picture, readers should join the dots numbered 1 to 20, you are trusted to write in what is missing. Your dazzling career has started. You feel that soon you should be writing some original stories or the factual feature boxes.
Here is how you know what to write.
I was once sitting at my desk working on a paysheet at half past two on a Friday afternoon, when the managing editor came walking round in and out of all the offices seeing who was still drinking in the pubs and who was back working.
Needless to say I was back working, as so would you have been in your ambitious little way. Lying on my desk was a picture postcard of the front at Brighton (an English seaside resort), sent by a staff member on holiday.
As it happened this managing editor lived near Brighton. He picked up the card interested in it at once and said: “Now I will give you the best bit of editorial advice you will ever get.”
And he did.
“People like the familiar,” he said. “You show someone a picture of a place to which they have been and they will look at it, pore over it, point out the hotel they stayed at, remember what the weather was like when they walked along the front. They will be interested in whether the town has changed since they were there.
“Show them a picture of a place they have never been to and have little chance of ever going to and they will give it a quick glance and move on. People like familiar things. They like things relevant to their lives either emotionally or through their backgrounds. It is your job to take those things and do something with them which will be compulsively interesting.”
How true!
Always remember this especially if you intend to write fiction. When you are working out your plots, look at the people around you. Let your ideas spring from the lives these people lead and the backgrounds they inhabit. What could happen tomorrow to fulfill their dreams? And I don’t mean winning the lottery. What could just possibly really happen? Like a supermarket chain paying them a lot of money for their house because the company needs that bit of land to make an entrance for their lorries.
Your target market needs something for a laugh or something absolutely thrilling - a marginally possible, terrifying ghost story - a plot where some local young heroes defeat a gang of local murdering car thieves. That is real enough in my England. And for the girls, well we’re tired of the old ones about girls who become models - boring. We all know it does not happen, not down our street anyway.
But how about the girl who studies hair dressing and make-up techniques. There are those in every town. She has a good eye and a sympathetic manner and gets to be make up girl to some medium weight celebs (by the way try to avoid slang. It can date your work terribly. I should have said celebrities.) and learns their secrets. We all know how people chatter at the hairdresser’s. Then the girl gets pressured by newspaper reporters to tell all - and then - and then - that is a perfectly possible scenario for hundreds of girls next door.
You need to write something more thrilling than every day lives to lift people out of themselves, but make it relevant to what is familiar to them so that they can just imagine themselves doing it - and then succeeding, and making enough money to live without worry - what a lovely dream.
Mysteries are always good. They take people out of themselves - but again set them in suburban streets. Don’t bother too much about the countryside settings. More people live in the towns than in the country. So there are more urban readers. Anyway ideally you are an urban dweller yourself. Do you know anything about the countryside? Of course not.
Do you want to know anything about those lonely fields full of animals and insects all eating each other as fast as they can get their mouths open? Of course you don’t and neither do many of your target readers.
But to get back to the mystery plots. A stranger knocks at someone’ door one day and asks for the previous occupants of the house. He strikes up a friendship with the present owners because - he has hidden something illegal in the attic - garden - whatever - and now he wants to get it back - or he knows the previous owners buried a body under the patio and wants to trace them to blackmail them. These things happen. People read about them in the newspapers. They know they could happen to them. You can build good stories round such themes.
Anyway - come on - try to think of some plots for yourselves.
Dot them down in a notebook and keep it. Years from now it could come in handy, even if only as a sample of the way people were thinking back whenever.
Your work doesn’t always have to be fiction.These people around you are not fools. Very many of your target group want to increase their knowledge of history, geography, world weather systems, even English grammar. But they have too little time to wade through heavy books - that is your job.
What readers want is accurate, human interest snippets. They want something to read in the half hour when there is nothing on television and until they can drop the magazine over the side of the chair when that programme that’s such a laugh comes on.
How about thinking of 10 people everyone should know about? Dead historical people are best. They cannot sue you. Choose people everyone has heard of, but can never remember the details and dates. Suggest the idea for a box in a magazine with a photograph or illustration and a chattily written paragraph or two to go with it. Write the paragraphs like a gossip column.
How about an item of English Grammar in a box in every issue of your magazine? - Believe me it would be very popular - especially with a comic illustration (expensive unfortunately!) and written in a light hearted style. (By the way I never have understood the subjunctive. How does it differ from the conditional? If anyone could explain that to me I should be grateful.)
Or put in 6 boxes of jokes you can tell at the pub without getting into a fight or 6 boxes of Nobodies from Nowhere who became Somebodies. These could be Nelson, Captain Cook, Francis Drake, William Shakespere, Catherine the Great - all sorts of surprising people).
But of course write only a few samples of any of the above. Show them to the editor and do no more work on them until you have a commission and a fee.
Don’t be upset at making endless good suggestions which are always turned down.
Keep them all handy and in good shape in your desk drawer.
Six months - a year later - an editor can run into your room like a scalded cat and scream “I’ve got to fill a box. I’ve got to fill a box every week for six weeks. First box due at the printers yesterday. Where’s that idea you were showing me ? - A box on Six Jokes to tell down at the Pub without getting into a fight - Or something about English Grammar - whatever it was - dig it out”.
The editor is still screaming at you. “Don’t sit there looking at me. Get on with them.” He will expect you to get at least two examples of the ready copy and artwork out of the drawer as if it were only yesterday that you first suggested the idea and if you say you have thrown them out because he said he did not like the ideas, he will mark you down as an idiot.
I have seen these things happen.
Also if you are always coming up with ideas, you might be chosen to write a small feature thought of by the editor who has no time to write it himself.
Or if a new magazine is being planned you could even be invited into the editorial conference because you seem to be a bit of an original thinker as opposed to the very many who think rehashing old ideas is good enough.
And of course with all your writing keep it short and simple and not too long between the laughs.
Talking of writing in an easy reading style - and that is what we should always be talking about - that brings us to the subject of style.
Chapter 4
Style
Style is something about which I never worry. My dearest friends tell me this is obvious. I belong to the stand up, speak up and shut up school of writing. Years ago one of the twentieth century’s most successful thriller writers said that when he heard writers talking about style, he knew they were fresh out of ideas. He was right.
By the way, you do know the old observation that people with something interesting to say can’t write and that people who can write have nothing interesting to say?
This is all too often true. - See my later rules about avoiding being talented (chapter 9) and also acquiring knowledge (chapter 5). However for the moment, here are the few basics about style to which I try to keep.
Never use bad language.
Time was when noble librarians would ban any book in which there was a swear word - especially books for children. Many individuals (me amongst them) still do not like to see or hear swearing. Just because being foul mouthed is ‘cool’ now does not mean it always will be. The pendulum could swing right back. Therefore, even if only for your own self advancement, do not use bad language.
There are other reasons.
Use one swear word and the next time round it will have lost its impact and you will have to use a stronger one - or two. Next time round, if you wish to impress with your vehemence, you will need to go in deeper, perhaps get blasphemous. It is best never to start. If you cannot convey your meaning clearly and thrillingly in correct, grammatical, expletive free prose, then you should not be a writer.
While we are on the subject of morality, which we vaguely are, in my early days I obtained a job working for a large publishing house in London in the children’s department. Along the corridors between the offices were notices every few yards saying “Silence”. And they meant it. You were there to work, not chatter with your chums. When the managing editor gave me the good news that he was prepared to try me out in the job, he told me that the company could not tolerate any impropriety of behaviour amongst staff who were working on publications for children. If I were involved in any notoriety, any scandal such as having an affair with a married man, I should be asked to leave the premises immediately. Anyone remotely connected with writing for children must be respectable or the dirt might damage the circulation of the magazines.
While I was there three people had to leave. One had written freelance in his own time for a porn magazine which was being prosecuted. The other two were starting an affair and the man was already married. Everyone thought their leaving was completely correct. They had standards in those days, didn’t they? At least they had their own standards.
The amount of drunkenness tolerated, especially from the free-lances was heroic, but I will come to that later in How to work with artists.
Continuing about Style.
Above all and above everything you must write EASY READING.
Do not compose long, dense paragraphs.
Break everything up.
Put in dialogue.
Stop relating the plot and turn aside to address your readers direct, as music hall (Vaudeville) artists used to lean forward and talk to the audience behind their hands.Write as if you are having a quick word with a pal. You are having a quick word with a pal. Remember you like your readers. They are your friends. Write as if you are chatting to them at the bar in the pub. If the publishers will let you, scatter around italics, bold type, capitals. These will convey the tone of voice and the turn of the head, the smile and the shrug of impatience you get in face to face conversation.
Publishers never seem to be keen on this sort of thing. I think they feel ashamed that they are dumbing down too far. But it does break up the appearance of the page and
N.B. to publishers: It is cheaper than commissioning artwork.
Would you like to know how easy reading in magazines came about?
Back in the old days, I happened to find out.
If you look at popular books of eighty to ninety years ago, (I’m talking in 2010) before the days of picture strips, say when Billy Bunter was being written and the thrilling adventure yarns were about Dick Turpin the highwayman. (I’m English remember.) Think back to mass market fiction, if any, at the beginning of the twentieth century in your own territory. The stories were in small print, filling the page from top to bottom with hardly a paragraph to break it up. There might have been a reluctant black and white picture here and there. The whole effect was off putting in the extreme.
As a side thought, considering the lack of electric light in those days, when most folks read by gas or candlelight, they must have had remarkably good eyesight.
But then they all died young didn’t they? Their eyesight did not have time to crack up. Anyway, in those days in the publishing house where I later worked, writers, then as now were paid per thousand words. In those days usually written by hand. Typewriters for the general public were still in the dazzling technological future. Sub editors were employed to do the very time consuming job of counting the hand written words of the writers in order to know how much to pay them. These hours spent counting cost the company money.
One day one naive editor woke up, opened his eyes and knew that he had had a brilliant idea, which he had, but not in the way he thought.
Why waste time counting the words of the stories before they went to the typesetters? Why not send them straight to the typesetters? As usual they would come back for proof reading set up in columns (galleys). A sub editor could swiftly work out roughly how many words would be printed to a page. The number of words would vary slightly according to whether long or short words had been used, but each page would be approximately the same.
Why not pay the writers for their work by the printed page instead of by the thousand words?
All the subs would then need do would be to count the number of pages a story occupied, a task done in a few seconds. All those costly hours spent counting words were to be a thing of the past. How pleased the managing editor would be.
(Stories varied in length. The important writers wrote a story according to its subject matter. Then a lesser writer had to write a short story to fill the remaining pages.)
Brilliant! A sum per page was agreed for each writer. (Writers were paid varying rates according to their popularity).
The editor was smug. The unfortunate young man had reckoned without the cunning, drunken old hacks of Fleet Street.
When they had been paid per thousand words, they had packed as many words as they could into each story in order to be paid more money per publication. Hence the dense appearance of the pages. Now they knew they were being paid per page they reversed that process. Why write words for which they were not getting any extra money? They immediately started breaking their copy up into short paragraphs and put in lots of bursts of repartee. Anything to spread the minimum amount of writing work over the maximum number of pages.
Here is a sample of the sort of thing:
The Bow Street Runners reined their horses to a halt outside the Red Lion Inn.
“Inn keeper! Inn keeper!” they shouted.
The inn keeper rushed out.
“Did you call me?” he asked.
“Yes,” they replied.
“What do you want?” he snapped. “I’m busy.”
“Have you seen Dick Turpin?” asked the Bow Street Runners.
“Have I seen who?” asked the inn keeper.
“Dick Turpin!” they shouted.
“Dick who?” he snapped.
“Dick Turpin!” they roared angrily.
“Never heard of him,” replied the innkeeper.
“You’re lying,” shrieked the Runners. “He was seen here last year.
“Says who?” laughed the innkeeper.
It was not quite as blatant as that, but well on the way.
When the managing editor saw the paysheets at the end of the month and read how much the writers were being paid for fewer than a third of the words they had been writing in the past, he hit the roof. The editor was on the carpet and blood flowed down the silent corridors.
Everything was changed back to be as it had been before. Then an unexpected thing happened. The sales reports came back.
The issues with the broken up paragraphs and lots of dialogue had been selling well. The word back from the newsagents was that the readers liked them and were asking for more.
Hastily the new style of writing was put into every publication possible. A compromise was reached over payment. The editor was picked up, the blood washed off him and he was put back at his desk. Some brilliant soul even thought of increasing the size of the typeface.
Modern easy reading magazines were born.
A last word on style.
Think of what you want to tell the reader and say it in words which convey your meaning as accurately as you know how.
Do not labour to write great prose.
The best way to learn to write well is to read work written in a style you admire. Never struggle to copy it, but if you read a little good work every day the words echo round in your head and with luck may come out again on to your computer screen.
For English writers, in my opinion, the greatest books to read for style are the King James translation of the Bible. (No need to be so archaic of course)
And also the works of Raymond Chandler, that absolutely matchless writer of the twentieth century. If you can combine the beauty of the writing of the translators working for King James in the seventeenth century with Raymond Chandler’s ruthless brevity, then you are made.
(By the way I cannot find it in my heart to recommend for style purposes any modern bible versions I have read. The translations may be more accurate but elegant they are not - in my humble little opinion.)
Just a word on Research:
Genuine academic research is very time consuming - supposing you even have access to a research library - and in the early stages of your career, I would not bother with it.
However acquiring knowledge to a fairly shallow level is extremely important. I will come to this later (chapter 5). And also some things absolutely have to be correct - see later on in How to Work with Artists (chapter 11).
But when I am writing, I always think of Raymond Chandler, whose work I admire so much, who as far as I know led a mild middle class existence, (apart from some years in the trenches in the first world war, which I suppose was enough brutality for anyone). He wrote about gangsters and life in those mean streets of the underworld. Someone once asked him, so I am told, how, when he never mixed with them, he knew all the slang used by gangsters.
“I don’t” he replied. “I make it up as I go along.”
What music to the ears of all writers.
Now let us leave style and go back to some more general advice.
Chapter 5
More General Advice
Hunt with the pack.
Always be on the side of the masses. Genuinely on their side, not writing that way to please the editor.
When you hear of your country‘s/club’s football fans fighting another country's/club’s football fans in running battles through the streets and the sanctimonious politicians stand up wearing sackcloth and ashes wailing how terrible it is; if you think “Good on you lads! Give them one between the eyes for me!”, you are well on your way to success.
Be shallow.
Ideally you are a lightly educated barbarian with no letters after your name, so even when you are well launched into your career, you will never be asked to write a book for experts.
However, as you are cheaper than an expert and as also you can write something readable, you will frequently be asked to write books on special subjects for the general reader. That is to say books covering the subject to a depth suitable for intelligent people who have too much house-maintenance/car cleaning/child-caring/wage-earning to do to have time to more than glance at a book on the train or before falling asleep with the light on in bed.
So read widely yourself. Learn everything you can, but only to a certain depth. You will never need more.
Know offbeat little facts like - when the railways came and slate could be transported cheaply, thatched roofs went out and slate roofs came in for the masses and consequently many diseases died out because they were no longer being spread by the vermin which lived in thatched roofs.
People with AB blood group are descended from the original hunter gatherers who came into Britain at the end of the ice age in 7000 B.C. (I am AB and truly loved that piece of information when I read it - as I am sure will every other AB type. So that is several thousand readers who will go on scanning through this writing in case they learn anything more about themselves - and every reader is a good reader. Incidentally there is another snippet for the AB types, but there is no room here. I will put it into the bit about ghosts later on.
Back to some offbeat little facts - but interesting. (I think so anyway). You needed a passport to travel on the Roman Roads. When Caesar first attacked Britain in 54 B.C. he sent back a report to Rome saying that the inhabitants of Britain were fit only to be sold as slaves for agricultural purposes - the Romans probably think the same to this day. About a hundred or so years later when the Romans invaded seriously the generals wrote back in astonishment to Rome saying that the British warriors would as willingly follow a woman leader into battle as they would follow a man - nothing changes does it - ask Mrs. Thatcher!
These are amusing items which will always fill a space. Read, read, read and store up bits of information.
Readers love to improve their knowledge, but only with fun snippets.
One more little word about what Italians think of English people. I once worked a lot with an artist from Milan and got to know him well enough to ask him what Italians really think of the English. He thought for a bit and then said: “Well the truth is we think you are badly dressed, drunken, northern barbarians, who for some strange reason are uncorrupt and dependable and will fight like hell in a tight corner.”
So there you are folks. Now we know.
And if you are paying attention about learning how to be a mass market writer - I do hope you have not been dozing off - little anecdotes are fun, aren’t they? Try to accumulate them concerning your own people and country. People like reading about themselves.
And a random piece of advice:
Be able to have a drink without becoming an alcoholic.
So many writers and artists seem to drink too much - remind me to tell you why later when there is a bit more time.
For you the rule is never drink when you are writing. Never drink when you are seeing a publisher. Drink only when the work is done, the cheque is in the bank and when you are with personal friends.
Then have a great time - cheers!
Here is some more advice about what to write: Go with the trend.
Don’t be proud. Good ideas do not come around that often. If space adventures are selling like hot cakes - you write space adventures - after you have agreed a fee with a publisher of course. If a picture strip about behind the scenes tennis scandals is pushing up the sales of a newspaper, submit the idea for a picture strip about how to get to the top in tennis to a rival paper.
Of course have it ready with the story line for the next six months, character sketches from an experienced artist and the name of a tennis hero who will give you the inside info. A lot of success comes this way. I will tell you how to write scripts for picture strips and how to deal with artists later on when we have more time.
Of course never copy anything exactly. You do not want to be sued.
Be prejudiced.
The educated, intellectual classes - note my working class prejudice continually coming out - Yeah!.......The educated, intellectual classes call giving info in jolly snippets dumbing down and regard your readers as feckless, couch potatoes.