Pulprack

Quantity Production

[This editor's blurb appeared within the following article by Arthur J. Burks in the June 1937 issue of WRITER'S DIGEST:

"Among the 41,000 readers of WRITER'S DIGEST are the best paid authors in the world. In the pulp field, none is better known than Arthur J. (for nothing) Burks. Over 10,000 sheets of manuscript from the Burks typewriter have gone to editors' offices never to return... How does Art Burks write? What are his sincere, deep-seated ideas on writing? Had we asked for them, we would have received some sort of kidding collect wire. (We are the world's champion receiver of collect wires.) But Art Burks as with many another Digest reader, including both dime-a-worders and WPA-filler-out-of-forms, sat himself down one fine day and wrote us a letter about himself, his work, and his ideas. It's the sort of honest personal thing we like to publish."]

QUANTITY PRODUCTION

By Arthur J. Burks

This article may do you harm. If it does I am sorry. It may do you good; if it does I'll be happy. Maybe some of the things in this article will startle or dismay you. I ask you to read it then, with an open mind, as something based on the experiences of a writer who has been knocking at the doors of editorial offices for sixteen years.

I began to write to make money. But that was not really true. I began to write because I wanted to be read, to be noticed, to have more people conscious of me, to express myself. I have sold millions of words. I have written other millions of words that did not sell. Why, then, did I write other words -- millions of them -- when experience had proved to me that I could write stuff that would sell?

I'll try to tell you. It may help you through the morass of your own troubles with this writing profession. It may cause rejections to take on new meaning to you.

A dear friend who is an agent wrote me recently: "If I were agenting for you, I'd make you write less. I'd make you revise, and work from outlines. In other words, I'd make you *slant*."

I know myself better than fully a dozen editors, agent, and fellow-writers, who, down the years, have said this to me: "You write too fast. You're too careless. You should take more time. You should do this, you should do that."

I know myself better than various men and women who have taken my manuscripts hot from the typewriter and fixed them up for the magazines. Not one of those hybrid stories ever sold, though those collaborators knew more about markets than I did.

When I am not writing, or thinking about a story, there is no living with me. I pace the floor. My family gets out of my way or gets stepped on. My children get kicked across the room. My wife gets her head bitten off if she smiles and says: "How are you, darling?" If the telephone rings I bite the ear off the caller when I say hello. If the door slams I pull my hair and shriek. Traffic outside my window drives me nuts. Everything is wrong, nothing goes right. I hear every sound and it rasps my nerves like a rusty file drawn over a rusty rasp. Absence of sound is even more maddening. I hate my food and my drink. I hate everybody including myself. I won't do anything anybody wants me to do. I can't stay inside, I won't go out. I'm utterly and completely impossible, and the fact that this is so makes me worse than ever.

My family walks on tiptoe and I give 'em hell for not making noise. If they make a noise I shatter them with words of irritation. They don't smile when I'm like that, and I give 'em hell for bothering me with long faces. If they smile I ask 'em what the hell there is to smile about when I'm suffering so. It's simply that I'm not writing.

But when I'm writing, ah, there's the difference! I like to write, I have to write, or go mad. And the more I want to write the faster words tumble over themselves to get onto paper. I'm happy. I'm as interested in the outcome of my story as I dimly hope my readers will be -- though right then I don't think about readers or editors or anybody else, except the matter of getting my story on paper. It burns inside me, trying to get out, and I'm happy when it's streaking across the pages at top speed. Editors say I'm careless: I'm not. I'm sold on my story to the exclusion of all else. My fingers won't keep up with my mind--and typographical errors therefore seem to prove to editors that they're right in calling me careless.

My fingers are simply not fast enough, because two of mine do the work of ten. I go do fast, am so burned up with my story that my brain goes right on while I'm changing paper in the machine, as a result of which I have to read back and put in the two or three words at the top-left of the page that I kept on writing in my head and didn't get down on paper.

Do I make myself clear?

Then let's go on, I'm writing this the same way I write stories. All right. I'm happy as I write. When I stop to catch my breath at the end of the first five thousand words, I go roaming through the house and have a smoke. The baby is crying. The radio is screaming at the top of its lungs. The neighbors are yelling over the back fence at my family, and my family is yelling back. Everybody is happy and laughing and making enough noise to waken the dead. And I don't give a damn! I'm happy, too, because I'm smoking it up again. People can yell in my ear and I may hear them or not, but whether I do or not, the typewriter goes right on smoking. Nothing bothers me, absolutely nothing. The phone rings and I answer intelligibly, with my eyes on my typewriter, my fingers itching to get back to work.

And when I've finished the story it may or may not sell; but by the Lord Harry that story is mine! I gave birth to it. I was happy to do it. I wanted to write it. I enjoyed every second spent at the machine. And I'm still so happy about it I'm itching to go right on to the next one. And the next one is easy because I feel that way. I read it back for error. I change what I find. I shoot it out. It sells or it doesn't sell. Quite often it doesn't. And even if I do need a check, there are other stories in the mail, and experience has taught me that a certain percentage of them will come romping home with dough on their tails. And the reject is money in the bank.

How do I explain that? I've sold stories that were seven years old. I've sold stories -- lots of them -- that were two years old. I get more rejects than the so-called "successful" writer in the pulp field. I think I appear in about as many magazines as the general run. Percentage takes care of me.

Put it like this. An editor asks me for a story, as editors sometimes do, but he wants an outline first. I send it to him. He rips it apart, suggests changes ranging from title change to complete upsetting of the story. I do the best I can with it. I can slant, and when the time comes that I'm forced to, I shall probably slant -- and all the zest for writing will be burned out of me as it has burned out of so many writers I know. Why? I'm a good enough hack to make a saleable story out of that returned outline, just as I'm a good enough hack to make sweeping revisions if I have to get paid to meet a bill. But the fire is gone. Writing has become a chore rather than a delight. And the resultant story, while it has my name on it, is really the work of the editor who ordered it, or the agent who insisted that I revise, or the collaborator who is sure he can make me rejectless. Yes, I get the money for it, but there's no great joy in that either, for by rights it would go to the editor, the agent or the collaborator. He has simply used my knack of writing to get the story he wants, in the way he wants, for what he considers to be his public. The story is a child born on the wrong side of town.

Understand, this is how I feel about it. The editor is right according to his lights. So is the agent. But when I'm writing I write to express myself, not the agent or the editor. If I were a stage director, would I rehearse the actors until everyone was a pale copy of myself, or would I try to bring out the best in them, their own personalities?

The agent will doubtless say: "If Burks can sell every story by slanting, he's a fool not to slant." But if slanting disgusts me, makes me utterly and completely unhappy, to the point where I can't write at all, what good is money? I've made a lot of it in my time, so much that I learned something that every writer knows, or will know sooner or later--that money is far from being the whole fruit. Even pulpsters -- who sneer at "art" -- need food for their souls on occasion. Else how can they enjoy life?

I have long barren periods when I don't sell anything worth mentioning.

When I analyze those periods I find that, because I need money, I am killing myself, becoming an insomniac, trying to slant -- and getting rejects because, when all is said and done, I don't believe in my stories. And when I don't believe in them neither will my editors or my readers.

Most of the stories I write are as close to being exactly what I want to write as I can make them. I love them. They bring me happiness. They are justification for writing at all. They are my attempts to express what's in me, and that has to come out.

An editor says (usually to someone else): "Burks writes too many duds. I'm prejudiced against his work the minute I see it." What's my answer?

I gave it in the beginning of this article. I write to express myself. When I do that I am happy. I want life to be a happy one. Percentage takes care of the question of food and drink; and when I sit down among my stories, I don't need to make a blood-test to know that there isn't a bastard in the lot.

Both the published and unpublished stories are beacons, showing me the way to wherever I may be going in my profession. I don't want to hate my profession. When I do, I shall find another one. Now and again editors give me a chance to write the way I want to. I'm proud of those stories when they are printed. I've probably written more of them, for Leo Margulies than any other editor. Next comes F. Orlin Tremaine, from whom I get few rejects, for whom I rarely make a major revision.

Men and women associated with me in my profession are wont to say: "Oh, Burks, the guy with all the agents!" Right, but that doesn't tell the story. When I find an agent who tries to help develop me, help me develop my ideas, instead of trying to make me a carbon copy of himself, that agent and I will go places. I'll make money enough to satisfy him, and be sufficiently happy to satisfy myself. Agents sometimes take individual stories into editorial offices for me; but for most of my professional life I have handled my won pulp output, going and coming.

I'll write what I wish to write, in all sincerity. I may never make the money the slanter makes, nor get his word-rate. But aside from his bank-account--by no means the only symbol of happiness, as one who has had bank-accounts can testify--how does his happiness compare with mine? And if it doesn't, what, really, does his profession profit him?

You'll last longest in the profession that makes you happy. The slanter is more "successful" than I am; but I'm curious about where each of us will be ten years from now if we live.

This article is a perfect example of what I mean. I don't expect much money from it; but I want to write it. I have to write it. I've an order on my desk for a 20,000-word story; but it has to wait for me, I am not a slave to it!

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[Editor's Note: Very little has been written about Arthur J. Burks since he faded from the pulp magazine markets in the 1940s and pursued other literary ventures, including spending several years in the Brazilian jungles to research and write books. For the most detailed article available covering Burks' military and writing career, read Peter Ruber's essay in Arkham's Masters of Horror, Arkham House, 2000. It is available at Amazon.com by clicking here.]