The first of these instructional essays, written in late 1935, titled “The Manuscript Factory,” is where Ron brings the sharp, candid and enlightening insight of a seasoned professional to the practical rigors—and rewards—of writing as a craft and career in an intensely competitive marketplace.
The Manuscript Factory
So you want to be a professional.
Or, if you are a professional, you want to make more money. Whichever it is, it’s certain that you want to advance your present state to something better and easier and more certain.
Very often I hear gentlemen of the craft referring to writing as the major “insecure” profession. These gentlemen go upon the assumption that the gods of chance are responsible and are wholly accountable for anything which might happen to income, hours or pleasure. In this way, they seek to excuse a laxity in thought and a feeling of unhappy helplessness which many writers carry forever with them.
But when a man says that, then it is certain that he rarely, if ever, takes an accounting of himself and his work, that he has but one yardstick. You are either a writer or you aren’t. You either make money or you don’t. And all beyond that rests strictly with the gods.
I assure you that a system built up through centuries of commerce is not likely to cease its function just because your income seems to depend upon your imagination. And I assure you that the overworked potence of economics is just as applicable to this business of writing as it is to shipping hogs.
You are a factory. And if you object to the word, then allow me to assure you that it is not a brand, but merely a handy designation which implies nothing of the hack, but which could be given to any classic writer.
Yes, you and I are both factories with the steam hissing and the chimneys belching and the machinery clanging. We manufacture manuscripts, we sell a stable product, we are quite respectable in our business. The big names of the field are nothing more than the name of Standard Oil on gasoline, Ford on a car, or Browning on a machine gun.
And as factories, we can be shut down, opened, have our production decreased, change our product, have production increased. We can work full blast and go broke. We can loaf and make money. Our machinery is the brain and the fingers.
And it is fully as vital that we know ourselves and our products as it is for a manufacturer to know his workmen and his plant.
Few of us do. Most of us sail blithely along and blame everything on chance.
Economics, taken in a small dose, are simple. They have to do with price, cost, supply, demand and labor.
If you were to open up a soap plant, you would be extremely careful about it. That soap plant means your income. And you would hire economists to go over everything with you. If you start writing, ten to one, you merely write and let everything else slide by the boards. But your writing factory, if anything, is more vital than your soap factory. Because if you lose your own machinery, you can never replace it—and you can always buy new rolls, vats and boilers.
The first thing you would do would be to learn the art of making soap. And so, in writing, you must first learn to write. But we will assume that you already know how to write. You are more interested in making money from writing.
It does no good to protest that you write for the art of it. Even the laborer who finds his chief pleasure in his work tries to sell services or products for the best price he can get. Any economist will tell you that.
You are interested in income. In net income. And “net income” is the inflow of satisfaction from economic goods, estimated in money, according to Seligman.
I do not care if you write articles on knitting, children’s stories, snappy stories or gag paragraphs, you can still apply this condensed system and make money.
When you first started to write, if you were wise, you wrote anything and everything for everybody and sent it all out. If your quantity was large and your variety wide, then you probably made three or four sales.
With the field thus narrowed and you had, say, two types of markets to hammer at, you went ahead and wrote for the two. But you did not forget all the other branches you had first aspired to. And now and then you ripped off something out of line and sent it away, and perhaps sold it, and went on with the first two types regardless.
Take my own situation as an example—because I know it better than yours. I started out writing for the pulps, writing the best I knew, writing for every mag on the stands, slanting as well as I could.
I turned out about a half a million words, making sales from the start because of heavy quantity. After a dozen stories were sold, I saw that things weren’t quite right. I was working hard and the money was slow.
Now, it so happened that my training had been an engineer’s. I leaned toward solid, clean equations rather than guesses, and so I took the list which you must have: stories written, type, wordage, where sent, sold or not.
My list was varied. It included air-war, commercial air, western, western love, detective and adventure.
On the surface, that list said that adventure was my best bet, but when you’ve dealt with equations long, you never trust them until you have the final result assured.
I reduced everything to a common ground. I took stories written of one type, added up all the wordage and set down the wordage sold. For instance:
DETECTIVE..............
120,000 words written
30,000 words sold
30,000
---------- = 25%
120,000
ADVENTURE.............
200,000 words written
36,000 words sold
36,000
---------- = 18%
200,000
According to the sale book, adventure was my standby, but one look at 18 percent versus 25 percent showed me that I had been doing a great deal of work for nothing. At a cent a word, I was getting $0.0018 for adventure and $0.0025 for detective.
A considerable difference. And so I decided to write detectives more than adventures.
I discovered from this same list that, whereby I came from the West and therefore should know my subject, I had still to sell even one western story. I have written none since.
I also found that air-war and commercial air stories were so low that I could no longer afford to write them. And that was strange as I held a pilot’s license.
Thus, I was fooled into working my head off for little returns. But things started to pick up after that and I worked less. Mostly I wrote detective stories, with an occasional adventure yarn to keep up the interest.
But the raw materials of my plant were beginning to be exhausted. I had once been a police reporter and I had unconsciously used up all the shelved material I had.
And things started to go bad again, without my knowing why. Thereupon, I took out my books, which I had kept accurately and up to date—as you should do.
Astonishing figures. While detective seemed to be my mainstay, here was the result.
DETECTIVE.............
95,000 words sold
320,000 words written = 29.65%
ADVENTURE...........
21,500 words sold
30,000 words written = 71.7%
Thus, for every word of detective I wrote I received $0.002965 and for every adventure word $0.00717. A considerable difference. I scratched my head in perplexity until I realized about raw materials.
I had walked some geography, had been at it for years and, thus, my adventure stories were beginning to shine through. Needless to say, I’ve written few detective stories since th
en.
About this time, another factor bobbed up. I seemed to be working very, very hard and making very, very little money.
But, according to economics, no one has ever found a direct relation between the value of a product and the quantity of labor it embodies.
A publishing house had just started to pay me a cent a word and I had been writing for their books a long time. I considered them a mainstay among mainstays.
Another house had been taking a novelette a month from me. Twenty thousand words at a time. But most of my work was for the former firm.
Dragging out the accounts, I started to figure up on words written for this and that, getting percentages.
I discovered that the house which bought my novelettes had an average of 88 percent. Very, very high.
And the house for which I wrote the most was buying 37.6 percent of all I wrote for them.
Because the novelette market paid a cent and a quarter and the others a cent, the average pay was: House A, $0.011 for novelettes on every word I wrote for them. House B, $0.00376 for every word I wrote for them.
I no longer worried my head about House B. I worked less and made more. I worked hard on those novelettes after that and the satisfaction increased.
That was a turning point. Released from drudgery and terrific quantity and low quality, I began to make money and to climb out of a word grave.
That, you say, is all terribly dull, disgustingly sordid. Writing, you say, is an art. What are you, you want to know, one of these damned hacks?
No, I’m afraid not. No one gets a keener delight out of running off a good piece of work. No one takes any more pride in craftsmanship than I do. No one is trying harder to make every word live and breathe.
But, as I said before, even the laborer who finds his chief pleasure in his work tries to sell services or products for the best price he can get.
And that price is not word rate. That price is satisfaction received, measured in money.
You can’t go stumbling through darkness and live at this game. Roughly, here is what you face. There are less than two thousand professional writers in the United States. Hundreds of thousands are trying to write—some say millions.
The competition is keener in the writing business than in any other. Therefore, when you try to skid by with the gods of chance, you simply fail to make the grade. It’s a brutal selective device. You can beat it if you know your product and how to handle it. You can beat it on only two counts. One has to do with genius and the other with economics. There are very few men who sell and live by their genius only. Therefore, the rest of us have to fall back on a fairly exact science.
If there were two thousand soap plants in the country and a million soap plants trying to make money and you were one of the million, what would you do? Cutting prices, in our analogy, is not possible, nor fruitful in any commerce. Therefore you would tighten up your plant to make every bar count. You wouldn’t produce a bar if you knew it would be bad. You’d think about such things as reputation, supply, demand, organization, the plant, type of soap, advertising, sales department, accounting, profit and loss, quality versus quantity, machinery, improvements in product, raw materials and labor employed.
And so it is in writing. We’re factories working under terrific competition. We have to produce and sell at low cost and small price.
Labor, according to economics in general, cannot be measured in simple, homogenous units of time such as labor hours. And laborers differ, tasks differ, in respect to amount and character of training, degree of skill, intelligence and capacity to direct one’s work.
That for soap making. That also for writing. And you’re a factory whether your stories go to Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s or an upstart pulp that pays a quarter of a cent on publication. We’re all on that common level. We must produce to eat and we must know our production and product down to the ground.
Let us take some of the above-mentioned topics, one by one, and examine them.
Supply and Demand
You must know that the supply of stories is far greater than the demand. Actual figures tell nothing. You have only to stand by the editor and watch him open the morning mail. Stories by the truckload.
One market I know well is publishing five stories a month. Five long novelettes. Dozens come in every week from names which would make you sit up very straight and be very quiet. And only five are published. And if there’s a reject from there, you’ll work a long time before you’ll sell it elsewhere.
That editor buys what the magazine needs, buys the best obtainable stories from the sources she knows to be reliable. She buys impersonally as though she bought soap. The best bar, the sweetest smell, the maker’s name. She pays as though she paid for soap, just as impersonally, but many times more dollars.
That situation is repeated through all the magazine ranks. Terrific supply, microscopic demand.
Realize now that every word must be made to count?
Organization and the Plant
Do you have a factory in which to work? Silly question, perhaps, but I know of one writer who wastes his energy like a canary wastes grain just because he has never looked at a house with an eye to an office. He writes in all manner of odd places. Never considers the time he squanders by placing himself where he is accessible. His studio is on top of the garage, he has no light except a feeble electric bulb and yet he has to turn out seventy thousand a month. His nerves are shattered. He is continually going elsewhere to work, wasting time and more time.
Whether the wife or the family likes it or not, when the food comes out of the roller, a writer should have the pick and choice, say what you may. Me? I often take the living room and let the guests sit in the kitchen.
A writer needs good equipment. Quality of work is surprisingly dependent upon the typewriter. One lady I know uses a battered, rented machine which went through the world war, judging by its looks. The ribbon will not reverse. And yet, when spare money comes in, it goes on anything but a typewriter.
Good paper is more essential than writers will admit. Cheap, unmarked paper yellows, brands a manuscript as a reject after a few months, tears easily and creases.
Good typing makes a good impression. I have often wished to God that I had taken a typing course instead of a story writing course far back in the dim past.
Raw Materials
Recently, a lady who once wrote pulp detective stories told me that, since she knew nothing of detective work, she went down to Center Street and sought information. The detective sergeant there gave her about eight hours of his time. She went through the gallery, the museum, looked at all their equipment and took copious notes.
And the sergeant was much surprised at her coming there at all. He said that in fifteen years, she was the third to come there. And she was the only one who really wanted information. He said that detective stories always made him squirm. He wished the writers would find out what they wrote.
And so it is with almost every line. It is so easy to get good raw materials that most writers consider it quite unnecessary.
Hence the errors which make your yarn unsalable. You wouldn’t try to write an article on steel without at least opening an encyclopedia, and yet I’ll wager that a fiction story which had steel in it would never occasion the writer a bit of worry or thought.
You must have raw material. It gives you the edge on the field. And so, one tries to get it by honest research. For a few stories, you may have looked far, but for most of your yarns, you took your imagination for the textbook.
After all, you wouldn’t try to make soap when you had no oi
l.
The fact that you write is a passport everywhere. You’ll find very few gentlemen refusing to accommodate your curiosity. Men in every and any line are anxious to give a writer all the data he can use because, they reason, their line will therefore be truly represented. You’re apt to find more enmity in not examining the facts.
Raw materials are more essential than fancy writing. Know your subject.
Type of Work
It is easy for you to determine the type of story you write best. Nothing is more simple. You merely consult your likes and dislikes.
But that is not the whole question. What do you write and sell best?
A writer tells me that she can write excellent marriage stories, likes to write them and is eternally plagued to do them. But there are few markets for marriage stories. To eat, she takes the next best thing— light love.
My agent makes it a principle never to handle a type of story which does not possess at least five markets. That way he saves himself endless reading and he saves his writers endless wordage. A story should have at least five good markets because what one editor likes, another dislikes and what fits here will not fit there. All due respect to editors, their minds change and their slant is never too iron-bound. They are primarily interested in good stories. Sometimes they are overbought. Sometimes they have need of a certain type which you do not fill. That leaves four editors who may find the desired spot.
Writers of the Future: 29 Page 12
