By Erle Stanley Gardner
(January 1931 Writer’s Digest)

After you’ve written a story, the thing to do is sell it. Sounds simple, and it is, if one will follow certain basic principles of salesmanship.

The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.

In the course of six years of more or less intensive study, I’ve seen every rule laid down by a prominent author contradicted by some other equally prominent author.

“Write of something you know,” says one man, and make it sound reasonable. Then along comes another and says, “You’re writing to get away from the humdrum and take other people away from the humdrum. If you know Fifth Avenue and nothing else, for Heaven’s sake write of the South Seas. If you know Kansas, write of the wild west. Your work will have a freshness of viewpoint and treatment you’d never get from writing of humdrum subjects.”

“Revise, revise, revise,” harps another. “You’re up against stiff competition, and you’ve got to be certain that the work that goes in over your name is as nearly perfect as you can make it. Write your first draft, then cut it, polish it, check it over for trite words, crisp it up, polish it until it sparkles like a jewel.”

And there’s a lot to be said in his favor.

Then along comes some other man and says: “This revision is the bunk. You polish your work, yes; but you polish all the life out of it. Fiction has got to be created at a white heat. What’s more, when you get to writing action fiction for the wood pulps, you’ve got to turn out a quantity if you want to make any money. It’s better to write a new story than revise an old yarn.”

And the name of the man who makes that statement will be the name of a man who sells his stuff right and left.

And so on, ad infinitum. I could cite examples by the hundred. One man claims the average writer jumps at his machine too soon. He hasn’t got all the plot worked out. He should take more time with plot before he starts in on story. Then along comes an H. Bedford Jones with an easy smile and says: “Put a piece of paper in a typewriter. Think of an interesting opening situation. Write it down. Then go on with the story. The characters will take care of developments.”

The bewildered student-writer (in which category is numbered every writer who is worth his salt, whether he’s selling or not) is doomed if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.

Now far be it from me to add to this contradictory mass of advice. It relates to the sales as well as to every other phase of the writing profession. Some man says “Mail out your story, don’t write a letter.” Another chap chirps, “Always write a personal letter to the editor, telling him what you’ve tried to accomplish in the story.” One writer claims that a story should never be sent out more than three or four times without revision. Another says “perseverance and postage will sell anything.”

In short, there simply aren’t general rules. There are basic principles, but no hard and fast rules.


Geez, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Check back for more tomorrow.

Keep Writing,
Maria

Hi Writers,
Thanks very much to all who are supporting me in my quest to get the WD archives digitized. It's starting to gain some momentum here, so please spread the word to your fellow writers and keep the good karma coming.

Today, I'm pulling out old magazines for an AP photographer to accompany the story I mentioned in my previous entry. Well, I was having quite the blast when I got ever so rudely kicked out of our company library for a meeting. The nerve.

Anyway, for your reading enjoyment, I found this hilarious letter Norman Mailer wrote to the editor in our March 1970 issue:

Dear Editor,
Regarding the interview you printed with me in the December issue done by Oriana Fallaci—Miss Fallaci is a talented journalist with a gift for making people talk more than they care to talk as she runs them through an interview. Her English however is uncertain, so uncertain that she uses a tape recorder, not as she confesses for the record but because she cannot understand exactly what you say. The use of a tape recorder is probably excusable, especially by a foreign journalist, but what is not altogether forgivable is that Miss Fallaci has the habit of rewriting the transcription with a freedom matched only by her ability to spurn the word you did use.

Since she was writing for an Italian audience, she took pains to convert my answers into Italian, which is to say that she rephrased my dialogue in such a way that it would make sense to Italian readers. The result, now translated back into English from the free translation into Italian, is a first-rate piece of surrealism. Nearly all the ideas I expressed to her find some place in her work, but it has become her work. It may even read like Oriana Fallaci interviewing Oriana Fallaci. My words, my style, my very clumsiness of speech—which any friend can testify to—have been converted into the spoiled and petulant tones of an Italian intellectual loved somewhat too much by his mother and I protest, fellas, I protest. Whatever my vices—they are many—I am not quite so bright an ass as Miss Fallaci would have me.

Norman Mailer
Provincetown, Mass.

Ahh, rest in peace, Norman. You were a spirited one.

Keep Writing,
Maria

Hi Writers,
Last week, we hosted an AP reporter who flew in from New York to spend two days combing through the Writer's Digest archives. He's writing a feature on the history of the publishing industry and found plenty of fodder for his piece here—in fact 88 years of writing and publishing advice.

Last year WD Books published a book featuring some great pieces from our archives, you can read an article about that here.

As you can imagine, there's amazing stuff in our archives—interviews and first-hand essays and advice pieces written by just about any literary luminary you can think of from the past century.

And as we were shuffling those crumbling, leather-bound magazines around—we're talking actual bound copies of the original magazines going back to 1920—I realized that wow, we really need to get our archives digitized. And soon, before all that history crumbles away with the low-grade paper it was printed on.

I've known this for awhile, of course. But as often happens, preserving the past takes a backseat to the pressing needs of the present. Like hitting deadlines for the next issue, and building a better website and blogging and hitting circ numbers to keep our publisher happy, etc., etc. etc...

So, I've got this awesome task ahead of me. It's something I've charged myself with, and something that I know in my gut I have to do.

But the sheer size of this project is overwhelming—we're talking months and months of scanning hundreds of thousands of pages of historical content. It's a big, big job. And I'm now in the process of convincing my bosses that not only does this need to be done, but that people might actually pay for CDs of our archives.

You could really help me build my case to get this done by saying sure, I'd buy that. So if you're into this pet project of mine, please leave me a comment here. I'm assembling reader feedback for my proposal now, and I'd sure appreciate hearing from you all.

Keep Writing,
Maria

Hi Writers,
Prodigious print buyers are winning by a landslide in my poll below “Do you buy less print (magazines, newspapers and books) than you did five years ago?"

To continue along that same vein of thought, I read an intriguing article this week on the Publishing 2.0 blog: The Evolution From Linear Thought To Networked Thought by Scott Karp.

Karp says that although he reads prolifically, he rarely reads "books" any more (as in print books). He posits in this article that perhaps the way we read is inherently changing from “linear” (as you do with a book) to “networked” (as you do with a blog).

Here’s an excerpt, but please network and read the whole piece. (Then network back here, of course):
So do I do all my reading online because it’s more convenient? Well, it is, but it’s not as if I don’t have opportunities to read books. (And I do read a lot of Disney Princess books to my daughter.)

But the convenience argument seems to float on the surface of a deeper issue — there’s something about the print vs. online dialectic that always seemed superficial to me. Books, newspapers, and other print media are carefully laid out. Online content like blogs are shoot from the hip. Books are linear and foster concentration and focus, while the web, with all its hyperlinks, is kinetic, scattered, all over the place.

Fascinating stuff. I guess I’m old school because I still like to read books. But I like to read blogs, too, so what can I say...

I’m a prolific reader of both linear and networked writing. I'm networked all day, but at home, I still want to cozy up with a good old-fashioned linear book. Judging from the results of my poll, you all aren’t quite willing to give up linear thought, either.

Basically though, if I had to choose, I'd have to say I'm still linear in a networked world.

How about you?

Keep Writing,
Maria