Grumbles from the Grave (19 page)

July 28, 1959: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am returning your clipping about the sad state of fiction. It is enough to drive a man back to engineering. However, I have always worked on the theory that there is always a market somewhere for a good story—a notion that Will Jenkins [the real name of science-fiction writer Murray Leinster] pounded into my head many years ago. When I started writing there were lots of pulp magazines, many slick fiction magazines—no pocketbooks and no television. I think I'll just go on writing stories that I would like to read and assume that they can be sold somewhere to some medium.

MOTION PICTURE CONTRACT

November 8, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We have just finished a hard three days with the literary appraiser—hard but very pleasant; he turns out to be muy simpatico. Today I am trying to turn my notes into a long letter to Ned [Brown] re the
Glory Road
[fantasy novel, see Chapter XI, "Adult Novels"] contract. Darn it, I opened that contract determined to sign it unchanged if at all possible to live with it. Ginny says they let a second cousin write this contract when they should have used at least a first cousin.

TELEVISION SERIES

October 12, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Ned told me by phone that the contract is all set for the TV series and for me to do the pilot film shooting script. He gave me a lot of details, none of which I wrote down, as I don't believe a durn thing out of Hollywood until I see a signed contract and a check . . . Ned seems to have gotten from them simply everything he asked for . . . I simply told him to go ahead and get the best deal he could and I would sign it as long as it did not commit me to work in Hollywood.

But Ned said that I really must come out to Hollywood for at least one day's conference with Dozier, the boss. This I flatly refused to do until I have a signed contract in hand. I was not just being stubborn.

Editor's Note: Robert was quite accustomed to receiving telephone calls from Hollywood producers; they would want him to do a script. Each time, the suggestion would be made, "Why don't you hop on a plane and come out here and discuss it?"

So, when in 1963, Robert received a telephone call from a Hollywood producer, Howie Horwitz, Robert was ready with an answer. Howie wanted Robert to do a pilot script for a science fiction TV series for Screen Gems. Then came the inevitable line: "Why don't you hop a plane and come out and discuss it?"

Robert replied, "Why don't you hop a plane to Colorado and we can discuss it here?"

To our amazement, Howie did just that.

Robert had sworn a mighty oath not to get involved in such an enterprise again. But Howie's presence disarmed him. Robert set to work after Howie left and produced a script. Then he found that trying to work between Colorado and Hollywood just wasn't possible. So in early 1964 we went out there for Robert to do rewrites under Howie's direction.

When the work was finished, we returned home. It was at just this point that the bankers went out to Hollywood from New York, and fired Howie and his boss. The script was shelved at Screen Gems, and Howie and his boss went across the street, and produced "Batman."

For all practical purposes, the pilot script was dead, along with the series, "Century XXII." There is a faint hope that it may be produced someday. As this is being written, someone recalled the script and is setting about the difficult task of undertaking to produce the film.

January 20, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Will you get me off the hook on several things? There has been a death in my family—no close emotional involvement for me, but some duty matters—so I am unexpectedly catching a plane in about an hour (Ginny remains here), then on my return Thursday will be leaving immediately to drive to Hollywood (Ginny accompanying me) and arriving there possibly late for Screen Gems story conference Monday 27 January. . . . The [TV] thing is sourer than ever and I see no hopes of saving it, but I must go out and try my best.

But today I'm badly strapped for time and ask help on some unfinished business (this damned screenplay has put me behind on
everything)—
and this funeral puts the topper on it—despite the fact that I answered sixty-three letters in the last three days, trying to catch up.

April 8, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I have many other things to acknowledge. We have been home three weeks now, two of them eaten by illness, the rest of the time used futilely in attempting to cope with an avalanche of accumulated low-priority paperwork, several hundred periodicals, etc., piled up not only while we were away, but left undone clear back from last August when (TV producer) first entered my life. This last Hollywood experience has simply confirmed my earlier opinion that, while Hollywood rates are high, what a writer goes through to earn those rates makes it a losing game in the long run. I hope that you and I and Ned [Brown] make some money out of this—but if the series is never produced, I hope to have sense enough to stay home and write books in the future and leave the movie never-never land to those who enjoy that rat race.

CHAPTER VI
ABOUT WRITING METHODS AND CUTTING

(107)

Heinlein working at his desk, at "Bonny Doon," the Santa Cruz house.

October 25, 1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

. . . then write another short. This one is tentatively titled "Homesickness" ["It's Great to Be Back"] and is another Luna City and so forth yarn. If possible, I want to build up a background, as I did in
Astounding,
for a series of interplanetary shorts, laid in the near future (the coming century, to about a.d. 2050). The series will follow the formula, somewhat modified, of the SEP [
Saturday Evening Post
] series such as Earthworm Tractor, Tugboat Annie, Gunsmith Pyne, Blue Chip Haggerty, etc.—stories laid against a particular occupation or industry. My series will be laid against the background of
commercial
(not exploration nor adventure) interplanetary travel. Continuity will be maintained by names of places—Luna City, Drywater, Venusburg, New Brisbane, New Chicago, How-Far?, Leyburg, Marsopolis, Supra-New York, etc., and by consistent use of techniques, cultural changes, and speech changes. Characters will shift for each story, but a major character in one story may show up in a bit part in another.

The science and engineering will be held to a minimum but will be authentic. An editor may be sure that I will respect facts of astronomy, atomics, ballistics, rocketry, etc. For example, the piloting in the story you are about to receive is as authentic as it can be at this date—if it is not as it will be, then it is at least as it
could
be; it is practical, with respect to time intervals, speeds, accelerations, and instruments used. When, in that story, I mention falling 700 feet on the Moon in forty seconds and thereby picking up speeds up to 140 miles per hour, and, thereafter, killing the speed with a one-second-plus blast at five-gravities, I know what I am talking about—I am a mechanical engineer, a ballistician, a student of reaction engines, and an amateur astronomer. I mention these things because they may help you sell my stuff—I won't give an editor any Buck Rogers nonsense. A great deal of study and research goes into the background of my stories.

May 16, 1947: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

. . . As for formal coaching from Uzzell [a well-known "story doctor" and coach of the time] or anyone, I'm getting just the coaching I want from you . . . I'm afraid of coaching, of writers' classes, of writers' magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble—you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step. Articles and books on how to write have that effect on me. The author seems so persuasive, so sure that he knows what he is talking about, that I start having doubts about my own technique. It usually turns out that the author is urging the reader to do something quite unsuited to me—fine for him probably, but not my pidgin. If I try to imitate him, follow his directions, I usually fail to accomplish his methods and lose my own in the process . . .

I do get a great deal of help from studying other writers' stories, particularly in the respects in which I see that they have accomplished an effect that I do not as yet know how to accomplish. I find such study of what they have
done
more use to me than their discussions of how they do it.

Winslow says I don't understand plotting and probably I don't—I have been congratulated many times on the skill shown in my plotting when I knew damn well that the story in question had not been plotted in advance at all. My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it I can't plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don't know what his character is until I get acquainted with him. When I can "hear the character talk" then I'm all right—he works out his own salvation.

January 31, 1948: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I certainly am sorry to have worried you and will try not to let it happen again—when I get into the final chapters of a novel it is sometimes almost impossible to attract my attention.

January 2, 1950: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

My method of work is such that I always have a dozen or more stories being worked on.

March 20, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Peter Hamilton (editor of
Nebula Science Fiction
)

The problem of building up convincing background in a science fiction story becomes extremely difficult in the shorter lengths. In ordinary fiction, background may be assumed or most briefly indicated, but it is a most unusual science fiction idea which may safely be so treated. In all the years I have been writing science fiction I have done only one story under 2,500 words, that story being "Columbus Was a Dope" . . .

October 9, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

. . . However, I have been fiddling with experimental methods of storytelling (none of which you have seen) and I am beginning to think that I may be developing a new method which might turn out to be important. It is a multiple first-person technique, but not the one used by John Masters in
Bowhani Junction.
Mine calls for using camera cuts and shifts as rapid as those in the movies; the idea is to give the speed of movies, the sense of immediacy of the legitimate stage, and the empathy obtained by stream of consciousness—a nice trick if I can bring it off! The greatest hitch seems to lie in the problem of shifting viewpoints, both without confusing the reader and without losing empathy through cumbersome devices. But I think I am learning how to do it.

I don't want to use this technique on commercial copy until I am sure I can force the reader to go along with a novel technique. James Joyce introduced into writing an important new technique, but he did it so clumsily that his so-called novels are virtually unreadable; if I do have here a usable new technique I want to polish it to the point where it can stand up in the open market in competition with the usual wares whose values are established and recognized.

Ginny suggests that I not use it in science fiction in any case, but save it for a lit'rary novel. She has a point, I think, as it would not be seriously reviewed in an S-F novel. We'll see.

ATTENTION

November 8, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Sure I signed the Gollancz [a British publisher] contract; and not in invisible ink, either. Then I stuck it into file and sent you the copy I had
not
signed—convinced that I had signed both of them. Ginny says that whenever she finds my shoes in the icebox, she knows I'm coming down with a story.

So here is the other copy—now signed.

WORKING HABITS

August 31, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

. . . In the meantime, I have turned out no salable copy. Part of my trouble is that I have undertaken to do something which does not fit my working habits, i.e., agreed to produce a story outline. Outlines never have any reality to me, no vividness. Oh, I use what I call an outline but a sort that no editor would accept; it's actually simply musing on paper—then when the idea begins to take fire, I start at once to write the story itself and become acquainted with the problem and the characters as I go along. Sometimes this results in blind alleys and surplusage which has to be removed (
Door Into Summer
had Martians in it for half a day, then I chucked a few pages and got back on the track)—but by the time I am well into the story I am writing with sureness, hearing the characters, seeing their surroundings, and having the same trouble coping with their problems that they have. As you can see, this is not a method [that] lends itself to a formal outline, from which I can promise to derive an acceptable story. But it is the method I have taught myself and it works for me.