The Road to Amber (62 page)

Then one day in the mail I received a package containing a story from a guy I never heard of and a covering letter that struck me strangely. He said, “Mr. Zelazny, I’m a professional writer, but I’m not a science fiction writer. You probably wouldn’t recognize the name because for years I’ve been a ghostwriter of Hollywood scripts. Most of them were very bad movies anyway, low budget things, but I made a career of it. Now I want to go into fiction writing, as I’ve always liked science fiction. I’ve written a bunch of science fiction stories. I sent them all around to every magazine in the business, and nobody wanted any of them. This one I think is the best of the lot. Would you tell me what’s wrong with it? I think it’s a good story. I don’t know why a person wouldn’t want to buy it.” I said to myself, “No, I shouldn’t read it, but I will read just the first sentence to see if he has a good narrative hook,” and I did, and it was a very good narrative hook that got me through the first paragraph. I said, “Well I’ll read the first page and not tell him I read it.” I kept going and read the whole bloody story. I softened like this, but when I read it I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I thought it was a perfectly competent story. I was sure that had I or any of a number of professional authors written that story it would have sold.

I guess all this is preamble leading up to this advice for everybody here who is writing or trying to write. Sometimes the story is perfectly good. Sometimes it is a perfectly acceptable story, and if you were a little bit better known it would sell, but it’s not quite good enough for your first sale—your break-in story. I could have written him back a letter nit-picking about some little things, saying you ought to fix this or that, but frankly, I don’t think it would have made any difference.

So I wrote him a letter and said, “Look, I normally don’t read manuscripts, but for some reason I read yours—probably because it was interesting. I can’t find anything wrong with it, but it’s a sort of gray story. It’s not a brilliant white story. It’s not a dark, stupid story. It’s a story I think you ought to place in a drawer and forget about for a while and keep writing. If you do, you’ll probably start selling if you’re persistent. After you’ve been selling a while, pick the editor who’s buying most of your stuff and take this story out again and send it to that editor, even if that editor rejected it in the past. I think you’ll sell it.”

I forgot all about it. A year and a half later I got a copy of
Amazing Stories
with a little bookmark in it. I opened to that and there was the story unchanged. All the author had written was, “You were right,” and he’d autographed it.

I don’t know what the moral is there. I’m still very leery of plagiarism and lawsuits. I will not normally read stuff that comes in through the mail that way, though the one time I did I actually wound up giving someone some good advice. I offer that good advice to anyone here who also wants to write because I think it is good to bear in mind that it’s not always what you write, but it is sometimes when you write it in your career that can make a difference. It may well be that someone sitting here right now has been trying to write for some time and has been writing stuff that will be perfectly acceptable a couple of years down the line when he or she pulls it from the files and resubmits it somewhere after establishing a bit of a track record. But the market has become so very competitive these days, with so many really good writers trying to break in, that the competition is considerably stiffer than it was back in the days when I started. About the only thing I can counsel is persistence, daily writing, a steady submission of stories, and a kind of a hard skin emotionally for rejections that may come by. That leads to certain other considerations.

We were talking on one of the panels the other day about distinctions to be drawn between art and craftsmanship and what may be said for creativity, for coming up with a brilliant, clever idea. You’ll find that many of the stories you read are not bright, new ideas but are variations on older ideas. The great virtue of stories in print may well lie with the author’s skill in characterization or dialogue or an interesting writing style. It behooves one to ascertain one’s strongest points. But one can go to extremes in anything, and this reminds me of one summer when I taught at the Indiana University Writer’s Conference.

I devoted a talk to the fact that I thought it was wrong for a writer to find his or her strongest point and capitalize on that completely. That is, if you are extremely good at writing dialogue, and you do a story which just scintillates with brilliant dialogue, and they buy it and ask you to write another one, and you start making a career of writing stories with clever dialogue, eventually you’re hurting yourself because you’re getting hypertrophied. You are capitalizing on your virtues without attempting to develop your weaknesses up to a point of at least competence. So I have always felt that, when you are finally in a position as a professional selling things regularly, you should take the chance of writing from weakness whenever you can. If you are good at clever gimmick stories but not so good at characterization, try stories which rely on the characterization more than the gimmick. If you are not good at writing good descriptive background scenes, but can carry a story with sketchy simulations of the background, sometimes it would be good to try to devote a few paragraphs to laying in a stronger background than you might absolutely need. I’ve always felt this to be true.

I had a fellow in the class that day who hadn’t been around before—the boyfriend of one of the girls who was taking the class. He was a Hollywood scriptwriter. He came up to me afterwards and said, “I hear what you’re saying, and I think you’re right. I’m very good at dialogue because that’s all I do. I write scripts. We don’t have to worry about characterization because a script is like a novel inside-out. We just come out and tell them in the first paragraph this is what this guy is like. We don’t have to show it through a bunch of action. We just say he was in the military previously for X years, is Y years old, and so on. After that paragraph the actor who is to play that part knows exactly what the character is like and he just gets on with the talk, and the talk is where I make my money. Frankly, if I really wanted to be a fine writer I would attempt to learn my weaknesses and strengthen them. But I don’t want to be a good writer. I just want to be a good script writer.” He had a valid point. This was all he wanted to do and my advice just didn’t apply to him, but I feel that it is worthwhile for most of you.

If you want to write something you are really going to be remembered for, a book that will stay in print for generations, you will have a better chance of doing so if you strengthen yourself in all areas rather than just one area. Actually I’m talking about craftsmanship. I’m talking about learning techniques. I’m not talking about courting the muse and coming up with brilliant ideas, because frankly this is something that only comes to you with the development of the discipline of craft.

I am reminded of a wonderful book I read years ago called
The Popular Book
by James D. Hart, a University of California professor. The book came out from the University of California Press in 1951. It’s a history not of great literature but of books that were extremely popular throughout American history. The anecdote that fascinates me most is about the man I have a secret admiration for—Timothy Shay Arthur, who amazingly in the 1840s wrote five percent of everything published in America. He was the most prolific author of his day. If they wanted temperance books, he’d grind out temperance books by the ream. If abolition suddenly became a popular notion politically, he’d be writing abolition tracts. If somebody wanted frontier novels, he’d be writing frontier novels. Everybody was reading Timothy Shay Arthur. If you asked the man on the street then who was the best author of the day, he’d most likely say Timothy Shay Arthur.

During the time Timothy Shay Arthur was writing five percent of everything published in America, Henry David Thoreau was writing
Walden
. Nobody read
Walden
except a handful of New England intellectuals, most of whom were personal friends of the author. Yet, if we look back now through the history of American letters we discover that apart from the small song called “Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now” from a temperance play called
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
, Timothy Shay Arthur is not remembered. But everybody knows of Thoreau’s
Walden
. Even if they haven’t read
Walden
, they at least know it is a story about a guy who went and lived in the woods and reflected on the nature of society and on nature itself. His book persisted. Nobody knew at the time that it was a classic. I think one is foolish to set out to try to write a classic. One just does the best job one can. But Arthur is barely remembered. Thoreau will still be read another hundred years from now.

Which leads to another consideration: Who judges in the present time? How valid are their judgments? Should you be writing to impress reviewers and critics, and even if you succeed in doing so, how lasting will their effects be upon your career? I am reminded in this regard of the fact that H. L. Mencken, American columnist, essayist, and editor for American Mercury—a fairly hip fellow on the literary scene back in the 1920s—decided to stick his neck out and write an essay on the people he thought would be remembered fifty, a hundred years down the line as the great American novelists of the 1920s. He chose three. He chose Carl Van Vechten, James Hunicher, and Clyde Brion-Davis. Everybody reads those today.

Carl Van Vechten wrote one nice book; it was called
Peter Wiffle
. He wrote six others and every book went downhill a little bit from the first one until he was writing so-so stuff at the end and he quit. He originally had been a music critic for a New York paper and he wound up writing books about cats, whom he cared about maybe more than people. I don’t know. James Hunicher, unfortunately, died shortly after Mencken’s essay appeared having written only one book, so we’ll never really know. Clyde Brion-Davis just never caught on the same way as the people Mencken did not mention in his essay, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos. They were writing all around Mencken at the time, and Mencken just didn’t feel they were doing as fine a job as Van Vechten, Hunicher, and Brion-Davis. It’s a very slippery thing to count upon your contemporaries for judgment.

I feel the only person that you must please as a writer, really, is your own self at its deepest levels. I feel that inspiration is not a thing that can always be present. It can be courted, but it cannot necessarily be achieved by an act of will. The next best thing to inspiration is a solid grasp of one’s craft and an honest attempt to apply it, and apply it as fully as one can in telling the best story one can with the materials one has at hand on those occasions when inspiration is lacking. I feel, too, that to do this one must also cultivate the entire spectrum of tools in the writer’s box of craft equipment. One has to learn to wield them all whether one does it to any great frequency or not. This is not proof against plagiarism. This is not proof against bad reviews. This is not proof against your contemporaries saying they don’t understand it. But it’s the only touchstone I think you have. Which does not mean I would not be willing to rewrite anything an editor requests, unless they asked me to do something I absolurely felt would castrate a book. (Not to be sexist about these things, but one gets nervous about what is most painful to oneself.)

I feel that whenever you are considering a story, if something odd occurs to you (as with
A Night in the Lonesome October
, when I decided to tell the story from the viewpoint of the dog), you should be willing to take a chance. I think that is part ofthe creative spirit speaking to one, saying, “I’m not going to interrupt too long, Zelazny—take a chance, write the story from a dog’s viewpoint and make Jack the Ripper a somewhat sympathetic guy.” Things like that I had thought of in the past but lacked the nerve to show it.

I wrote a book early in my career called
Creatures of Light and Darkness
, which was not intended for publication at all. I wrote that book solely to teach myself writing tricks. I said “nobody’s going to want this book because I’m going to throw in all sorts of things. I just want to learn.” I decided I would write a chapter in free verse, I decided I would introduce many more characters than one should in a story that long, and I decided I would write the final chapter as a one-act play. When I finished the thing I said, “well nobody’s going to want it but I’m glad I wrote it.” I mentioned it to Samuel R. Delany. One time he had lunch with an editor at Doubleday and the editor phoned me and said, “I think you have a book you’ve never showed me.” Doubleday by then had published quite a number of my things. I said, “Yeah, but you wouldn’t like it, Larry.” He said, “Let me see it anyway.” I said, “You won’t like it.” He said, “That’s okay, let me see it.” So I sent it to him and two weeks later he called me up and said, “I love it, I’m buying it.” Now if I’d gotten the idea for that book and intended to write it for commercial publication, I wouldn’t have written it that way. I wouldn’t have taken all those dumb chances, but that was one of the things that made me realize that sometimes you have to take a chance. It’s part of the fun of the game, too. You might get knocked down on it but it’s one ofthe ways you grow.

On the lighter side of it, I’ve sometimes refused to grow in other directions. I remember back when I was writing for Doubleday, on a perverse whim in one of the Amber novels I wrote a very graphic sex scene between Corwin and Dara. I had no intention of leaving it in the final version of the book because the tone was way off. I just did it for the fun of it. I wanted to see what the editor would say, because I’d heard it said that Doubleday claimed they didn’t censor anything, but on the other hand they didn’t like stuff like that. So I sent the book into them, and they called me up and said, “Zelazny, you’ve got this scene on pages such and such. (I already knew the page numbers.) Now look, we’re not trying to censor you or anything like that, but about two thousand copies of your hardcover sales these days are going to libraries. (This was in the early ’70s.) Most librarians consider science fiction to be a juvenile form of literature. If they saw a graphic scene like that in it they wouldn’t buy it because the readership they feel is fairly young, so I’m not asking you to take it out. I’m telling you that if you leave it in it might cost you a lot of library sales.” “That’s okay,” I said, “I’ll take it out.” Because I had in mind (it’s really perverse, I don’t know why they put up with me) putting a scene like that into every Amber book and letting them call me and talk me into taking it out, then when I had enough of them, doing an article for some men’s magazine called “Scenes I Was Asked to Cut.” It would be a semi-scholarly, polite, gentlemanly way of introducing a basically pornographic article in the men’s magazine without making it look as if they’re publishing anything dirty. However, after the first time the novelty wore off and I never did it again. I tell you that to tell you more how my mind works, but also a thing about the publishing industry. It has been fun over the years.