Grumbles From the Grave

CHAPTER VI

ABOUT WRITING METHODS AND CUTTING

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, Dry water, Venusburg, New Brisbane, New Chicago, How-Far?, Ley burg, 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.

Trying to force myself into the more conventional method has not worked; it has simply resulted in my snapping at my wife for a couple of months and getting no other work done either. So I am going to devote the next week to an attempt to start a story suitable for Boys' Life on spec-no outline. Probably it will work and probably they will buy it. But if I can't click in about a week I shall have to tell them that I have nothing to offer them at this time-I shall have to cut my losses and get busy on something I can do.

September 13, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I've been wanting to write to you ever since I spoke with you on Sunday, but I have been busy on a draft of a novelette for Boys' Life. I finished it last night and will now try to clear my desk-starting with your letter.

I think I finally have a story that Boys' Life can use, provided I can now sweat it down to an acceptable length without bleeding it to death. The title is "Tenderfoot on Venus" and is about a Scout and his dog and his chum in a Boy Scout troop on Venus-no sex, no firearms, no fighting between the boys, knives used only for things that a Scout legitimately uses knives for, no villains other than the hazards of nature. I have no real doubts about the story; while it isn't immortal literature, it is a good, decent, adventure story. But I do want to use as much wordage as possible in the final draft because of the always present problem of building up a convincingly detailed background in a science fiction story laid in the future in a strange scene. Could you phone their editor and ask him for his absolute top word length? The more space I have, the better the story will be.

Final copy should be in New York about one month from now. They can count on that.

EMOTIONAL DISTURBANCES

August 27, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I greatly sympathize with her [Peggy Blassingame] emotional difficulty, being subject to it myself, although from different causes. When I am working on a book, any commitment at all other than the book itself is almost unbearable. A dinner date four days away will get between me and the typewriter and make it very hard to work...very hard to keep and hold that out-of-the-world reverie that seems (for me) to be almost indispensable to empathic fiction. This neurotic peculiarity of mine is quite inconvenient to Ginny, as I am quite reluctant to take part in any social activity arranged earlier than about 5 P.M. on the day it takes place-I don't mind socializing during a story as long as I don't know about it ahead of time, but that limitation is very awkward for a hostess.

STORY CHANGES

March 28, 1957: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

...delay on Methuselah's Children. Both Ginny and I have been over it carefully since I last wrote. She thinks it needs a complete rewrite from beginning to end; I am certainly convinced that it should not go on the market until I have worked on it a bit and perhaps completely rewritten it. I greet this task with the delight with which I change a tire in the rain at night, but it has to be done, I am afraid. Worst of all, it uses time I had intended to put onto new copy. With luck I should forward it to you not too late in April...

...My strongest misgiving about a release through Doubleday is on other grounds, however: I am afraid that Methuselah simply does not stand up to the quality of Puppet Masters and The Door into Summer, I am afraid it would look like a slump. It was written sixteen years ago; I have learned something of story telling techniques in that time, I think.

EXCERPTS

February 16, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

And I have another letter from -- concerning that request to use an excerpt from "Logic of Empire." This time he tells me approximately (not exactly) what he wants to excerpt but says that he cannot tell me how much I would be paid. Well, from what I know of British prices, I doubt if he contemplates paying more than ten to twenty dollars for a thousand words. But I can't see why he expects me to sell for an unstated price. I'm tempted to tell him that short excerpts call for short-short story rates-say about a shilling a word.

But I'm going to tell him no again, (a) I don't like to see my stories chopped up, in any case; each is meant to be read as a whole, (b) I have a dirty suspicion that he wants my name on the dust jacket at a cost of about ten bucks, (c) The controlling point: I don't like his action in bypassing my agent. If he wanted a rehearing he should have submitted his second proposal to you-he certainly knows who you are and where you are.

Damn it, on second thought I am not going to answer him now; I'll enclose his letter instead. If you want to answer it, do so. If not, send it back and I will do so. But I certainly do not like his unprofessional behavior in intentionally trying to bypass my agent.

INTRODUCTION

January 14, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Robert Mills

Lurton tells me that you and he have reached an agreement on the use of "Zombies" ["All You Zombies"] and that you now want an introduction to the story from me, telling why it is "one of my favorites."

At that point it suddenly lost status with me. The prospect of writing a blurb for one of my own stories I find almost as filled with grue as is attending an autographing party or writing for a fanzine. Why don't you write it? You seemed to like this story better than I did and your blurb in FSF [The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] was okay.

But, if you must have it, how about this: "Mark Twain invented the time travel story; six years later H.G. Wells perfected it and revealed its paradoxes. Between them they left little for latecomers to do. But they are still fun to write. Some stories are chores, some are fun-this is one I enjoyed writing."

But I would still prefer for you to blurb it. If an author writes his own blurb, he is caught between the horns of conceit and false modesty.

FREE OPTION

January 27, 1961: Robert A. Heintein to Lurton Blassingame

My whorish instincts protest the idea of a free option even for six months-but I'm willing to go along, pursuant to your advice. He [a would-be producer] would be a lot better off (safer) and I would be happier if there were some minor cash involved, with the deal spelled out. The option money needn't be much and it could have renewable dates by small payments. However, I suspect that he does not want to sign a formal option now because that necessitates spelling out the deal which is being optioned-and he probably hasn't any clear idea what the deal might be until he has a treatment to show financial backers.