I hit a milestone this week. I currently have forty stories in the market. I’m proud of this, and believe each story to be a solid read and I’m happy to have my name attached to them. Some are new and fresh and full of vim, others are old veterans still trying to find a home. A handful are in good places and awaiting final decision. All in all, I’m happy with this state of affairs.
There are writers who take a year to write a single story. Others can crank out a nearly clean draft in a week. There is no one-best-way to write fiction. Scientific management principles don’t apply, since so much of writing is subjective. There has been a lot of discussion on LJs and elsewhere on rates of production and rates of quality. I thought I’d share some tid bits I picked up from the days when a short story writer could live off his words in a desperate age: the “Pulp” era.
I won’t wax nostalgic about the Shadow, The Spider, or Doc Savage. I dig these icons of the era, and if you do too you should read Don Hutchinson’s Pulp Heroes. I want to talk about Frank Gruber.
Frank who?
Frank Gruber was a workhorse of the pulp era. Born in 1904, he only lived to see his sixty-fifth birthday. And I think I know why. Frank Gruber climbed the ladder to make some good money in the pulps as well as novels. He wrote everything he could get his hands on. He created three series characters (Johnny Fletcher, Otis Beagle, Simon Lash). He had a number of novels and a short story collection and wrote his own autobiography, The Pulp Jungle, two years before he died.
Gruber’s story of survival in stories during the 1920s and 1930s is harrowing. He wanted to be a writer like his hero Horatio Alger. He had little to no formal schooling in letters, but an absolutely astounding work ethic. He started writing in 1922 and received his first sale in 1925 to a Sunday School publication. He lost his job and while finding more work kept writing. Between 1932 and 1934, he had a handful of sales. But his output was scary :
“I wrote a grand total of one hundred and seventy four ‘pieces.’ The total wordage amounted to six hundred twenty thousand words, the equivalent of about eight book.”
This did not include revisions. Of these he sold 107 pieces. This was not just fiction but articles, poems, anything he could get his hands on to make some cash.
“Nothing was too low, nothing too cheap. I wrote Sunday School stories, I wrote spicy sex stories, I wrote short stories and I even wrote a novel.”
Some were rejected as much as twenty two times before selling, and every story that was rejected was sent out to a new magazine that day. He studied the markets, became an expert on certain military subjects, and sold to military periodicals. His success at writing sales articles got him a job as editor of a small magazine.
Gruber moved to New York and lived the desperate life of a writer in the city, going to pulp mags to drop off his stories, joining writers groups, making friends with the likes of Steve Fisher, a colleague in arms whose friendship helped sustain him through years of hunger and eating “automat” soup. After getting his face, name, and work known, an editor called. He was in a bind and needed a story and gave Gruber a single night to crank out a 5000 word story for the popular spy mag “Operator Five.” It was a harrowing night of bad plots, wild ideas, and finally a draft about a pole vaulting super spy who saves NYC. It sold, and Gruber’s fortunes began to change.
In 1935, he’d written fifty four stories and sold all but two of them. And as his career bloomed he set higher goals, aiming for those great five cents a word markets like Black Mask. Some magazines were impossible to crack, like Argosy or the Dell mags, but that didn’t stop Gruber from trying. He was lured into the possible funds of Hollywood for a character he’d created called the Human Encyclopedia, but soon became disillusioned. Hope and avarice crushed him:
“A month ago I had not even thought of Hollywood. Now it was the foremost in my thoughts. I could not work. What was the use of writing stories for fifty, sixty, or even a hundred dollars when out there, in California, they were paying thousands and thousands of dollars?”
Waiting for agents and golden handshakes crippled his ability to write. So he said to hell with Hollywood.
“I was a pulp writer. I was getting a cent a word for my stories and I could make a very good living from it. All I had to do was work like hell. Perhaps I could become a good pulp writer and get my rates up to a cent and a half a word. perhaps—even two cents a word.”
His pride got the better of him on occasion, ruining some relationships with editors that thinned his marketability. He learned to be more professional in his conduct and keep any attitude he had for the stories and not confrontations he couldn’t win. Better to write a story they’ll regret passing over than telling everyone you’re a genius. In doing so he increased his game and managed to crack into Black Mask, the King of the Pulps, and helped Steve Fisher do the same. After that, it was upward and onward, working his ass off and creating characters and stories year after year until he passed away, two years after writing his memoir of the pulp era.
I wonder, reading this over, how much has changed and how much has stayed the same? Old wine, new bottles? New wine, old bottles? Some lessons I’ve taken from Gruber’s epic story of survival confirm most of what I’ve learned on my own, eighty-plus years after his salad days.
1. Know the genre,
2. Know the editors,
3. Jump on opportunity and you just may get it
4. A cast-iron work ethic can keep you alive where others die
5. Don’t think you’re too good to write certain kinds of stories
6. Desperation can occasionally be a source for inspiration
7. Pride almost always goes before the fall
8. Pay rates for short stories are worse now than in the 1930s
9. Colleagues who are at the same station as you are just as critical to your well being as mentors
10. Always set goals that force you to grow as a writer
The only major warning to take from this may be the question I raised at the beginning: Frank who? Maybe toiling like this will prevent you from writing quality. Maybe this approach is only suitable to hacks and pretenders whose work is now forgotten. I mean, who has heard of Frank Gruber?
Well, I have. And now, so have you.
Maybe Gruber wasn’t destined to be Shakespear II: Electric Boogaloo, or James Joyce III: The Search for Finnegan, or Gene Wolfe IV: The Quest for Urth or whoever. Maybe that’s ok, There was room for him as well as Hemingway in the 1930s. Maybe that’s ok, too. Maybe there’s wisdom to be gleaned from his experience even for those who want to aim higher than Operator Five. Regardless, I have a lot of respect for Gruber’s ethic and his memoir was a treat to read. Not sure if I want to burn myself out by sixty, but I still find his life story inspring.
Questions, comments, snide remarks?
JSR
NOTE: all quotes and data taken from Frank Gruber, The Pulp Jungle (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, Inc., 1967)