Recently, Bob Greenberger wrote about the satisfaction of creating and writing a recurring character of his own and that got me to thinking about characters I’ve worked on in my career. Having spent more than a little of the past forty years laboring in the comic book field, a majority of the stories I’ve written were about OPCs (Other People’s Characters), from the Atom and Archie to Superman and Scooby Doo. I’ve never had a problem with that; as a lifelong comic book fan, I was always happy to get my paws on the classic characters I grew up reading. But a writer comes to these established and long running characters weighed down by the character’s baggage, allowed to bring to them a certain limited amount of individual interpretation but always bound by what came before…and with full knowledge that no matter what story they tell, things have to be reset to the status quo when they’re done.
Still, along the way, I managed to create a few new additions to the DC Universe of characters. A sorcerer here, a spy agency there, a science fiction hero way out there in deep space…but though I created them, they aren’t really mine. Mainstream corporate comics operate (for the most part) under the work-made-for-hire provision of copyright law, meaning that the corporation is considered the legal “author” of the work. The actual creators have some (small) equity in the creation, but no real control over its destiny or use. The editor, as representative of the “author,” has more control over the character than does the creator and the corporation is free to make whatever changes or alterations it deems necessary.
I’ve also written a considerable number of words in prose for OPCs, including the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, Star Trek, Doctor Who, the Avenger, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Archie, Powerpuff Girls, and others, and I’ve enjoyed them all. But, again, these characters were all well established before I got to them and I was obliged to leave them pretty much as I found them once I’m done. As much fun as I’ve had with all the neat toys in those different sandboxes, I always knew they belonged to someone else and that when I went home at the end of the day, I had to leave them where I had found them for the next writer to play with.
The difference between writing OPCs and your own creation is the same as the difference between running a race with and without leg irons. In corporate comics or prose featuring licensed properties, you’re hobbled by the rules of the characters’ owners. But with your own characters, you’re free to run like the wind, limited only by your own imagination.
And, thanks to the paradigm shift in publishing I wrote about last month, I’m free to write my characters, my way. Of course, I was always free to write the stories…I just wouldn’t necessarily have had a venue in which to publish them so someone other than myself could actually read them. But thanks to Crazy 8 Press (and Charlton Neo for comics projects), now I do. And what I write remains mine, to do with as I wish and retain full rights to them should I ever be lucky enough to have any of them optioned for licensing or other media.
Maybe corporate comics and book publishing can offer me greater exposure (although neither seems to be offering much these days in the way of anything except to the Big Names who can sell Big Numbers), but they take away much more by what they demand in exchange for the privilege of being published by them. Junker George and F.B.I. Special Agent Irwin Benjamin in the ReDeus stories, shabby and put upon little Weekly World News investigative reporter Leo Persky in a quartet of tales (previously published in R. Allen Leider’s Hellfire Lounge anthology series and soon to be included in my upcoming Crazy 8 collection of short stories, In My Shorts: Hitler’s Bellhop and Other Stories), the comics characters Blank and Neo (and others to follow) in various Neo publications…mine, mine, mine, all mine.
As Janice Joplin sang, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but in this instance, I think it means everything to gain.
My great-grandmother Becky was born sometime around 1880, in what was then known as the Pale of Settlement, a chunk of Tsarist Russia where Jews were allowed permanent residency but beyond which they weren’t allow to live. The boundaries of the Pale changed between its establishment in 1791 and its abolishment in 1917, but life in the Jewish settlements (called shtetls, or “little towns”) was about as hard as it got and poverty was the accepted reality. Think Fiddler on the Roof…but minus the Hollywood glamour, singing, and dancing. Becky left the hardscrabble life of the Pale circa 1895 and, as family lore goes, traveled at the age of 16 on her own across country and across an ocean to settle in New York, working at first as a housekeeper for the family of her older brother who had preceded her to America. She would shortly thereafter marry my great-grandfather, have children (including my grandfather, Alfred), become widowed, and raise her kids, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren until her death in 1980 at the (we think) age of 101.
I was born in 1955, when Bubbe (Yiddish for “grandmother”) was 75 years old. This little old (but active until nearly the end) lady was a presence in my life from the very start, one of a slew of strong, amazing women I was surrounded by while growing up. While I loved and appreciated them all (and miss them more and more the older I get), I suppose I took her for granted, the way all kids do their elders. She was Bubbe. Bubbe was always there. Bubbe would always be there. Until, of course, she wasn’t. After her death, and I can’t recall exactly when, I came to a realization about this woman. It was nothing profound or terribly original, just a fact of her life that I had never stopped to think about while she was alive. What it was was this: Becky had been born in a time before automobiles, before airplanes, before even electrification; she lived to see not only the Wright Brothers get off the ground but Neil Armstrong walking on the moon! Talk about paradigm shifts! That century of her lifespan was the most intensely progressive and inventive of any period in the history of the world up until then. What she thought about all that she had seen and experienced we’ll never know. Nobody ever thought to sit down with her and say, “Bubbe, tell me your stories.” She had spent her much of that time just trying to survive, nurturing the children who survived, mourning those she lost in infancy. Life may not have been as hard in American as it had been in the shtetl, but it was never easy.
What would Bubbe make of today’s world? I can’t even imagine. I’m not sure I even how what I make of it, considering the paradigm shift that’s occurred in my 59 year-long lifespan. When I was born, TV was in black and white and sets were stuffed with vacuum tubes (and weighed about a ton), computers with 1/100,000th the processing power of a calculator I can today buy in a dollar store filled entire rooms, a telephone was something made of solid plastic, had a rotary dial, and was forever tethered to the wall by a cord, and if you wanted to find facts about something, you had to consult a lot of books. Now, a hundred bucks buys me a device that fits in my pocket, goes anywhere I go, and provides all of the above services at the touch of a button.
There’s been equally seismic changes in my field, also linked to the miracle of modern electronics. Publishing, once a purely mechanical (strictly from the technological point of view, of course) operation, has in the course of little more than a decade morphed into an electronic process. Once a manuscript had to be typed onto paper and transferred to cold type and printed by pressing more paper against that type after it had been coated in ink. Now, a book can go from concept to finished product without anyone ever having to handle a physical thing, at least until someone loads the rolls of paper onto the press…unless we’re talking about eBooks, in which case there is never a physical object other than the electronic device on which it’s being viewed. Manuscripts are electronic. Editing is done on the screen. Books are designed, laid out, and prepared for press (or e-distribution) on a computer. The computer has even radically changed the concept of “publisher.” It used to be that the complexity and expense of preparing, printing, storing, and shipping physical books required a corporate entity to back it.
Today, publishing an eBook requires zero up front costs; creating a physical book can be done for next to nothing thanks to print on demand technology; a book doesn’t have to be printed until it’s been ordered. No vast quantities of paper to pay for upfront, no storage costs, no charges for shipping boxes of printed matter (which may or may not sell once it reaches its destination).
It’s the same for comic books. Used to be a writer would type out a script on paper, mail or hand deliver it to an editor, who would do his voodoo, than ship it out to the pencil artist to draw on oversized sheets of Strathmore drawing board, which would then be shipped back to the editor, who would turn it over to the letterer to put in the balloons, captions, and sound effects, then returned to the editor and sent off to the inker who finished the art in India ink, then back to the editor again for proofreading before being handed off to the production department to make corrections, after which it was Xeroxed down to print size and given to the colorist to be hand-painted with transparent dyes (produced by a company called Dr. Ph Martin), before being sent out for a pre-press process known as color separations which would in turn be used to create the physical printing plates that went on the presses that churned out the finished comic books. Today, I do entire comic book projects without ever having to touch a piece of paper. Sure, artists still draw by hand on paper (well, most…okay, lots…or, you know…some), but after that it gets scanned into the computer and every step after that until printing can be done electronically. Editing, inking, proofing, lettering, coloring, separations…all on screen.
And, like eBooks, they don’t have to be printed to be seen. Just click the “buy” button on the program of your choice and read your favorite funnies on your phone, tablet, or PC. Concurrent with the paradigm shift wrought by technology is another, more ominous change that’s been creeping through publishing of books and comics (and films as well) for several years now. That’s the idea that it’s better to publish (or produce) one major, blowout, mega-hit book (or comic or movie) than a dozen smaller projects. I recognize the economic sense in this; paying to produce and advertise a single book that sells a million copies is cheaper than the cost of 12 separate titles that sell 80,000 copies each. But from an aesthetic point of view, it means that there are 11 good books that those 80,000 potential readers will never get a chance to see. It narrows the field and the chances of writers who aren’t J.K. Rowling or John Grisham of getting published.
As it was in Bubbe’s world, these changes are massive and, even for someone like me who grew up on Star Trek and science fiction in the 1960s, unimaginable just a few years ago. Was Bubbe better off with modern technology over the primitive conditions and crushing poverty into which she was born? Absolutely. Did much of it really have an impact on her day-to-day life? Electricity and running water aside, probably not, but it was there nonetheless, the advantages available when needed.
Are we better off with computers and print on demand books than we were back in the analog days? Well…yes. And no.
The ease of publishing books has made it so anyone can do it and, from what I can tell by the proliferation of eBooks out there, everyone does. It’s democratized publishing, true, but that’s just made it more difficult for professional writers like we here at Crazy 8 Press to break through the clutter and noise so our readers know we’re here. But we’re all, to a writer, storytellers and we’ll continue telling our stories and trust (hope?) that, thanks to all this newfangled tech, we will be found by readers. But in the numbers we would be found if we were published by Penguin Books or Random House or Simon and Schuster? It happens, sure…but not often.
As I’ve done with books, I’m also doing now with comic books. The major comic publishers have become stunt-driven crossover event-crazy mishmashes of endless, overlapping “epics” that are, to say the least, not to my taste. Okay, as the writer of the recent “Death of Archie” storyline I’m not entirely without sin in this area (although I hope I was able to give readers the added value of a good, emotionally true story with their slice of stunt), but it was the exception to my current comics writing, not the rule.
The rule, these days, is the work I’m doing at a small start-up called Charlton Neo, where a small group of Facebook friends came together to revive the beloved, 30-year defunct Charlton name with new stories and art, created not for the money (whew, talk about an understatement!) but for the pure love of the material. What started as a fun little small print run comic book is slowly evolving into an entire line, featuring new stories by old timers like me and a slate of new talent that is, frankly, knocking my socks off with what they’re doing. I’ve written about 130 pages of new material (and counting!) for the Charlton Neo books in progress, from anthology titles in genres from Western to horror to funny animals, as well as two issues of Paul Kupperberg’s Secret Romances, a romance anthology that proves “happily ever after” isn’t what it used to be.
As with Crazy 8, I can’t believe the array of talent I get to work with at Charlton Neo (do please check us out at CharltonNeo.blogspot.com; you’ll be impressed, too). Crazy 8 and Neo are both, without question, labors of love…possible, paradoxically only because of the paradigm shift in publishing that has, in other ways, affected many of us in negative ways. Would I ever want to go back to the old ways? In some regards, maybe…except that would also mean losing the breathless excitement and wonder of being part of two such amazing, dynamic creative communities. And while there are struggles even in that, just as I’m sure Bubbe would never have wanted to return to the shtetl despite the hardships of emigrant life in Brownsville, Brooklyn, I’m happy to take up residence in this New World in which I now find myself.
So, paradigms, keep shifting. We’ll adapt. If a 4-foot-something tall little Jewish woman who came to the U.S. from the middle of nowhere without knowing the language or customs could do it, I suppose I can too.
I was listening to a writer being interviewed on NPR the other day and the interviewer asked Stock Question #27: “So out of all your books, which is your favorite?” The write responded with Stock Answer #27: “All my books are like my children. How do you pick a favorite?”
Yeah. Sure. Look, every writer knows when they’ve screwed the pooch and written something that just doesn’t stack up against the rest of what they’ve done, or just flat out sucks. If you’re a believer in Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crud.”) than 90% of what every writer writes has to be crud (unless you’ve revised it as I have to make it Sturgeon’s Law–Now Improved With Face Saving Rationalization!: “90% of everything by everybody except me is crud.”). But even if you don’t accept the Law, I can understand using Stock Answer #27 instead of responding truthfully; why open yourself up to the follow-up question, “So which one of your books, etc. do you think isn’t so good?” Which can also be asked as, “Which of your books shouldn’t readers waste their money on?”
(See, this is why I only had the one kid.)
But to the question at hand: I do have some books, stories, comic books, whatever that I’ve written that I like more than others. I can’t really think of many things I’ve worked on that I outright hate, even if I wasn’t happy with it at the time I finished it (oh wait…I almost forgot The Adventures of Goggleman, an instructional comic I wrote in 1992 for the Power Tool Institute. I kid you not. “Always wear your safety goggles and always read, understand, and follow the owner’s manual!”). Usually, with the softening effect of a little time and emotional distance between the actual work and taking another look, I find it’s really not as bad as I thought. Maybe not my best but I usually put it down with an, at worst, mildly satisfied, “Well, maybe that didn’t suck as much as I thought.” (Usually, although there’ll be a few epic fails, like the one I discussed here, in an earlier blog post.)
Conversely, there are projects that I’ve pushed away from after typing “the end” and said, “Okay, this almost doesn’t suck!” (That’s understatement, so as not to jinx anything or, as my people say, put the kina horah, or evil eye, on it.)
One such project was The Same Old Story (available, I’m obliged to remind you, right here from Crazy 8 Press). It was one of those times when, once I got going, everything just seemed to come together and roll merrily along to a wonderfully (to me) satisfying conclusion.
Another of my babies to which I can point with some pride is Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury, a humor book I wrote for Kensington Publishing in 2008. It’s written as an instruction manual for a Jewish-based martial arts but is, in reality, a repository of Jewish jokes, Yiddish humor, and silly plays on religious traditions. It’s no longer in print, but if you want to learn such moves as the Davening Headbutt, the Payess of Fury, the Deadly Punch in the Kishkes, and how to use the throwing star of David, it’s still available for the Kindle here.
The third of my babies was, if you’ll pardon the disturbing comparison, stillborn. In 2004, I signed with Byron Preiss’ iBooks to write a trilogy of Justice Society of America novels. Book One, JSA: Ragnarok was finished in July 2005, just weeks after Byron’s early, tragic death in a traffic accident. Others tried to keep iBooks going, but they weren’t able to hold the company together and were forced to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on February 22, 2006…the very week Ragnarok was supposed to go to the printer. I have a PDF of the uncorrected proof, and, within the last year or so, have been in touch with the publishing concern that acquired iBooks’ assets (Ragnarok included) about getting the book to market. However, the new company and DC haven’t been able to come to terms (DC owns the rights to the JSA; the other publisher owns the rights to the manuscript, meaning neither can publish the book without the cooperation of the other) so it’s unlikely Ragnarok will ever make it to print. (You can, however, check out a few excerpts I’ve posted to my website, here, here, here, and here.)
I really do love all my “children,” but as it is with the people we love in our lives, there are some I definitely like better than others. But don’t tell that to Goggleman. There’s really no reason to hurt his feelings.
Contemplating the Crimson Keep at Shore Leave 2013.
As the newest member of the Crazy 8 Press team, the first I heard of this Crimson Keep dealie was at the group breakfast we held at last summer’s Shore Leave in Maryland. I learned that it was the setting for “Demon Circle,” a short story co-written by the pre-me Crazy 8 writers at 2011’s Shore Leave as part of a fundraising effort for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The idea in 2013 was to create an anthology of Crimson Keep stories to be available at Shore Leave 2014 in celebration of the imprint’s third anniversary.
The ever-efficient Bob Greenberger made sure that we were all provided with a copy of the short story and a mini-bible of its characters and situations, set the deadlines to assure a Labor Day weekend pub date, and off we went to the races.
The thing I took away from “Demon Circle” was the humor. The set-up involves a group of students apprenticed to the magical Master of the Crimson Keep, a castle rumored to have one thousand rooms and one hundred staircases…more or less. The Keep changes, whether by whim or necessity, no one is quite sure, and the apprentices themselves range from braggarts to incompetents to straitlaced, dedicated warriors. Stories could be about any one or all of the above. I went with a solo story about Belid, the wise guy braggart.
Those who know me won’t be surprised by the selection of Belid for my story. Like me, Belid is a terrible student, a dedicated procrastinator, and an unrepentant wiseass, all of which offered me the opportunity to do one of my favorite things: write funny. I don’t mean comedy writing per se, but rather writing with a light touch that lets the reader in on the absurdity of the situation without any outright mockery. Kind of like Douglas Adams, just sans stepping outside of the story to provide observationally wry commentary. It’s the approach I use to write my Leo Persky, Weekly World News reporter of the weird stories for R. Allen Leider’s Hellfire Lounge anthologies (three stories and counting, in volumes 2-4, published by Bold Venture Press) and it’s a wonderfully refreshing break from the more serious voice I usually take in prose.
So, what happens when Belid attempts to evade an upcoming test for which he isn’t prepared by deliberately getting himself lost in the ever-shifting corridors of the Crimson Keep? In this case, he finds himself locked out of the castle and trapped in an enclosed courtyard between “The Wee Folk at the End of the Hall” and their jailers, the bird-like Shadowings. But even while avoiding class, the young apprentice winds up learning a valuable lesson, to wit: No good deed goes unpunished. The trick thereafter is living long enough to apply this hard learned lesson to life.
Tales of the Crimson Keep may have been my first exposure to the world of the Master and his apprentices, but here’s hoping it’s not my last. Like Belid, I’ve still got a lot to learn about this magical and ever-changing place.
Tales of the Crimson Keep will be available in print and digital editions on August 1.
Growing up in the 1960s, I was a diehard DC Comics fan. I was also a fan of Marvel and Charlton and Gold Key and Warren and the handful of other publishers than sharing space on America’s comic book spinner racks, but it was DC Comics that stood front and center in my heart. DC’s comics were slick and beautifully produced and, more importantly, they were home to the world’s greatest superheroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman (the only superheroes to survive in their own ongoing titles from the 1940s Golden Age straight through the Comics Wasteland of the 1950s), Aquaman, Green Arrow (who likewise survived the near-death of the superhero genre, albeit as back-up features), the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, Adam Strange (just a few of characters which helped jump start the new heroic age of comics that exploded in the 1960s), and many more.
I don’t recall exactly when I realized that there were, somewhere, people who actually produced the comic books that I devoured by the dozens off the rack at the cigar store on Ralph Avenue or the candy store on Remsen Avenue and Avenue B, but by 1964 or so, I was creating my own comic book stories, written and drawn (badly in both instances) on lined loose-leaf paper and in composition books. I suppose it was Marvel Comics, which featured creator credits on page one of every story, that did the trick. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, Sam Rosen et al were credited with different aspects of the creation of those stories. Writer. Artist. Inker. Letterer. While math was never my forte, it was easy enough here to put two and two together and see that making comic books was an actual job.
And I wanted it!
I knew I’d never make it as an artist, but coming up with stories was easy for me. I didn’t show these stories to anyone because I was fairly certain they sucked, but I knew I could do it. By the late 1960s I had also discovered fellow comic book fans and comics fandom. By 1971, along with friends Paul Levitz and Steve Gilary, I was about as deeply immersed in said fandom as one could get and, thanks to the exposure afforded me by the fanzines we published (The Comic Reader and Etcetera), more determined than ever to make the jump from fan to professional.
In 1975 that determination lead me to meeting the first of three editors to whom I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude. Another of those three, DC’s Julius Schwartz, had already left his mark on me through the insanely great comic books he oversaw there, including the aforementioned superhero age jumpstarting Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, Adam Strange, and other titles he edited. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say (and even if it is, it’s my opinion anyway) that Julie was probably the most influential editor in the history of the medium. His (at the time) thinking man’s approach to comic book story telling was the foundation upon which later editors like Stan Lee were able to build an entirely new direction for comics.
But before I met Julie, there was Wally Green. In late 1974, after about a year of ghostwriting for friends who had proceeded me into the business, I screwed up my courage and sent off a batch of ghost story plots and a couple of sample scripts to Gold Key Comics, which at the time was publishing such anthology titles as The Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery. Wally got in touch with me and invited me up to Gold Key’s New York offices to discuss my submissions (I have a vague recollection of them being on Park or Lexington Avenue, but that’s neither here nor there). Like their location, my memory of the exact conversation is lost in the haze of the last forty years, but Wally sat me down and, story idea by story idea, went through my submissions and explained exactly why he wasn’t going to buy them. He explained that there was nothing inherently wrong with any of them, just why they weren’t right for the Gold Key books he edited, and he hoped I would continue submitting stories to him.
Wherever those offices were located, I left them walking on air. I was two blocks away before I realized that I had been soundly rejected…but it didn’t matter. Wally Green, a professional comic book editor, had treated me, a 19-year old wannabe, with the same professional courtesy he would extend to his own stable of writers. And for me, as insecure about my nascent abilities as it got, it was a gift from the Muses. Instead of the standard rejection form letter that I’m sure most editors would have sent out and which would, likely, have left me crushed, I had been given an open, honest, face-to-face critique that was, far from being dismissive, an affirmation and encouragement of whatever talent I showed.
Thank you, Wally Green! You were, and remain in my heart, a mensch among men! (Later, Wally did work, briefly, at DC, at which point I was able to tell him the above story and thank him in person for his warmth and encouragement. His response was to be baffled that an editor would treat any talent, professional or, especially, wannabe, any other way.)
Wally’s encouragement gave me the courage to take those stories rejected by Gold Key and send them off to the editors of Charlton Comics in Derby Connecticut. Not too much later I received a letter from Assistant Managing Editor Nicola Cuti: “We’re accepting “DISTRESS” (See enclosed billing instructions)…The synopses sound good so do them up in script form and we’ll probably take them.”
And, just like that, I was a comic book professional. Charlton paid $5 a page for scripts in those days and the $25 I received for that first story (which was drawn by another relative newcomer named Mike Zeck and appeared in Scary Tales #3 in late 1975) remains the sweetest money I’ve ever received. And, as instructed, I wrote up the other synopses and Nick did take them, and, just like Wally’s professional treatment of me gave me the courage to keep going, Nick’s acceptance of my writing was affirmation that I could in fact make it in comics.
That was validated a few months later when I wrote my first story for DC Comics, a “World of Krypton” back-up for the Denny O’Neil edited Superman Family, my foot in the door at the Crown Jewel (in my eyes anyway) of comic book publishers. That first assignment lead to others, introduction pages for House of Mystery, short stories for anthology titles, an ongoing “Nightwing and Flamebird” back-up, a stint on Aquaman, the New Doom Patrol and, before I knew it, an actual career as a comic book writer.
But…no matter what I wrote, there was still a part of me that wouldn’t believe I had made it until I cracked the hardest and most prestigious nut in the joint: the editorial office of Julius Schwartz. That opportunity finally came by way of a backdoor opening thanks to DC’s licensing of a new toy line from Mattel, “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.” Editor Dave Manak had, for reasons I don’t recall, asked me to write the MOTU tie-in comic, which consisted of a three issue miniseries, a 16-page insert that ran in one of the company’s advertising groups, and an issue of the Superman team-up title, DC Comics Presents. DCCP was one of the Superman line of books then edited by Julie, but for this one issue he stepped aside to act as “consulting editor” while Dave took care of the bulk of the editorial work.
Julie Schwartz & Me.
I guess I didn’t screw up my handling of Superman too bad, because the next thing I knew, Julie was in my face, growling, “You wanna write an issue of DC Comics Presents for me?”
Uhhh. Yeah.
For the next three or four years, until he gave up the Superman franchise with the coming of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, I found myself a Schwartz office regular, writing dozens of issues of Superman, Action Comics, DC Comics Presents, Superboy, Supergirl, and the daily Superman syndicated newspaper strip. Being one of “Julie’s boys” was, for this fan of 1960s era DC, the ultimate validation. Getting to know this legendary curmudgeon (it was all an act!) was just the icing on the cake.
So thank you, Wally, Nick, and Julie. I’m fairly certain if not for you three gentlemen, I would have had a fine career as a high school English teacher, a valid and worthy profession to be sure…but imagine all the subsequent adventures I would have missed.
Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you? Hemingway: Getting the words right.
—Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review Interview, 1956
When asked, as I sometimes am, for “writing advise,” I usually lead with these trite bits of wisdom:
1. Write!
2. Don’t be afraid to turn out a bad first draft, because
3. Writing is actually a process of rewriting.
The first is self-explanatory. Don’t just think about writing or talk about it. Do it! The only way to learn how to write is by the doing, and the only way to do it is to do it, re-do it, then do it again and again until, as the esteemed Mr. Hemingway said, you get the words right. The first draft is the blueprint. The rewriting is the fine, detail carpentry work, if I may get all This Old House on you.
While it was me who suggested this month’s Crazy 8 blog topic–What work of yours would you go back and rewrite if you could?–I realized when I sat down to write my piece on the subject it was a case of having hoisted myself on my own petard. Because the answer is, honestly, everything. Whether it’s something I had written at the start of my publishing career in 1975 or the story I finished last week, I would, if given the opportunity, rewrite every single damned thing I’ve ever published. Of course that’s not possible, certainly not for the 1000 or so comic book stories I’ve written, or for most of the prose, fiction and non-fiction alike, that I’ve done. Most of it is in print and out of my creative control besides, having been written as “work made for hire,” meaning it’s owned and technically “authored” by the publishers who paid me to do the work in the first place.
“I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Random House, 1966
But re-reading some of my output, is if not painful, at least an effort. I often describe myself as a “retail writer,” a pen for hire. I turn out stories by the word count or the number of pages, usually on a very specific deadline, and get paid accordingly. Sometimes there’s time to rewrite; more often than not, there isn’t. The picture that heads up this post is of the bookcase where I keep what I’ve written. Even taking into account that there’s almost an entire shelf of reprints of other things on the rest of the shelves, and that I didn’t write every story in every comic book or anthology, that still represents a buttload of words. As da Vinci is supposed to have said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” If a writer didn’t “abandon,” to whatever degree of satisfaction, any single work, they would never get to the next one.
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times–once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”
—Bernard Malamud, “Long Work, Short Life,” quoted in The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud, by Evelyn Gross Avery, SUNY Press, 2001
Which isn’t to say I’m embarrassed by these works, whether written forty years or forty days ago. I like to think I did the best I could with what I knew and the skill level I possessed at the time I wrote them. While some of the writing or ideas may make me cringe, there’s always something in it–a sentence here or there, a random chapter, a well-realized character or bit of business–that I can point to that makes it tolerable.
That being said, if I had to choose one work that I would love to have a second crack at, it would have to the 1980 novel Murdermoon featuring Spider-Man and the Hulk, the eleventh (and final) entry in Pocket Books’ Marvel Novel Series. I had written an earlier novel in the series (Spider-Man in Crime Campaign) which, considering my age and that it was the first novel I’d ever done, was an at least readable 50,000 words of pulp fiction. Murdermoon, on the other hand, doesn’t stand up under any criteria. Remember my second piece of advice above (Don’t be afraid to turn out a bad first draft)? Well, Murdermoon was certainly that…unfortunately, given the project’s tight deadline, it was also the only draft. Nowadays, thanks to computers, rewriting and revisions are easily done on the fly; before I start a day’s writing, I revisit the previous day or two’s output and do my revisions as I go along, then do a last and thorough rewrite/revision on the completed piece after I’ve typed “the end.”
But Murdermoon was written in the age of the typewriter and what little rewriting I could do was done in pencil on that first and only draft of the manuscript. There simply wasn’t time to run it through the typewritten a second time and the result shows it. The story meanders, the plot is barely coherent, and the prose even more clunky than was my wont as a twenty-five year old writer. Len Wein, one of the book’s editors along with Marv Wolfman, did single out one chapter, set in a small town where Bruce (the Hulk) Banner wakes up and thinks about perhaps settling, praising it for its Ray Bradbury-ish vibe. To this day, I think Len was being extraordinarily kind.
“I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
—Truman Capote in Conversations With Capote, by Lawrence Grobel, New American Library, 1985
Murdermoon is more than half my lifetime in the past and it is and will always be what it is. And the truth is, even if I had a reason to rewrite it, it would still never be all that I want it to be. Someone asked me recently what the hardest part of writing was. I answered that it was making the words sound as good on paper as they did in my head.
I’m currently revising a collection of short stories written since the mid-90s that I plan to bring out through Crazy 8 Press in the near future, my opportunity to rewrite, update, and make better than when they were first published. Of course, every time I look at them, even those I’d already gone over again (and again) I find something else to change and hopefully improve. Pretty soon, I’ll abandon them to publication and move on to the next piece that I’ll eventually be forced to let loose in the world, ready or not.
Like this essay. Another couple of lines and the first draft will be done. Then I’ll put it aside for a bit before returning to it for the second (and third and so on) round until, even though it’s not exactly right because it never can be, I’ll post it and regretfully move on. I know the right words are out there. I just have to keep searching until I find them.
