The Way the Future Blogs

This one’s going to be pretty nuts-and-bolts elementary, but you don’t have to read it if you have no intention of writing anything any time soon.

I. How do you get to be a writer?

1. You sit down and write something.
2. Finish what you write. Pensées don’t count. Neither do short stories without an ending.
3. If the next morning you think it’s any good send it to some editor who might buy it.

4. Repeat as needed.

II. How do you prepare the manuscript?

1. Type your story (no handwritten works need apply) in black ink on white 8½ × 11 paper. (Unless you’re British, in which case the only typing paper available to you may be slightly larger.)
2. “Type” is understood to include typing on a computer.
3. Remember to number the damn pages! You would be astonished how many otherwise reasonably intelligent and quite good writers have not figured out how to make their computers number the pages. Can you imagine what happens if the wind blows the manuscript?

III. How do you send it?

1. Put it in a manuscript-sized envelope. Put in with it a self-addressed return envelope.

2. If you’re using the postal mail service (recommended) include return postage. I recommend paper-clipping the stamps to the envelope instead of sticking them on. If the editor buys your story, he gets to keep the stamps, which some of them like to do. Of course, this is not enough to make him reconsider a rejection and instead buy the thing, but it may lead him to have a kindlier thought of you, and how can that be bad?
3. If you prefer to use Fed Ex, etc., tell the person who sells it to you that you want to pay for return and he’ll take care of it.
4. Submit by e-mail if (and only if) the publisher’s submission guidelines say you should.
5. If you are submitting a novel, you don’t have to send the whole thing. Just send the first 40 or so pages with an outline (can be short, since all you’re aiming for is to get him to read the whole thing).

IV. What do you put in the cover letter?

1. Only what is necessary for him to know about you.
2. Include any writing awards you may have won. Do not include telling how much you need the money because your baby is sick and you can’t afford to buy medicine. If you are a good-looking woman, do not include pictures of yourself in a bikini. Make it as brief as you can.

V. Good luck!

 
Related post:

• Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 2: Collaboration

Photo by Josef Stuefer (Flickr)

See, I’ve got this novel that I owe my publisher and it’s way, WAY overdue. Its composition was repeatedly interrupted, first by Arthur Clarke inviting me to write The Last Theorem with him and then by some of those pesky almost-90-now health problems. I’m back on it now and the end is (almost) in sight, and I’ve even been able to write some new stuff for this blog. Including a couple of what, I hope, will be regular features.

One will be next. It comes about because I once thought that, having worn all the hats at one time or another, I might like to write a how-to-be-a-writer book. I never did it, partly because I think there are too many of them around already, but I have over the years sometimes thought of things I would like to say in it. So next will be the first installment of Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom.

Back in the day when Cyril Kornbluth and I were writing books like The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law, we had an idea for an experiment. The writing was going pretty well, as it usually did, but we were not content to leave well enough alone.

The papers had been full of stories about new pharmaceuticals called Benzedrine and Dexedrine, which sometimes appeared to help people stay awake and work longer and better. So one of us — I don’t remember which — said to the other, “I wonder if they would do anything for writers,” and the other one said, “Dunno. Let’s find out.”

So we did. Next time Cyril came out for a spot of writing, he brought supplies. I volunteered to go first, so I took a hit and sat down to write. And I wrote. I was confident I would start writing as soon as I sat down, and I pretty much did. I could see how that scene would end, and what the complications for the characters would be and what their resulting acts should be and what alternative decisions they might have preferred to make. It was all perfectly clear and straightforward.

The words came out, and when I had filled four pages I went downstairs to where Cyril was having a cup of coffee and reading the morning’s Times to tell him that the experiment was promising. Then he did his stint and, when it was over, reported that he thought so, too.

I don’t think we stayed turned on to finish the book. I don’t know why; either, but I’m pretty sure that we just went back to the old way of each doing four pages, turn and about, until the novel was complete. (No, I don’t remember which book it was.)

So the book got finished, and handed over to the publisher. And Cyril went home to Levittown, and I got on with some work of my own. And in the fullness of time, perhaps six months or more later, I hit that terrifying thing they call writers’ block.

On this subject I am no expert, and I’m not even sure that that thing that sometimes happens to me really deserves that name. I don’t lose the ability to write. Instead I lose the ability to believe what I am writing is any good, and sometimes (as I learn when time has passed and I look at those pages more critically) it really isn’t.

So what do I do about it? I rewrite, and I keep on going over the same ground until it gets better.

But that’s a slow and painful process, and on this occasion it suddenly occurred to me that I might have a better idea, because Cyril and I hadn’t used up all our Dexedrine. There was enough for a more extensive trial in the medicine chest in the third floor bathroom.

So I sought out my then wife, Carol, to tell her that I would be working late that night. She cooperated by making an early dinner, and, probably not much after seven p.m., I was sitting at my Remington Electric, fed, coffeed, juiced up with little white pills and ready to compose.

The fears and worries that had been paralyzing my fingers did not appear. My hands were relaxed, all but reaching for the keyboard and sentences were forming in my mind. I was clearly aware of what my characters had to do to get out of the tedious mess I had put them in., and of what might be going on elsewhere in my story universe that could start off a good new sequence. Foolishly I had got myself all tangled up in pointless and unneeded complications. But the way out was easy to find, and then it would be only chlld’s play to move ahead. I hadn’t thought through my backstory. I hadn’t seen how easily and inevitably events could fit themselves into a pleasing narrative — indeed into some of the most graceful line-by-line prose of my life —

And then I heard Carol’s voice from the stairway. “I think I’m going to pack it in. Want to take the two a.m. feeding tonight?”

It was almost midnight. I had been sitting in front of that keyboard for nearly five hours, happily savoring the knowledge that I had solved all the writing problems I had faced. And not one word, not even a comma, had gone onto paper. And that is what I have discovered about chemically mediated writing.

 
I’ve talked to other writers who have had similar disappointments, but not anyone who has used the new brain enhancers. Any of you guys out there know anybody who has?

Here are a couple of quatrains, the first from the smallest fanzine ever published (one 8½-by-11 sheet, folded twice to make eight 4¼-by-5½ pages), my own Mind of Man, ca. 1936:

Necroptic life, in Thursday bliss,
Exploits a winnowed worker’s brawn
While taurine canines gently kiss
With urine the aureuscid lawn.

— Frederik Pohl

While the other is the only complete verse by Cyril Kornbluth that I remember. Date unknown, but probably close to the above.

Gym Class

One, two, three. four,
Clap your hands and prance
In stinky shirt and stinky shoes
And stinky little pants.

—C.M. Kornbluth

Related posts

C.M. Kornbluth

I think Cyril Kornbluth knew he wanted to be a writer at the age when most of us did, that is in his early teens. His first efforts, or at least the first I knew anything about, weren’t stories. They were poems.

He owned a book, written by one of his high-school teachers, I think, which gave the rules for composing every kind of verse I ever heard of. Cyril and I studied the book and resolved to write one of each. We made a good start, actually writing a haiku (we spelled it “hokku”), a villanelle, a sestina, two sonnets (one Petrarchan and one Shakespearean) and I think a couple of others. We bogged down when we came to the chant royal (the chant royal is HARD) and, like most of the other Futurians, we decided to try our luck with science fiction. At that time, I think Cyril was maybe 14, and I three or four years older.

If Cyril had favorites among his stories, he didn’t tell me about them. He did take his work seriously and got really testy when editors messed them up. (Particularly Horace Gold.)

Cyril had excellent work habits. When he sat down to write he wrote. I am not aware that he ever sat unproductive, staring into space, for more than a few minutes at a time before putting words on paper, and he rarely rewrote.

Although Cyril was doing reasonably well in economic terms, he suffered the usual beginner’s cash flow problems. A writer’s income does not arrive in the form of a check delivered every Friday. It comes in lumps of various sizes at irregular times and (with two kids) Cyril felt the need of a more regular income. Happily, he had been offered an assistant editor job on F&SF, which he took and liked a lot. The job included being first reader for the editor, Bob Mills, and Cyril took pleasure in finding something worth passing on to Mills. (He was, I remember, particularly delighted with Fritz Leiber’s “The Silver Eggheads.”)

Unfortunately Cyril’s health was deteriorating. Partly this was due to the quantities of coffee, cigarettes, hot pastrami sandwiches and alcohol he had been ingesting since his teens, but mostly it was due to the war. Cyril’s draft number had come up early, but he caught a break. He had worked for a time in a machine shop and thus had experience of operating metal-working machinery. This was just what the artillery people wanted, so they recruited him to work in cannon-repair shops, always located far enough from the front lines that the enemy couldn’t sweep down in a lightning raid and steal the precious machines. It was the kind of a safe and cushy job that several million GIs would have traded their right testicle to get, but in 1944 what looked like a better deal came along.

Higher-ups in the Army’s command circles were calculating that the war was likely to last for years yet, and if so there might be a serious shortage of college-educated candidates to serve as commissioned officers. They didn’t want to get caught short of these valuable resources, so they quickly set up what they called the Army Specialized Training Program, under which the GIs lucky enough to be accepted would be relieved of all duties except going to college. This sounded like a dream of heaven to most GIs, not least because the service’s unrelenting drafts of manpower had left most college student bodies heavily weighted with an excess of young single women.

Cyril applied, was accepted and went happily back to school, though in uniform … until some person higher still than the higher-ups noticed that both the Germans and the Japanese were losing most of the recent battles, and the war might end sooner than they had feared. So ASTP was peremptorily abolished and all its personnel transferred willy-nilly to the infantry. For which branch of service the Army had a great and unanticipated immediate need, since Hitler had managed to launch an immense surprise Christmas attack on the unsuspecting Allied troops in the Ardennes Forest.

So Cyril, who was always a slightly pudgy and definitely unathletic young man, found himself lugging a 50-caliber machine gun around the freezing temperatures and unremitting combat of the Battle of the Bulge. He survived, having acquired for his efforts, 1) a Bronze Star, and 2) a serious case of what the medics called severe essential hypertension.

The hypertension won. Cyril’s editorial career was cut short — a pity, because he would have been an outstanding one. Early in spring of 1958 he had a meeting scheduled with Bob Mills in New York. It had snowed heavily in Levittown, where Cyril lived. He had to shovel out his driveway, which made him just barely able to catch his train, so he ran to the train station and died of a heart attack on the platform.

 
C.M. Kornbluth works online

• “The Only Thing We Learn” (From Startling Stories, July 1949)
• “The Mindworm” (From Worlds Beyond, December, 1950)
• “The Cosmic Expense Account” (From F&SF, January 1956)

C.M. Kornbluth on Amazon

M. King Hubbert

I don’t usually go to the trouble of telling people where I get my scientific information. I prefer to have you suppose that it comes from my own research, grinding lenses and letting little balls roll down inclined planes and all that. This time, though, there’s a piece in a recent issue of Science that I want to tell you about and, if interested — and I think we all might be interested — go to the periodicals desk at the nearest halfway decent library, ask for the 13 March issue of Science and turn to page 142, where there is an article titled “How much coal remains?”

Of course, you could spend $15 to read it online, or if you are a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, you are already getting the magazine, so you can skip the drive to the library. (Am I a member? Nah! For the last thirty years I’ve been a Fellow, and thus entitled to put the letters F.A.A.A.S. after my name when I write crank letters to the New York Times, and don’t you forget it.)

Yes, the article’s about coal, but what it’s mostly about is the process called curve-fitting, and that’s what I am embarrassed to have to admit is a whole new world to me.

 
Go back to 1956 and a geophysicist named M. King Hubbert, who had an interest in bell curves. Those (as you of course know) are graphic models of some kind of process, let’s say something like railroad building.

In the beginning there’s hardly any of that going on, and so the dot you plot for that first year is barely above zero. By the second year it picks up a little, by the third year more than that. When you connect the dots, you have a line that rises shallowly at first, then ever more steeply, until you reach the time of peak production — I don’t know, say perhaps the 1890s in America, and the top begins to round off — and then to go down. And the curve you wind up with does look like a bell.

The insight of M. King Hubbert was to realize that when you’ve got as far as the peak of the period, you have a pretty good idea of what the final leg should look like. Or, to put it differently, you have a rough, but useful, description of what the terminal events will look like even though they haven’t happened yet.

 
So what did M. King Hubbert do with this insight? He issued a forecast saying that the peak period of American oil production would be in the 1970s (this was in 1956, remember?), and when did it happen? In 1970, causing a lot of peakists to begin to use Hubbert’s bell curve system.

They are doing it even now. China, for example, apparently using the bell curve system, has eliminated five-sixths of its claimed coal reserves. The coal is still there, it’s just not clear that it will ever be mined.

The American coal reserve has usually been given as 250 years. The best opinion now is at perhaps 100. The reserves of all of our fossil fuels are being sharply corrected. And it’s all due to Mr. Hubbert’s bell curves.