The Way the Future Blogs

 
    Our most famous collaboration.

When I seriously began trying to be a writer — by which I mean when I began to write stories with beginnings, middles and ends — I began feeling the need to have other people around who were doing the same thing.

I wasn’t the only one. It was quite common for three or four, sometimes more, beginning writers to get together for a few hours after dinner — perhaps in someone’s apartment or, more likely, an office, because the chances of finding enough typewriters to go around would be better there — and everybody start typing at once. Then when we had something complete, we would show the story to the other guys, or maybe read it aloud to everyone at once, for criticism.

I don’t know that the presence of others made my own writing any better, but it did encourage me to do more of it. This is a good thing in itself. The very best way to improve as a writer is to keep right on writing until it gets good.

I hooked up briefly with two of these mutual-assistance groups. In neither case did we talk to each other about what we were going to write until we had written it. That was just as well, in a way, because what I wrote was almost always science fiction and in that the others had no interest at all. (A feeling I reciprocated about their light boy-girl comedies or sports.) I yearned not just to practice the mechanical skills but to hear trade talk about science fiction.

Then — blessed day! — along came the Futurians.
.
 

The Futurians were one of the New York area’s science-fiction fan clubs, but they were a little different from the others. We didn’t just want to read sf and talk about it. We wanted to make it — to write it, or to become editors of it or in some other way to become professionally involved in producing it, and to make that sort of thing our lifelong careers. So naturally, inevitably, we started our own writing group.

Actually, it might actually be more accurate to say we became one, because even the non-obsessed fraction of our members were mildly interested in the writing. All we needed was a place to set our portable typewriters — and then, when three of our members decided to club together on a joint apartment at 2574 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn that would also be the club headquarters, that problem was solved. We called it the Ivory Tower (it was on the fourth walk-up floor), and there we wrote. Three or four of us at a time, sometimes more.

The diligent ones, first to last, were Cyril Kornbluth, Dick Wilson, Donald Wollheim, Robert A.W. Lowndes, Dirk Wylie, James Blish, Damon Knight and, of course, me. Member Isaac Asimov rarely joined us in these sessions. He was as eager as anybody else, but he had to work regular shifts at his mom and pop’s candy store and so had to do most of his practice writing alone. (Well, except for a couple of minor collaborations with me, which are in his book The Early Asimov.) And, as you see, quite a few of us made the professional cut — some, like Isaac, almost excessively.

In fact we had a kind of success that writers’ workshops seldom achieve. Why? There may have been several reasons, but perhaps one of them was that there was a particular exercise we did that most workshops don’t do. We didn’t give each other just criticism and moral support. We began doing something else. We began to collaborate.
 

There are many ways of collaborating,. I think the traditional way goes with two writers getting into a room with a pot of coffee and a typewriter. One of them sits down at the typewriter and types their names and addresses and a title for the story and then looks expectantly at the other. Who says, “Okay, let’s start with he meets the girl. She gets out of a taxi, but when she closes the door and it starts away her dress is caught and the skirt is pulled off.” While the other one is typing away. And they keep on doing that, maybe changing places from time to time, until the story’s done.

What all the ways have in common is that two (or occasionally more) people are involved, and the hope is that if one gets stuck the other will come up with a way to get out of it. Or, when it’s working well, one has an idea for a bit of business and the other takes it and runs with it.

I’ll give you an example from life. When Cyril and I were writing The Space Merchants long, long, long ago we had some scenes in a food factory that we called Chlorella Costa Rica, where people were farming algae to turn into food for poor people. I said, “Why don’t we give them some actual meat? They can have an Alexis Carrel chicken heart that just keeps growing and growing and they chop steaks off it as it rotates.”

And Cyril said, “Fine,” and began to type and made the whole Chicken Little bit out of it. If you’ve read the book you know how fine that was; if you haven’t take my word for it. It was fine.

You have just seen one of the reasons why I loved collaborating with Cyril, but what I’m saying is that collaborating can help, even if you don’t have two writers who work together as productively as Cyril and I often did. It is often helpful to a newbie to collaborate, even with another newbie, just for the sake of the life support and discipline they can give each other.

Enough for now. Next time I’ll tell you how collaborating can help you even when you don’t have anyone to collaborate with.

 
Related post:

• Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 1

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?

Some of the Futurians at my apartment in 1938. From left, front row: Joseph Harold Dockweiler aka Dirk Wylie, John B. Michel, Isaac Asimov, Donald A. Wollheim; center row: Chester Cohen, Walter Kubilius, me, Richard Wilson; top row: Cyril Kornbluth, Jack Gillespie, Jack Robins.

The “Quadrumvirate,” for most of its existence, ran the Futurians. We accreted to the club and to each other by adhesion to other clubs; the first was G.G. Clark’s Brooklyn Science Fiction League, which Donald Wollheim and Johnny Michel had left a shambles after they had kidnapped most of its members, one of them being me; then we began sending radar signals to individuals to seemed to be our kind of people, by which we mostly meant the kind of fan who desperately wanted to become a pro.

We found one of these in Connecticut in a person who was then a member of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, because the CCC not only gave him three hots and a cot for planting trees and doing other things for the environment, it also sent some money back to his family who could use it (remember, this was the time of the Great Depression). That was Robert A.W. Lowndes. Before long, he was able to change jobs, becoming a hospital orderly (thus his nickname of “Doc”) and then he made it to New York and the Futurians.

Continue reading ‘The Quadrumvirate’ »

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

The One That Went Right, Almost

The Space Merchants was actually the first science fiction novel that Cyril Kornbluth and I wrote, and it pleased us both greatly by becoming a quick success. We scored good sales and got a ton of reviews, mostly good.

And in the fullness of time, I got a phone call from a man named Arnold Perl. He said he had just read the book. He thought it might have some possibilities that might not have occurred to me, and would like to discuss them. And why didn’t I drop by his house in Alphabet City — a pleasant residential section of the lower East Side at the time, not yet carved into drug kingdoms — and have a chat?

If you are a more sophisticated person than I was in the 1950s, you know who Arnold Perl was. I didn’t. He had to tell me. He was the fellow who had taken a book of short stories by Sholem Aleichem, Tevye’s Daughters, made it into a Jewish theater play … and then encouraged the process, together with Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, who fiddled with the milkman’s story and added some great songs — and everything else it needed to become Fiddler on the Roof, pretty much the biggest and best musical event to hit old Broadway.

And what he was wondering, Arnold said, as he poured me another cup of tea, was whether something like that could be done with The Space Merchants.

 

Now, I can’t honestly say that I knew just what was being offered to me, but what I did know was just a tiny bit worrisome. I didn’t want to disappoint this nice man, and I was well aware that I knew nothing about playwriting. Ah, not to worry, Arnold said. He wasn’t looking for a finished script. What he was hoping for was glimpses — a short story, even a single page from a story, a confrontation, a discovery. An idea.

Or a song.

Or a dance number — I was after all, I was a big ballet fan, wasn’t I?

Nothing that had to attain the professional standards of theater, though.

So I did it. I said I’d give it a try, and as I wandered down from his place in the East Village, the ideas were beginning to condense themselves out of what had been that amorphous cloud that these things come from. So I waited for the ideas to hit.

No “If I were a Rich Man” came to me out of my gymnastics, not even a long and empty length of railroad track. But I was, I thought, beginning to catch the rhythm of the process. One notion — a song and dance about a major surgical procedure — stuck in my mind for a while. What did that have to do with the future of the advertising business? Nothing.

What did Arnold say when I showed it to him? He said, “I’m glad to see you’re loosening up.”

Was any of this stuff real story material? I don’t know, but sometimes I would get a feeling that there were useful images coming along, any minute now. My big sorrow was that I had to do it all by myself, because Cyril had died some months earlier. If he had been around, the whole process would have been at least twice as easy and at least twice as good. But he wasn’t.

And then one morning the phone rang at a shockingly early hour, and it was the office of my film agent, H.N. Swanson, on the line. I don’t mean it was Swanie himself. It was one of his large number of assistants and associates and assorted other human beings who inhabited the two-story walkup that was his office.

“Fred?” said the voice on the phone. “Swanie says some English people called Redifusion Television are offering $750 for the film rights to The Space Merchants and what do you want him to do about it?”

To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:
Me and the Biz
Me and the Biz, Part II (continued)

Which, as you know, is the largest island in the Marquesas group, and the one in whose harbor we are now anchored so that our shipmates may storm ashore in search of tapa cloth and guaranteed authentic ironwood carved war clubs.

Betty Anne and I, shipboard, 2009.

The other thing about Nuku Hiva is that it is the last dry land we are going to see until, after seven more days at sea, we dock once more in San Diego. This has certain consequences, among them the fact that something we do with our computers is incompatible with something the local comsats do up there in orbit. I won’t bore you by providing a more technical explanation of the problem (as if I could!), but what it means is that the posts I have been writing for transmission to our blogmeisters, Dick and Leah, aren’t going to get transmitted anywhere until we are back in our own home. And then they may not get to you in the proper order, as planned for your maximum reading enjoyment.

Ah, well. Sorry about that. I’ll try to do better. Meanwhile. . . .

I said in the beginning that I intended to provide reminiscences of some people who might interest you, and you might like to get an idea of who these people are. They appear to come in five categories: writers I have collaborated with to one degree or another (Williamson , Kornbluth, Asimov, Hubbard, etc.), writers who were my clients when I was a literary agent (Asimov, Budrys, Wyndham, etc.), writers I published when I was an editor (Asimov, Niven, Doc Smith, Heinlein, etc.), writers I hung around with a lot (Asimov, Silverberg, Ellison, etc. — you will note that some people come under more than one of these headings) and, the smallest of these categories, the nonwriters. This includes editors and publishers (the Ballantines, John Campbell, Horace Gold, etc.) and a few assorted scientists, politicians and other special cases (Carl Sagan, a local Democratic Party boss, a U.S. senator and so on).

Quite a few of these I have already written about in one form or another and those bits just need touchups to pass on to you, and so I will start them soon and keep them going as long as my right index finger permits. Along with whatever other kinds of comments I think you might be willing to sit still for. And I hope you’ll enjoy.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke at home in Sri Lanka, 2005. Photo by Amy Marash.

I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science-fiction writer and he did what sf writers do in a strange city: He looked for other sf writers to talk to.

He found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it — at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted “cons” — sf-speak for science-fiction gatherings — in many places at many times.

In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink — that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher, because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.)

Then, in one of his letters in the early part of 2006, Arthur rather offhandedly mentioned that, a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he had signed publishing contracts for several books that, he was now convinced, he would never be able to write himself. Most of them he had arranged for some other writer to finish, but there was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he needed a collaborator.

Continue reading ‘Sir Arthur and I’ »