My Dad, Horace L. Gold, was a famous comic-book writer who wrote the Jor-El Krypton Superman’s Origin story for Siegel and Schuster, and what’s more, he had an office at Action Comics immediately postwar.
He was a published author who specialized in fantasy and some science fiction, but also wrote for the pulps, which he covers neatly in his short autobiography, “Gold on Gold”.
His life was simple — it revolved around his typewriter and his constant cup of tea and a continual chain of cigarette smoke.
I learned a number of things about writing from him.
- A short-story always ends with some sort of punchline.
- The first paragraph has everything you need in it and teases the reader to read on.
- Never write “Adam and Eve” stories where the hero and heroine turn out to be Adam and Eve. It’s not that it’s already been done — it’s been used so many times editors can sense when one is coming in.
- Never fool the reader. Always take the reader into your confidence, and trust the reader to follow and get the point.
- Don’t use language beyond the reader’s present skills. It’s not your job to teach basic language to the reader, but to entertain, amuse and possibly educate them on some related subject.
- Readability is more important than exactitude, especially when it comes to typography. Which would you rather do — sell books, or win design awards.
- Always try to get the cattle to Abilene, where every bump in the plot tells the audience, “now they’ll NEVER get the cattle to the rail-head at Abilene.
- Give the main character a goal and a series of obstacles to that goal.
- One idea per story. Never waste a second idea in the same story — you’re a writer, and ideas are money in the bank.
- There has to be a time limit — he usually gave his characters 24 hours to solve their own murder or rescue a planet. When he edited Galaxy, that was a prime factor.
- Let the audience in on it. Don’t pull a fast one, like Agatha Christie always does, the page before the last one.
I asked him one day, after a particularly tough writing session where I was still trying to get my first published story, how you write a novel — not that I had plans, just curious.
He explained that a novel is simply a series of short stories, called “chapters”, which are connected by a common theme, the same central character, or place and time setting, or some other factor that appears in some or all of the chapters.
He explained how to write a short story by telling his famous “How Sholom Aleichim Became a Great Writer”, which fortunately was recorded and is, I believe, still available from our Gateways Books & Tapes online store.
There were many science fiction personalities who visited Horace at his infamous apartment in Stuyvesant Town, and many tales have been told — there are about 30 books that speak to the Friday night poker parties in our living room.
I can’t tell you what happened during those parties every Friday night — I was out of the room and in my own room, reading stories our guests had written. I got to see every manuscript that came in, and helped to proofread many of them.
I also got to mark those “slush pile” stories — meaning stories from authors with no agents — and recommended a few of them that later became quite famous, notably new writer Tom Scortia’s “The Bomb in the Bathtub” in 1957 when I was home from military boarding school, and Isaac Asimov’s “The Martian Way”, a thinly disguised rant about McCarthy, which — because of the danger of McCarthyism and political violence, Horace was reluctant to publish, but in the end, he did.
He didn’t publish William Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth”, a satire of the Korean War, because it literally made him sweat to think of the damage the goons could do. There’s an equal danger today.
Back in my Agency days, I learned some dirty tricks, and thought up a few myself — at that time, working on the Dark Side, I figured out that mucking up the works was the best solution, along with Lawrence of Arabia’s chief tactic — avoid the soldiers and attack the infrastructure — the telegraph poles, the food supplies, the ammo trucks.
If you have a specific target, such as those creeps who scare refugees and bus them to a distant state with nothing but fear and dread at what might be facing them after a 4,000 mile trek to what they supposed was safety from bullies.
In my list of Dirty Tricks, I managed to find one that fits precisely and sends the message to the point, by shipping your household garbage bag to those assholes, and get millions of other folks to do the same.
Let’s see — who would be on that short list of recipients?
- DE SANTIS — On the envelope and at the start of the letter, use “The Honorable” followed by the governor’s first and last name. The second line should read “Governor of” and the state name. Then add more lines for the official mailing address, typically found on the “Contact” page of the governor’s office website. Make the package attractive — it’s a love-offering in the same spirit as they acted.
- GREG ABBOTT — Same instructions — don’t get abusive, just make your point — they send something to the North, the North should send something back to the Confederacy or whatever it is this time around.
I don’t actually recommend doing this — I myself would never bother — but I include it in my list of Dirty Tricks just to show that if someone wanted to do something mean to De Santis and Abbott, it wouldn’t be hard.
Another trick is to swamp their phones and flood their server and keep doing it from a variety of source-points, meaning that I’d enlist millions to help me do it, if I did it at all, which I wouldn’t — these bastards are just not worth the trouble, and they’ll get it in the end from their own people, when they discover that they’ve been swizzled, and they will — they always do.
There are a million dirty tricks, and there are actually catalogs of them available from a number of different book dealers online and off.
The best one is just titled “Get Even” and features a guy with a screw through his head on the cover.
You can also easily find George Hayduke’s “The Big Book of Revenge”, John Jackson’s “The Black Book of Revenge”, and “Dirty Tricks” by Michael Dibdin. These were textbooks years ago, and are still in print, and are generally sold for entertainment purposes only.
Mostly these are humorous compilations of ingenious practical jokes, some of which are downright mean, but most of which are just plain funny.
The best revenge is to expose someone to humiliation. I don’t play practical jokes that cause bad feelings, but I wanted to show that I could, if pushed, do exactly that.
My point here is that there are many NON-VIOLENT ways to express displeasure and many more ways to resist bullying than you might suppose, and I wanted to mention just a few, including the dirty tricks, which can be effective political tools, like busing LEGAL immigrants to strange towns where they’re not expected.
Causing a major crisis is not the job of a governor, but Abbott & DeSantis will go down as a comedy team little remembered and long-forgotten.
They are dust in the passage of time, dimly lit by the glow of past history, left in the rotting pages of their biographical essays, part of the entangled events that leave us asked, “Can someone please tell me what the f*ck just happened???”.
Speaking of the F-word, it’s become really popular these effing days with all those effing mean politicians doing one effing stinko thing after another, and I’m effing tired of it.
Time to scoot along for breakfast — I’ll be thinking up some more Dirty Tricks that I’ll share at our morning gathering, although I must caution you, there’s no money in revenge.
In case you didn’t get the reference, it’s a line delivered by Inigo Montoya, in the famous and somewhat funny, “Princess Bride”.
Breakfast, breakfast, keep focused. Breakfast, then meeting. Remember my training as a Viking Warrior — “Pillage first, THEN destroy”.
Hey, don’t knock it — had I known that little bit of wisdom before I conquered all of Europe, I’d still have some loot left over!
Speaking of which, there’s a New Ladder on D2R, and it’s coming up soon!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby