September 13, 2013

Faster Than a Speeding … Pulp Writer?

Category: Literature :: Permalink

In my last post, I mentioned The Waltons, a show that comes easily enough to my mind because I’m working my way through Season 4 right now with my family.  Speaking of Season 4, in the fourth episode (“The Prophecy”), John-Boy is confronted by a professor who tells him that he’ll be very lucky if he can make a living as a writer.  He says something like “There are only half a dozen writers in the United States right now who are able to do it.”

Perhaps he was referring only to what might be termed “serious literature,” which seems to be what John-Boy wants to write.  (The creator of The Waltons, somewhat disappointingly, seems to have turned out only about three novels himself.)  But if John-Boy had wanted to write for the pulps, he might just have been able to make a living.  If he had been fast enough.

“Come now,” you say.  “Surely the pulps didn’t pay that well.”  Granted.  They might pay a penny a word (as with the Texas Rangers series I mentioned in my previous blog entry) or perhaps $500 for a novel. Lester Dent, working under the house name Kenneth Robeson, started writing the Doc Savage novels at $500 a month and later received $750. The magazines themselves didn’t cost very much — maybe a dime — but some of them had a lot of readers.  Within a couple of years from its first issue, The Shadow “was selling more than 300,000 copies” (Hutchison, The Great Pulp Heroes, 20).  At a dime an issue, that’s $30,000 per month.  Not bad, considering it was the Great Depression.

What kind of wages might a writer earn?  That would depend on how many stories he sold, and that might depend on how fast he wrote.  According to this site, wages in the early ’30s ranged from $0.35 an hour to $1.50 an hour (e.g., for a doctor).  At an average of 21.67 working days a month and assuming only eight working hours a day, that’s $60.68 to $260 a month.  Lester Dent’s $500 a month looks pretty good in comparison, doesn’t it?

But then consider a guy like Walter Gibson, who wrote The Shadow novels under the name Maxwell Grant.  At first, he was writing only one novel a quarter, but soon it was a novel a month — and then the magazine started to come out twice a month: “he was to produce twenty-four adventures per year, one 60,000-word novel every two weeks for as long as the popularity of The Shadow continued.  That figure totaled more than 1,440,000 words per year” (20).

If you do the math, that’s 692 words an hour, every hour, eight hours a day and 21.67 days a month, every month.  Not 692 first draft, sloppy, “I’ll write them fast and edit them later” words.  That’s finished product, ready to go.  And that’s not 692 words per hour, after taking some time to think about your plot.  If Gibson took some time for plotting, the actual writing was a lot quicker.

And, in fact, it was: “Keeping two dozen yarns ahead of publication, he sometimes turned out a fresh book in four to six days, often working all night to meet self-imposed deadlines. Behind a typewriter, he was as superhuman as his own creation.  He worked on a battery of machines.  When one began to “get tired,” he’d move on to another, and then to a third (20).”

And he kept it up for eighteen years, for a total of 283 Shadow novels … among other things.  Hutchison notes that the published guide to Gibson’s writing “is, in itself, a staggering 328 pages long” (29), and included “149 other books of all types, thousands of newspaper and magazine pieces, comics, radio shows, puzzles, mgic tricks, and other material under various pen names” (29).I don’t know what his income was per story.  If he was paid a penny a word, that comes to $1200 a month.  Maybe, like Dent, he received $500 a novel, but that still comes to $1000 a month — and that at a time when many doctors were making less than $300 a month.

Serious literature, John-Boy?  No, you couldn’t likely have made a living writing that in those years of the Great Depression on Walton’s Mountain.  But if you’d been writing for the pulps your father liked to read and if you wrote fast enough and well enough, maybe you could have.  Apparently some people did.

Posted by John Barach @ 2:23 pm | Discuss (3)

3 Responses to “Faster Than a Speeding … Pulp Writer?”

  1. Links 6 – 14/9/13 | Alastair's Adversaria Says:

    […] 10. Faster Than a Speeding … Pulp Writer? […]

  2. Ben House Says:

    Thanks for calling my attention to this. Great post.

  3. Kata Iwannhn » Intimations and Coincidences Says:

    […] pulp magazines (which generated a blog entry on westerns and another on the amount of writing some pulp writers did and how much they were paid for […]

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