CHAPTER VI
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ABOUT WRITING METHODS AND CUTTING
October 25,1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
…then write another short. This one is tentatively titled “Homesickness” [“It’s Great to Be Back”] and is another Luna City and so forth yarn. If possible, I want to build up a background, as I did in Astounding, for a series of interplanetary shorts, laid in the near future (the coming century, to about A.D. 2050). The series will follow the formula, somewhat modified, of the SEP [Saturday Evening Post] series such as Earthworm Tractor, Tugboat Annie, Gunsmith Pyne, Blue Chip Haggerty, etc. — stories laid against a particular occupation or industry. My series will be laid against the background of commercial (not exploration nor adventure) interplanetary travel. Continuity will be maintained by names of places-Luna City, Dry water, Venusburg, New Brisbane, New Chicago, How-Far?, Ley burg, Marsopolis, Supra-New York, etc., and by consistent use of techniques, cultural changes, and speech changes. Characters will shift for each story, but a major character in one story may show up in a bit part in another.
The science and engineering will be held to a minimum but will be authentic. An editor may be sure that I will respect facts of astronomy, atomics, ballistics, rocketry, etc. For example, the piloting in the story you are about to receive is as authentic as it can be at this date-if it is not as it will be, then it is at least as it could be; it is practical, with respect to time intervals, speeds, accelerations, and instruments used. When, in that story, I mention falling 700 feet on the Moon in forty seconds and thereby picking up speeds up to 140 miles per hour, and, thereafter, killing the speed with a one-second-plus blast at five-gravities, I know what I am talking about-I am a mechanical engineer, a ballistician, a student of reaction engines, and an amateur astronomer. I mention these things because they may help you sell my stuff-I won’t give an editor any Buck Rogers nonsense. A great deal of study and research goes into the background of my stories.
May 16, 1947: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
…As for formal coaching from Uzzell [a well-known “story doctor” and coach of the time] or anyone, I’m getting just the coaching I want from you…I’m afraid of coaching, of writers’ classes, of writers’ magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble-you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step. Articles and books on how to write have that effect on me. The author seems so persuasive, so sure that he knows what he is talking about, that I start having doubts about my own technique. It usually turns out that the author is urging the reader to do something quite unsuited to me-fine for him probably, but not my pidgin. If I try to imitate him, follow his directions, I usually fail to accomplish his methods and lose my own in the process…
I do get a great deal of help from studying other writers’ stories, particularly in the respects in which I see that they have accomplished an effect that I do not as yet know how to accomplish. I find such study of what they have done more use to me than their discussions of how they do it.
Winslow says I don’t understand plotting and probably I don’t-I have been congratulated many times on the skill shown in my plotting when I knew damn well that the story in question had not been plotted in advance at all. My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him. When I can “hear the character talk” then I’m all right-he works out his own salvation.