Legends of the Underwood #21: Dean Koontz

Normally I just run a quote, but this one requires a bit of set-up.

In 1977, Dean Koontz sold a thriller called Strike Deep to Dial Press to be published under the pseudonym "Anthony North." Not long after, his editor at Dial called him with a strange request. Seems another book had dropped out of the schedule, and they needed Strike Deep to fill the slot. And they needed it in six weeks. Finished, edited, revised... all in six weeks. Koontz, being the stone cold pro, agreed, despite this being 1977, long before you could e-mail a Word doc to your editor.

As Koontz explained it to biographer Katherine Ramsland:

"So week by week I would write like the infinite number of monkeys typing away, and every Friday morning, we drove to New York, three and a half hours away. At some point before we got there, I'd pull off. Gerda would take over the car and she'd drive to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. I'd leap out with the pages while she circled the block. I'd run into the editor's office and give him the pages and he'd give me the past week's pages with editing notes, and we'd drive home. And that day would be shot. I'd spend Saturday revising anything that had to be revised, and start the next batch. And that's the way it went until it was done."

Later, Koontz's agent asked the editor if he was interested in another Anthony North thriller. The editor said no, telling the agent he'd been disappointed in Strike Deep. When the agent pressed for more details, the editor responded: "It felt rushed."

--from Katherine Ramsland's Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography (HarperCollins, 1997).

(Twenty-first in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #20: Nathanael West

"Nat and his fellow writers were treated like factory workers. A rookie, Nat was in over his head, but Sid [Perelman] helped him prepare a list of technical terms. His first week was spent bluffing his way through one of the company's ideas, a story set in a beauty parlor. He furiously stitched together a treatment, an eleven-page synopsis describing the characters and scenes, and by the end of two weeks completed the first draft of a shooting script. It was amazing to discover himself capable of producing four thousand words a day under pressure."

--from Marion Meade's new (and highly recommended) Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

(Twentieth in a series. Photo from the Lonelyhearts Facebook fan page.)

Legends of the Underwood #19: John Hughes

"Writing was, for Hughes, not so much a profession as a condition of life. The thoughts that germinated in his brain took a direct path to his hands, which filled notebooks, floppy disks, and hard drives with screenplays, stories, sketches, and jokes. When he wasn't writing creatively, he was writing about how much writing he was doing. A spiral-bound logbook from 1985 finds Hughes keeping track of his progress on Ferris Bueller. The basic story line, he notes, was developed on February 25. It was successfully pitched the following day. And then he was off: '2-26 Night only 10 pages... 2-27 26 pages... 2-28 19 pages... 3-1 9 pages... 3-2 20 pages... 3-3 24 pages.' Wham-bam, script done. All in one week."

--from David Kamp's "Sweet Bard of Youth," his piece on late director John Hughes in the current Vanity Fair (February 2010).

(Nineteenth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #18: Samuel Fuller

"We went to work on the script on a Monday morning... As [Hank Wales] paced back and forth feeding me local color, I pounded away on my Royal. By talking it out we piece together the action, plot twists, and dialogue. The first ninety-page draft was finished before breakfast on Saturday morning. After eggs, bacon and hash browns, we found an agent, Charles Feldman, who happened to be in his office on the weekend. He sold our script to Twentieth Century Fox on the following Monday morning for fifty grand."

--legendary director Samuel Fuller, on writing Confirm or Deny (1941) in his autobiography A Third Face (Applause, 2002).

(Eighteenth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #17: James Cameron

"Cameron took both jobs. This meant that, in a three-month period in 1983, he had to write three scripts. Cameron approached the dilemma schematically, as a Terminator might, scanning the scene with a computer readout in its head. He decided each script would be two hours long and 120 pages, for a total page count of 360. He divided the total number of waking hours he had during that three-month period by 360 and figured out how many pages per hour he had to write. 'And I just wrote that many pages per our,' he says. Cameron wrote longhand on yellow legal pads, mostly starting in the evening and going into the early morning hours, so that he could attend to preproduction duties on The Terminator during the day... He downed pot after pot of coffee, ate plenty of junk food, and... didn't really finish."

--From Rebecca Keegan's new Cameron bio, The Futurist (Crown, 2009). The three scripts were a Terminator rewrite, Alien 2, and Rambo: First Blood Part 2. Of course, he eventually finished.

(Seventeenth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #16: Robert Silverberg

"Back in my pulp-mag days I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5000-7500 words in a single day. If I had 3000-worders to do, I usually wrote one before lunch and one after lunch. At three o'clock I poured myself a shot of rum or mixed a martini, put a record on, and sat down to relax until dinnertime, reading and perhaps sketching out the next day's work on a scrap of paper. This was the Tuesday-to-Friday routine. I never worked on Saturday or Sunday... In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write. I produced a lot of copy that way—a million words a year, or more."

--Robert Silverberg in conversation with Octopulps, Francesca Myman's website highlighting SF, fantasy and adventure pulps "featuring the wily octopus." (Hat tip to BoingBoing for the link.)

(Sixteenth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #15: Mario Puzo

"I used to do a book bonus on the weekends, which was at least 60 pages. I never could write in the office, I had to work at home. When I was working on The Godfather, I was doing three stories a month, I was writing book reviews for The New York Times, Book World, Time magazine, and I wrote a children's book [The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw]. All at one time. And I was publishing other articles. I had four years where I must have knocked out millions of words. I tell ya, it's absolutely the best training a writer could get, to work on those magazines. You did everything."

--Mario Puzo, in conversation with Josh Alan Friedman, from It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps (by Adam Parfrey, Feral House, 2003). During the 1960s, Puzo wrote for Magazine Management titles Male and Men.

(Fifteenth in a series. Cover scan courtesy CoverBrowser.com.)

Legends of the Underwood #14: Philip K. Dick

"[Phil] was a fluent writer, and his work came easily to him. He said that the idea for a novel came in one intuitive flash, but he couldn't tell it 'in under sixty thousand words. The words come out of my hands, not my brain. I write with my hands. I type 160 words a minute, the rate of a really good legal secretary.' One day he told me that he had typed sixty original manuscript pages without an error."

--From Anne R. Dick's Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982 (Point Reyes Cypress Press). Dick's biographer, Lawrence Sutin, notes that in 1963 and 1964, Dick wrote eleven novels, eleven stories, two essays, two extended plot treatments, as well as "hundreds of letters and God knows what all else that may have been lost or destroyed along the way."

(Fourteenth in a series. Won't make it to 15 this calendar year, but hey, 14's not bad, right?)

Photo: copyright Nicole Panter.

Legends of the Underwood #13: Arthur J. Burks

"Average daily output of [Arthur J. Burks'] Underwood is four thousand words. In emergencies Burks can do three or four times this amount. Once, for example, Sky Fighters called him at ten in the morning and ordered three stories, a total of twelve thousand words. It got them by six in the evening, and Mr. Burks made two hundred and fifty dollars for his day's work. He never rereads his writings, either in manuscript or after they are published, and doesn't care what editors do to them."

--From "Burks of the Pulps," a Talk of the Town item in the February 15, 1936 issue of the New Yorker.

(Thirteenth in a series. Will we make it to fifteen by year's end?)

Legends of the Underwood #12: Erle Stanley Gardner

"Gardner slept as little as three hours a night, instead staying at his typewriter until he had produced the 4,000-word daily target he set for himself. Gardner was a writing machine, a story industrialist... in recent years he'd hammered out millions of words and sold hundreds of stories."

—Richard Rayner in his latest book, A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (Doubleday).

(Twelfth in a series. Here's the whole danged thing so far. )

Legends of the Underwood #11: Jack Kerouac

In August 1963, Kerouac became involved with a beautiful black woman, Alene Lee. She later became the model for "Mardou Fox" in The Subterraneans, which Jack wrote in three days but took five years to publish.

—Harvey Pekar writing in The Beats: A Graphic History (with Ed Piskor; Hill and Wang, 2009)

(Eleventh in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #10: Mickey Spillane

According to legend, [Spillane] wrote his first novel I, the Jury (1947) in nine days, in order to get $1,000 for a piece of land. Once, he told the house painters, he had been taking a manuscript to the publisher and lost it. That must have been awful, said the painters. “No big deal,” said Spillane, “I just typed it out again.”

—from J. Madison Davis's essay on Spillane, "His 'Customers' Were the Jury," in World Literature Today.

(Tenth in a series. Image from the Life photo archive.)

Legends of the Underwood #9: Dashiell Hammett

After hitting New York Hammett completed The Glass Key in what he claimed was a whirlwind of typing—the last third of the novel composed in something like one thirty-hour session.

—from Don Herron's The Dashiell Hammett Tour, recently reprinted in hardcover by Vince Emery Productions as part of their "Ace Performer" series. Highly recommended, even if you don't intend on visiting San Francisco any time soon. This little gem is packed with Hammett insights, rarities and trivia.

(Ninth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #8: John D. MacDonald

I was involved in the desperate business of trying to wrest a living out of free-lance fiction for magazines... During those first four months of effort, I wrote about 800,000 words of unsalable manuscript, all in short-story form. This is the equivalent of ten average novels. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me ten years to acquire the precision and facility I acquired in four months.

—John D. MacDonald in The House Guests (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1965)

(Eighth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #7: Lawrence Block

I have on occasion written books in as little as three days; I've written a couple that took only seven or eight days that are probably as good as anything I've done. I can't argue that I made a mistake writing those books as rapidly as I did. nor am I at all inclined to attempt to do that sort of thing now.

—Lawrence Block, in Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (Writer's Digest Books, 1979)

(Seventh in a series. Photo by Laurie Roberts.)

Legends of the Underwood #6: Orrie Hitt

Hitt had a grinding regimen, twelve-hour days in front of an aged Remington Royal perched on the kitchen table, surrounded by iced coffee, noisy children and Winston cigarettes, pausing only for supper or to watch wrestling or Sergeant Bilko on the television. Hitt produced a novel every two weeks, for which he was paid as little as $250.

—Lee Server in Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945-1955

(Sixth in a series. Hitt was a master of the... um, erotic paperback original, in case you were thinking of ordering up a stack. Also, Server's book is very highly recommended.)

Update: James Reasoner, a modern-day Legend of the Underwood himself, heard from Orrie Hitt's daughter. Read all about it here.

Legends of the Underwood #5: Richard S. Prather

For years I was on just about a 26-hour day. I wasn't going anywhere...all I did was write. I might start working at ten o'clock in the morning and go to bed about two the next morning, then wake up at ten o’clock and start the cycle over again at noon. Every day it was about two hours later, rotating like that. I just thought of it as a 26-hour day... The biggest day I ever had was here in Arizona when I was working on Dead-Bang. I worked 24 hours straight and did 24,000 words. I think when it goes that well and goes that fast, it's the best stuff you can do.

—Richard S. Prather, from an interview with Dean Davis at the Richard S. Prather/Shell Scott Website

(Fifth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #4: Michael Avallone

[Avallone was] the self-proclaimed "Fastest Typewriter in the East" and "The King of the Paperbacks," who claimed to have written over a thousand works, almost all paperback originals... He once completed a novel in a day and a half. One story goes that he wrote a 1,500-word short story in 20 minutes, while dining in a New York restaurant. One year, he supposedly churned out 27 books.

—Kevin Burton Smith, from his entry on Avallone at The Thrilling Detective Website

(Fourth in a series. Illustration by Frank Hamilton from Paperback Parade #3. Avallone's writing desk, complete with cigarette burns, is currently on display at Port Richmond Books in Philadelphia, PA.)

Legends of the Underwood #3: Richard Bachman

Completed in a blind heat—The Running Man was written in a mere 72 hours—it was declined by at least two New York publishers before consignment to the desk drawer that would later spawn four [Richard] Bachman novels. "It's nothing but story," says [Stephen] King. "It moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side.

—Douglas E. Winter, Appendix A to Stephen King: The Art of Darkness

(Third in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #2: Richard Matheson

I wrote Fury on Sunday in three days. We lived in an apartment right near the beach I used for Someone Is Bleeding. I had a little typewriter, my old Standard Corona that I got when I was twelve years old from my sister at Christmas, and I sat in a closet and banged the thing out in three days. That's why some of the writing is quite interesting, because it's really stream of consciousness.

—Richard Matheson, quoted in Matthew R. Bradley's introduction to Noir: Three Novels of Suspense

(Second in a series.)