What you're looking at here is Part 12 in my series of articles advising writers who ain't sold their stuff how to maybe sell their stuff. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here, Part 9 can be read here, Part 10 can be read here and Part 11 can be read here. Part 12 starts right now.
This time out, I have a piece of advice that's mainly for writers who are just starting out and who've sold little or nothing, though there are those of us who've been around for a while who could stand to remember it. It's advice which may be very, very hard to follow — the kind where your brain may tell you it makes good sense but you still may not be able to resist doing what your brain tells you what not to do.
The thing you shouldn't do is rush to brag.
In writing, a certain amount of self-promotion is sometimes necessary but a little humility can also go a long way. Obviously, I'm talking about selling your work or getting people to hire you but it's also sound advice with regard to protecting your mindset and keeping things in perspective.
I have two stories to tell here. The first is from when I was just breaking into the writing of comic books — or at least I thought I was. None of this led to me getting a professional sale or assignment but I think you'll see that I had good cause at the time to think it was happening.
Around 1968 when I was 16 years of age, I was the president of the local comic book club and I was also published a lot in comic book letter columns. I was living (as I always have) in Los Angeles and though I loved comic books, I had no strong notion of ever working in that field. Every interview I'd read about the business said you had to live in or around New York to do that. That was where DC and Marvel and all the major publishers were and the editors there didn't work with writers who couldn't show up at the offices there.
That wasn't exactly true. They were a wee bit more open than they said to working with writers by mail and there was actually a major comic book company in Los Angeles. Western Publishing Company had its Gold Key comics line and half of their books — mostly the ones with the Disney characters, the Warner Brothers characters and a few others including Tarzan — were edited out of an office in Hollywood. By 1972, I'd be steadily employed by that office but in '68, even though I knew they were local, that possibility somehow didn't occur to me.
I had resigned myself to not writing comic books when I suddenly had three invites to submit to East Coast publishers. Mort Weisinger, who edited the Superman titles for DC, wrote in reply to one of my letters and suggested I try my hand at writing for him. Something in one of those letters (I have no idea what) had made him think I might have the necessary skills.
Not long after, I received a similar offer from another DC editor, Jack Miller, who was editing romance comics and The Inferior Five and Strange Adventures, and who had just taken over Metal Men. Then Dick Giordano, who was the editor-in-chief at Charlton Comics said he'd be open to any ghost-type stories I sent him for his books.
So I wrote and sent Weisinger a Jimmy Olsen script which he immediately rejected. I was actually startled by how quickly it was back in my mailbox — sooner than I'd thought the U.S. Postal Service could physically transport it there and back.
It was a flat-out rejection but a person I assumed to be Mr. Weisinger had jotted down remarks on its pages and they were very wise and very educational. I may have learned more from those brief comments than I learned from any writing teacher I ever had. As I will explain in a few paragraphs, I later had cause to question if Mr. Weisinger himself had authored those notes.
Was this script that bad? Yes, I'm afraid it was. A few years back, I came across my manuscript and forced myself to re-read it — and believe me, that was not easy and not pleasant. By page five, I must have looked like Edvard Munch's painting of "The Scream." Just awful…far worse than I could have imagined.
Weisinger was so right to reject it and I cannot comprehend why on God's Earth he encouraged me to submit more. That script should have caused him to write back and say, "Please stop sending scripts and while you're at it, don't read any more of our comics. I don't want to run the risk that you'll be inspired to submit something else."
But he didn't say that so I sent a few more ideas and outlines and within about three months, I'd written a short Krypto tale for the rear of the Superboy comic and Mr. Weisinger liked it. He wrote to say he had some "minor notes" for rewrites and he'd send them to me as soon as he returned from his vacation. His letter said, "If you can't fix the problems, I can do it here so you basically have your first sale. Congratulations."
I never would have believed it. And I never heard back from Mort Weisinger about it.
Soon after, he passed the editorship of Superboy over to another editor at the firm who did not want Krypto back-up stories and who was notorious, I later learned, for never buying anything from writers who had not made a substantial number of sales to other editors first. Then not long after, Mort Weisinger left the company. But come to think of it: Though he never wrote me again about my script, I did have one more contact with the man.
In 1970, I happened to be paying my first-ever visit to the DC offices the same day Weisinger was paying one of his last. We were introduced, we shook hands and I chatted with him briefly, all the time savoring the irony. He was getting out just as I was getting in.
The person there that day who introduced me to Mr. Weisinger was Nelson Bridwell, who had been Weisinger's assistant back when I was submitting. I related the whole tale to Nelson later and he vaguely recalled the Krypto script, saying "If Mort had bought it, you would have been the last 'new' writer he ever hired." Nelson did not recall my Jimmy Olsen script but he said he, not Mort, probably wrote the comments on it. I got to know Nelson well enough to believe that was so.
My relationship with Jack Miller had almost the same denouement. We had a brief but furious correspondence and soon, he had me developing stories for Metal Men. He told me in one letter that he was going to assign me — meaning yes, I would be paid — to do a script for it. He was waiting, he explained, for some writer and artist juggling within the office to settle down so he'd be authorized to buy scripts for that book.
I never heard from him again, either. He was soon juggled right out of the company, not by choice.
In the meantime, I wrote a script intended for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, one of the books Dick Giordano edited. Dick wrote back to say he liked it and would have accepted it on the spot with no changes but he'd just been hit with a temporary "buying freeze" at the company. He'd bought too many scripts lately or committed to too many writers and had to wait a month or two before purchasing any more.
He asked if it was okay if he held onto my script until he was allowed to buy it. I wrote back to tell him that was fine with me. A few weeks passed and then he wrote me again to tell me he was leaving Charlton but he would pass my script on to his successor and urge him to buy it and get me going on others.
It's been 46 years now and I have yet to hear from that successor. To be fair, I'll give him 'til 50 — but not a decade longer. Then that's it. No more of this Patient Writer crap.
Three opportunities, three strikes…but I think you can see why for a few months there, I was sure I was on the verge of becoming a professional writer of comic books. And being 16 years of age, I think you can sense why I made the mistake of anticipating reality a bit and telling the guys at the comic book club that I was about to be writing for Superboy and Metal Men and Charlton. It wasn't exactly a lie…just a slight advancement on the truth. Later, when that truth turned out not to be true, I was sorry I'd told them.
It wasn't just that some of them thought I'd been lying, though there was that. There were also those moments when someone would innocently ask, as they did for months after, "Hey, when is that Superboy you wrote coming out?" There was no way to explain to them why it wasn't coming out without feeling naïve and a little foolish and maybe that they didn't believe me.
I did feel naïve and foolish, like I'd kind of deceived myself. That's never a good feeling. Career management requires a very clear, honest understanding of where you are at any given moment. Turned out, I wasn't where I thought I was. As I have since learned — and have tried to impart in previous editions of this column — sometimes, projects don't happen for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I didn't do anything wrong in any of those three incidents except get my hopes up too high and too soon and to tell others.
Breaking into professional writing is a very personal matter which can involve a lot of emotion and self-doubt and self-discovery and self-everything. You only ratchet up the emotion and make it more difficult for yourself when you try to do it in public, perhaps feeling you have to prove something to others. It would have been so much easier if I'd kept it all to myself until my first sale was not only made but published; so much easier if I'd resisted the temptation to boast so I might savor a bit of jealousy from others.
Here's the other anecdote that applies to this topic. In the late seventies, I was running the comic book department for Hanna-Barbera and I was hiring writers and artists to create comic book material that was published overseas. We paid about the same as DC and Marvel and we paid promptly. It was a very good operation while it lasted and we employed a lot of good people.
A fellow I knew from comic book fandom heard about what we were doing and contacted me about possible work. He wanted very badly to write comics, he said, but had struck out with the New York companies. I decided to give him a break and asked him to send me some plots for a six-page Mumbly script. You remember Mumbly.
I sent him samples of the Mumbly stories others had been writing for me and he sent back a half-dozen plots, all of them too long and convoluted to fit into six pages. Density of Information is a key factor in any kind of writing. How much space/time do you have? What kind of story can you tell at a proper pace within those limitations? I would guess that the biggest mistake made by beginning comic book writers is trying to put too much or too little plot into one story and/or too much or too little dialogue and/or action into each page or panel.
All of his submissions were plots that would have gotten claustrophobic in twenty pages. I simplified one of them way, way down and told him to turn it into a script, reminding him that the primary market for our comics was other nations…so no puns, no references to American holidays or current events, etc.
Back it came a week or so later and it was not very good. I am here using "not very good" as a euphemism for "terrible and totally unusable." And really, really amateurish.
He had followed my simplified plot but added in lots of extraneous "in" jokes that most readers wouldn't get — and which wouldn't translate for our foreign audiences. And even if this story was published somewhere in English, most readers still wouldn't get them because they were jokes and references targeted at his friends and really, really devout comic book fans. He'd put way more effort into that kind of thing than to telling a cute story about Mumbly.
Throughout, he had done something that in the world of science-fiction writing is often called "Tuckerizing," though I'm sure it exists in every genre. Tuckerizing was named for a writer named Wilson Tucker who famously inserted his friends' names into his stories. It's a generally harmless practice if your friends are named Bob Johnson or Jane Porter or Henry Delaney or even Wilson Tucker. It's obvious and distracting if your friends are named Harlow W. Feinblatt or Gustavo Jakobsovinski or Fenmore Gyllenhaal.
The Mumbly script was loaded with gratuitous references to people he knew so he could say to them, "Look! I put your name in a comic book!" The whole script was like that. He even got himself into it via a "breaking the fourth wall" joke where Mumbly mumbled "Frazzl snazzl something" and another character said, "Yes, I know this doesn't make sense but this is the writer's first script!"
I called him up and gave him the facts o' life as nicely as I could. I said something like, "Your goal here is to please your editor, which you do by pleasing the general readership. Forget about showing-off to your friends. And get yourself out of the story. It's about Mumbly, not about you."
After apologizing nine thousand times and swearing, "I got it, I got it," he did a total rewrite, removing all the references designed to amuse his pals and/or call attention to himself. It still wasn't a very good script and at this point, I decided I had to cut my losses and just rewrite it myself. I could have written six six-page Mumbly scripts in the time I'd spent trying to midwife his one.
I did pay him the full rate but made it clear that he'd had his chance and that further submissions were unwelcome. Nevertheless, he continued to bombard me with plot ideas and pitches, none of which seemed worthy of acceptance.
Three weeks after I'd cut him off, I received in the mail a copy of a fanzine. It included a "news item" he'd planted proclaiming he was the new writer of the Mumbly comic book published overseas and that his work would soon be appearing in the American Hanna-Barbera comics. I'd never told him either of those might happen. Obviously, he circulated that announcement before I'd even reacted to his first draft…and I suspect he was a lot more interested in writing that press release than he ever was in writing comic books.
If you are an aspiring writer, there is much to learn from this story. He may not have made every possible mistake but he came darned close. He later submitted elsewhere, made a few modest sales but ultimately did not have anything resembling a professional writing career.
What's the moral of this story? Well, you should be able to figure that out.