A Word About Louis' Work Habits (cont.)
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He might experiment with mailing the story
off to a "slick" magazine . . .

It is very important to realize that for the great majority of his career Dad was a working writer. He wrote so that he could eat and later so that his family could eat. Art was not the goal. If he entertained people, he would sell stories. If he sold stories he made money . . . and well into the 1970s he didn't even make what many people today would consider to be good money.

When he was writing for the magazines of the '30s, 40s, and '50s, Louis would try to complete at least one story a week and to get it into the mail immediately. This was so he could always feel that he had the hope of selling something to someone. Often stories came back over and over again and he was constantly balancing the cost of the postage against the number of times he could afford to send a story out. If he was feeling like he had a little extra change he might experiment with writing a story specifically for the slick magazines (like The Saturday Evening Post). They paid more but were less likely to publish his work and also might not send him any money for months if they did publish it. It was likely too, that they would require extensive rewriting, which would mean that the potential pay-day was both not certain and further off.

There was less risk, if he focused on the kind of action oriented stories that were bought by the pulps, and concentrated on writing as many of them as possible. The pulp market was mostly about volume, and so speed became Louis's greatest ally. One draft was about all the time that he could afford to spend on a story if he wanted to make money on it. If the editor sent it back and wanted changes sometimes it was easier to just send it out to another magazine and hope that they liked it more.

Since he wasn't getting paid very much for his stories Louis found it necessary to come up with an incredible number of ideas. As he moved from writing short stories to novels, that talent did not diminish and the required volume did not abate much either. Many years Dad wrote up to four novels and, as you will see from this site, created many, many ideas that he did not end up finishing.

Often his creative process went through the following stages - He would have ideas for stories, usually not the full plot, just a situation or a beginning. He would write these down in a sentence or maybe just a word or two on an unlined sheet of paper . . . most of the time this would fix the idea in his memory and he would never look at the paper again. When the time came that he decided to write the story, Louis would sit down at the typewriter and knock out the first chapter. If he knew where it was taking him or the situation was intriguing enough to get him reacting to it in a creative manner then he would keep on. But if he wasn't sure what he was going to do or the idea for another story that seemed more ready to be written got him sidetracked, then that beginning went into a pile. Occasionally, they were resurrected and turned into finished stories but, more often, they were not. The first seventy pages of The Haunted Mesa sat on his desk for nearly fifteen years before being finished. And Last of the Breed was an idea that rattled around in his brain for even longer. Occasionally, Dad would take one of his short stories and develop it into a novel. Sometimes it was a direct expansion of the original work as in The Gift of Cochise becoming Hondo, other times there was only a loose association between the two, like in the marvelous Cap Rock Rancher and the novel Tucker, or the short story End of the Drive and Kiowa Trail.

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