When people ask me how I came to be a writer, I tell them: I lost my job.
It was in 1938 when I was working in New York as editor on a trade journal. The publisher decided to cut costs by firing the two most junior editors.
I had done some writing. I had been active on my college paper, The California Tech, serving one year as editor. As an employee of the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, I had co-authored (with the late Alf K. Berle) a textbook on inventions and patents. I was trained as an engineer; but, graduating in the early thirties when the great Depression was on and engineers were being fired everywhere, I had to make do with jobs in technical editing and education.
When I lived in Scranton, my friend and college roommate, Dr. John D. Clark, was job-hunting in New York. He was then a more faithful reader of the science-fiction magazines than I. To keep on eating, John wrote a couple of science-fiction stories, on whose plotting I helped him on weekend visits. He sent them to Astounding Stories (then edited by F. Orlin Tremaine) and, to our delighted surprise, sold them.
So, thought I, if he can, why not I? I wrote a couple and sold them, too. I also started collaborating with P. Schuyler Miller on the novel that eventually became Genus Homo.
When I made my first sales, I thought: Whee! Why hasn’t somebody told me about this? It sure beats working! When I got fired from the Fowler-Becker Publishing Company, I reasoned that if I could make so much money by writing for five hours a week, for fifty hours I could make ten times as much.
There is a fallacy there, since one soon runs into a law of diminishing returns. But I tried it, found I did about as well financially as I had been doing, and discovered that I preferred to be my own boss. Save for the Second World War and a few temporary jobs, I have been at it ever since.
The first story herein, “Hyperpilosity,” is one of those two first stories that I wrote in Scranton. (There was one other, an amateurish little caveman tale eventually published in the short-lived magazine of historical adventure, Golden Fleece.) The next two items were composed after I had moved back to New York. The dates of the others you can get from the copyright page.
John W. Campbell replaced F. Orlin Tremaine as editor of Astounding Stories (soon changed to Astounding Science Fiction) at about the time I broke into that magazine. Campbell taught me much of what I think I know about fiction writing—he, and my longtime collaborator Fletcher Pratt, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1941, which I attended as a Fellow.
The article “Language for Time Travelers” made a bit of a stir, I suppose, because nobody in the science-fiction field had given the matter of future languages much serious thought. I had made a hobby of phonetics and knew at least something about linguistic evolution, when my contemporaries were equipping their heroes for strange milieu by endowing them with telepathy or electronic translators or some such easy solution. Seventeen years later, I went over the same ground in another article, written in the light of fuller knowledge: “How to Talk Futurian” (Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1957).
“The Command” had no special inspiration, unless one counts visits to the Central Park Zoo. It was the first of a series of four sequels. I learned the hard way that each story of a series must top its predecessor or it will look less good. In this case, the series ran down; Johnny Black starts out by saving the world and ends up saving his boss’s job. It should have been the other way around, but that would have meant planning the whole series in advance. This would have been wise, but I did not then know that.
“Employment” reflects a longtime interest in paleontology. As a high-school student, I intended to be a paleontologist. This ambition dismayed my mother, who was sure that the occupation would not provide the income and social position that she thought desirable. My father offered a sensible compromise: that I should get an engineering degree and so be able to earn a living. (He did not foresee the effect of the Depression on the engineering profession.) Then, if I still wished to go into pure science, it would be time enough to get the advanced training required.
As things turned out, I was never able to practice real engineering until the Hitlerian War and never to practice paleontology at all. I have consoled myself by writing books and articles on prehistoric life and putting paleontological elements into a few of my stories.
“Employment,” by the way, is my only story published under a pseudonym. Campbell demanded it because, in that issue of Astounding, he was running the first installment of my long article “Design for Life,” and there is a tabu against letting an author’s name appear more than once on the contents page. So I chose “Lyman R. Lyon,” the name of a great-grandfather. L.R.L. was a big man in upstate New York around the time of the Civil War. He once horsewhipped his brother Caleb, an eccentric politician-adventurer, in the streets of Rome, New York. Walter Edmonds fictionalized the incident in his novel The Big Barn (Little, Brown, 1930). My great-aunt used to protest that Edmonds had made her father (as “Ralph Wilder”) much more of a hick than he really was. He was, she would have you know, an educated, cultivated man.…
Otherwise I have practically not used pseudonyms. With a bogus-sounding name like mine, who needs one? When I started writing fiction, readers wrote in asking who this “L. Sprague de Camp” really was. Was he Henry Kuttner? Or L. Ron Hubbard? It took them a while to accept the idea that such a person existed.
“The Merman” is set in the old New York City Aquarium, a converted fort at the southern tip of Manhattan. I knew the place well but did not foresee that Robert Moses would demolish the structure and build a new aquarium at Coney Island, more than an hour by subway from Manhattan. So easily are prophetic stories dated by events!
“The Gnarly Man” has a little story. In December 1938, P. Schuyler Miller came from his home in Schenectady to New York for a meeting of the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies. I had just returned to New York after a year in Scranton and met Schuyler. I mentioned that I had been playing with an idea for a story about an immortal Neanderthal man. That’s funny, said Schuy; he had been toying with the same idea.
For a while, we played Alphonse and Gaston: You write it! No, you write it! At last we agreed that we should both write it whenever we got around to it. Schuyler urged me to write my story first, since he was busy with other things. In addition, he generously gave me anthropological information on the man of Neanderthal. The result was “The Gnarly Man,” followed a year and a half later by Schuyler’s “Old Man Mulligan” in Astounding.
If I were writing the story today, I should diminish the physical differences between Aloysius and modern men, in accordance with modern anthropological research. These differences were exaggerated in the literature available in 1938 because the first nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton found, the man of La Chapelie-aux-Saints, was that of an arthritic old man, who could not help his slouching, shambling posture.
Biographies of writers usually make much of the connection between the writer’s experiences and his fiction. John Livingston Lowes wrote a celebrated book, The Road to Xanadu, tracing everything in Coleridge’s poems to things that Coleridge had read.
Actually, most fictions are composites of things the writer has experienced, seen, heard about, and read, put together in various combinations to make a new sequence of imaginary events. A writer may get all the material for one story from the library, while for another he uses his own life, with himself (thinly disguised) as protagonist. In the latter case, we may speak of the story as autobiographical. We should not, however, use the term if a story contains merely a few elements from the writer’s own life amid many elements from other sources.
Compared to vicarious experience, personal experience is generally more useful to a writer. With many experiences, such as being in love, or in a battle, or in a storm at sea, or in a surgical operation, no amount of research will give one quite the feel of the experience that going through it will.
The trouble is that a writer does not live long enough to have all the experiences that he may wish to use in his stories. The man who spends a lifetime at one occupation and then writes a novel based on his experience may produce a good story but is likely to prove a one-book author. So a practicing writer must pad out his personal experience with vicarious experience. This he does by reading, talking with others, or even watching documentaries on television. Reading is the most fruitful source, but it all helps.
One can sometimes fool knowledgeable readers by research. An early story of mine, “The Blue Giraffe,” was set in South Africa, where I had never been. You can imagine how pleased I was when a South African reader wrote to say that I must have once lived “in this sunny land of ours.”
The mistake that some writers make is to think one can convincingly describe an exotic milieu from a mere smattering of knowledge, such as one gains by reading others’ fiction laid in that milieu, with neither personal experience nor intensive research. A weakness of Robert E. Howard as a writer was that he wrote stories laid in Afghanistan and other oriental lands without ever having been out of the American Southwest. Hence he admitted that his fictional Orientals were merely “Englishmen and Irishmen in turbans and sandals.”
If personal experience is impossible, then one must hole up in the library and dig like a mole, noting every aspect of the milieu in question: weather, topography, fauna, flora, custom, costume, language, and so on. Of course, no amount of research guarantees the writer against any mistakes. In Lest Darkness Fall, laid in sixth-century Rome, I caused one of my characters to say a few words in Gothic. A scholarly reader wrote to point out that I had made this Goth use the nominative case where he should have used the vocative!
Like others, I have used my own experiences in my fiction. Naturally, as I have lived longer, I have had more experiences to draw upon. Since most of the present stories are relatively old—more than half go back before the Hitlerian War—their content of personal experience is smaller than in many later pieces.
“Nothing in the Rules” was suggested by a swimming meet at the YMCA where I lived for a while in New York. In “The Hardwood Pile” and “The Reluctant Shaman,” I leaned on my firsthand knowledge of the Adirondacks, where my father was in business and where I spent much of my boyhood and youth. There I have hiked, climbed, ridden, hunted, fished, worked in a sawmill and on a survey gang, and even prospected by airplane for uranium. The story was written long before the New York Central Railroad abandoned its Adirondack Division and became part of the Penn Central.
“The Guided Man” uses some of my trade-journal experience. Other stories, not represented here, have used other bits out of my own past. I drew on my correspondence-school days for the fantasy novelette “Mr. Arson” and on my war service in a Naval research center for my historical novel, The Arrows of Hercules. Recently I have drawn upon my travels for the backgrounds of some of my Willy Newbury stories, and on my experience as a guidee on many guided tours for my new Krishna novel, The Hostage of Zir.
The story that comes the nearest to being autobiographical is “Judgment Day,” in which several incidents are taken straight out of my boyhood. It was, as you can infer, not a very pleasant one. Many other elements of the story, such as the narrator’s parents and wife, are imaginary. From what colleagues tell me, this boyhood must have been fairly typical for a writer. Boys who are more athletic, extroverted, boisterous, and mischievous to begin with are, I suppose, less likely to take up the scrivener’s solitary trade.
This collection is skewed in another way. Twenty years ago, with “Aristotle and the Gun,” I took a vacation from writing science fiction sensu stricto for over a decade and a half. In the interim I was busy with historical novels, nonfiction books (popularizations of science and history, biography, and miscellaneous works), and fantasy stories, many of them collaborative tales in the Conan saga. Lately I have been getting back to science fiction proper, with a couple of novels in press. As a result, of my eighty-odd books, about half are fiction and half nonfiction. Of the works of fiction, deducting the five historical novels, about half the remainder are science fiction and half fantasy.
A standard problem of writers is that as they get along in years, they find that their writing techniques become sharpened but their ideas come with more difficulty. As a wise editor once said, fiction is the only trade that gets harder with practice. The reason is that when you conceive an idea and exploit it in a story, that idea is used up. You cannot (or rather, you had better not) use the same idea in the next story. Readers and editors soon catch on to the fact that you are repeating yourself. Therefore you have to dig up a new idea, and for each successive story idea you have to dig deeper and deeper into your unconscious.
Well, I do not think I have yet run out of ideas. In fact, the ideas are still far ahead of the time available to get them on paper. I do, though, think that I have learned a few things in the last forty years about composing English prose. When I reread some of my early stories, I shudder: awkward sentences, ill-chosen expressions, disregard of rhythm, erratic punctuation, and so forth. Now, if I could have as simple and powerful an idea right now, how much more felicitously I could express it.…
But the river of time flows one way only. I agree, at least in part, with George Washington when he said: “We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors.” So I hope there will be many more stories where these came from, and that readers will like them even better than they did their predecessors.
L. Sprague de Camp
Villanova, Pennsylvania
June, 1977
# # #
Thank you for reading!
Would you like to read more by de Camp?
Check out these other Phoenix Pick books:
Fiction:
Lest Darkness Fall & Related Stories
Rogue Queen
The Glory That Was
And de Camp’s historical fiction:
An Elephant for Aristotle
The Bronze God of Rhodes
The Arrows of Hercules
The Golden Wind