2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
4. You must put it on the market.
5. You must keep it on the market until sold.
6. Only accept the last four words of rule 3 if your integrity and the quality / interior logic of the story reconcile with such changes.
Otherwise:
7. Kill to maintain the integrity of your work.
“Promises of Laughter” [3600] happened to me. The lady called “Holdie Karp” is a reasonably well-known author these days. She really did that to me, what happens to the dude in the story. And how I wrote the yarn was this: when the events of that night went down, I got so pissed off I got into my Austin-Healey and drove like a lunatic across the twisting, accident-laden Mulholland Drive to my house, ran at the typewriter like a Rams linebacker, banged out the story (sexual pun intended) in about two hours, yanked the carbon off the desk, got back in the Healey, hit Mulholland again, made the course in about thirteen minutes batting sixty all the way through the night and the fog, slammed into her driveway, and started kicking on her front door.
She came to the window, in her nightgown, obviously having been asleep, saw it was wild-eyed li’l ole me, and damn near didn’t open the door because she was afraid I’d knife her or something. But when she let it slide open just a crack, I shoved the manuscript into her hand, got back in my car and raced away … having had (I thought) the last fucking word, damn her eyes!
It appeared in a magazine containing one of the articles referred to in the story. She was furious. Everyone now knew our personal lives. So several months later she wrote her view of that incident
It was a better story than mine.
We are friends to this day, “Holdie Karp” and I, and she writes for magazines and for one of New York’s biggest newspapers, and she taught me more about being a non-macho male than anyone I’ve ever met.
So the least I could do was to rewrite the story a little, to make it a fairer representation of her, uh, position on that fateful night.
I have no idea why people keep identifying me with the stuff in my stories.
Which brings me to the last story in the book, and the most recent one I’ve written. I wrote it for this book, and unless I sell it to a magazine in the next 5½ months … but we’ve been through that before. Anyhow. “Tired Old Man” [5000] was written in June of this year, 1975. It’s one of my most recent stories, so you can judge how I’m doing these days; but beyond that curious conceit, it is a story with a peculiar history, and one I’m inclined to tell you.
First, however, let me warn you. I am not the protagonist, Billy Landress, even though much of Billy’s career parallels mine and some of the things that happen to him in the story happened in a sorta kinda way, and some of the perceptions at which he arrives are ones I’ve lately come to hold as my own. Now I suppose all that disclaiming will convince those of you who believe in the “he protesteth too much” philosophy that I am Billy. Well, that only goes to show how little some of you understand about the art of creating fiction. A writer takes bits and pieces of himself — as Geoffrey Wolff put it in that quote leading off this introduction — he cannibalizes himself, and he applies a little meat here and a little meat there, and he comes up with a character that bears a resemblance to himself (because who do I know better than myself, for God’s sake), but who is a new person entirely. So don’t get all screwed up trying to fit me into Billy’s shoes.
Back to the story.
I was in New York on a visit about eight, ten, eleven years ago. I went to dinner with Bob Silverberg and Bobbie Silverberg, and after dinner we went to a gathering of the old Hydra Club. Willy Ley was there; it was shortly before that great and wonderful man died; it was good to see him again. And a bunch of other people, most of whom I didn’t know. And I wandered around and finally found myself sitting on the sofa next to a weary-looking old man in an easy chair. Marvelous conversationalist. We talked for almost an hour, until I got up and went to the kitchen where I found Bob with the late Hans Santesson, a dear friend and ex-editor of mine. I described the old man and asked who he was.
“That is Cornell Woolrich,” Hans said.
My mouth must have fallen open. I had been sitting next to one of the giants of mystery fiction, a man whose work I’d read and admired for twenty years, since I’d been a kid and discovered a copy of BLACK ALIBI after seeing the 1946 Val Lewton film, The Leopard Man. I was nine years old at the time, and the film made such an impression on me that I stayed on at the Lake Theater in Painesville, Ohio to see it three times on a Saturday. And it was the first time I ever really read those funny words that come at the beginning of the movie (I later learned those were the “credits”); the words that said “Screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich.”
How I got hold of the novel, I don’t remember. But it was the first mystery fiction I’d ever read (excluding Poe, of course, all of whom I’d read by that time). Nine years old!
And in the years when I was voraciously devouring the works of every decent writer I could find, Woolrich (under his own name and his possibly even-more-famous pseudonym, “William Irish”) became a treasurehouse of twists and turns in plotting, elegant writing style, misdirection, mood, setting and suspense. God, the beautiful stories that man wrote. The “black book” series: THE BLACK ANGEL, THE BLACK CURTAIN, THE BLACK PATH OF FEAR, RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and, many more times, BLACK ALIBI. And DEADLINE AT DAWN, PHANTOM LADY, NIGHTMARE, STRANGLER’S SERENADE, WALTZ INTO DARKNESS. And all the short stories!
Cornell Woolrich!
Jeeeezus, if Hans had said I was sitting next to Ernest fucking Hemingway it couldn’t have collapsed me more thoroughly. Bertrand Russell, Bob Feller, Dick Bong, Walt Kelly … all my heroes … it wouldn’t have gotten to me half as much. Cornell goddam Woolrich! I damn near fainted.
“But I thought he’d died years ago,” I said.
They laughed at me. He was old, no doubt about that, but he was very much alive. He wasn’t writing any more; his mother — whom he’d lived with through all of his adult life, in a resident hotel in Manhattan — had recently died; and he was just getting out and around.
I was flabbergasted. I’d sat and talked with Cornell Woolrich, one of my earliest writing heroes, and hadn’t even known it. I wanted to find him in that crowded apartment and just be near him for a while longer.
They were bemused by my goshwow attitude, but they were also a little perplexed. Hans said, “I do not remember seeing him here. Where is he?”
And I led them back to the easy chair in the far rear corner of the room. And he was gone. And he was nowhere in the apartment. And no one else had talked to him. And I never saw him again. And be died soon after that night, I learned later.
To this day, I’ve felt there was something strange and pivotal in my meeting with Woolrich. He could not possibly have known who I was, nor could he have much cared. But we talked writing, and I was the only one who saw or talked to him that night. I’m sure of that. Don’t ask me how I know, I cannot give you a rational explanation; and I firmly do not believe in ghosts or astrology or UFO’s or much else of the nonsense gobbledygook that people substitute for the ability to handle reality. But from the time I left him in that easy chair till the moment I went back to find him, I was right in front of the only exit from that apartment and there was no way he could have gotten past me without my seeing him.