January 20, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Will you get me off the hook on several things? There has been a death in my family-no close emotional involvement for me, but some duty matters-so I am unexpectedly catching a plane in about an hour (Ginny remains here), then on my return Thursday will be leaving immediately to drive to Hollywood (Ginny accompanying me) and arriving there possibly late for Screen Gems story conference Monday 27 January...The [TV] thing is sourer than ever and I see no hopes of saving it, but I must go out and try my best.
But today I 'm badly strapped for time and ask help on some unfinished business (this damned screenplay has put me behind on everything) -- and this funeral puts the topper on it-despite the fact that I answered sixty-three letters in the last three days, trying to catch up.
April 8, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I have many other things to acknowledge. We have been home three weeks now, two of them eaten by illness, the rest of the time used futilely in attempting to cope with an avalanche of accumulated low-priority paperwork, several hundred periodicals, etc., piled up not only while we were away, but left undone clear back from last August when (TV producer) first entered my life. This last Hollywood experience has simply confirmed my earlier opinion that, while Hollywood rates are high, what a writer goes through to earn those rates makes it a losing game in the long run. I hope that you and I and Ned [Brown] make some money out of this-but if the series is never produced, I hope to have sense enough to stay home and write books in the future and leave the movie never-never land to those who enjoy that rat race.
CHAPTER VI
ABOUT WRITING METHODS AND CUTTING
October 25,1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
...then write another short. This one is tentatively titled "Homesickness" ["It's Great to Be Back"] and is another Luna City and so forth yarn. If possible, I want to build up a background, as I did in Astounding, for a series of interplanetary shorts, laid in the near future (the coming century, to about A.D. 2050). The series will follow the formula, somewhat modified, of the SEP [Saturday Evening Post] series such as Earthworm Tractor, Tugboat Annie, Gunsmith Pyne, Blue Chip Haggerty, etc. -- stories laid against a particular occupation or industry. My series will be laid against the background of commercial (not exploration nor adventure) interplanetary travel. Continuity will be maintained by names of places-Luna City, Dry water, Venusburg, New Brisbane, New Chicago, How-Far?, Ley burg, Marsopolis, Supra-New York, etc., and by consistent use of techniques, cultural changes, and speech changes. Characters will shift for each story, but a major character in one story may show up in a bit part in another.
The science and engineering will be held to a minimum but will be authentic. An editor may be sure that I will respect facts of astronomy, atomics, ballistics, rocketry, etc. For example, the piloting in the story you are about to receive is as authentic as it can be at this date-if it is not as it will be, then it is at least as it could be; it is practical, with respect to time intervals, speeds, accelerations, and instruments used. When, in that story, I mention falling 700 feet on the Moon in forty seconds and thereby picking up speeds up to 140 miles per hour, and, thereafter, killing the speed with a one-second-plus blast at five-gravities, I know what I am talking about-I am a mechanical engineer, a ballistician, a student of reaction engines, and an amateur astronomer. I mention these things because they may help you sell my stuff-I won't give an editor any Buck Rogers nonsense. A great deal of study and research goes into the background of my stories.
May 16, 1947: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
...As for formal coaching from Uzzell [a well-known "story doctor" and coach of the time] or anyone, I'm getting just the coaching I want from you...I'm afraid of coaching, of writers' classes, of writers' magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble-you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step. Articles and books on how to write have that effect on me. The author seems so persuasive, so sure that he knows what he is talking about, that I start having doubts about my own technique. It usually turns out that the author is urging the reader to do something quite unsuited to me-fine for him probably, but not my pidgin. If I try to imitate him, follow his directions, I usually fail to accomplish his methods and lose my own in the process...
I do get a great deal of help from studying other writers' stories, particularly in the respects in which I see that they have accomplished an effect that I do not as yet know how to accomplish. I find such study of what they have done more use to me than their discussions of how they do it.
Winslow says I don't understand plotting and probably I don't-I have been congratulated many times on the skill shown in my plotting when I knew damn well that the story in question had not been plotted in advance at all. My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it I can't plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don't know what his character is until I get acquainted with him. When I can "hear the character talk" then I'm all right-he works out his own salvation.
January 31, 1948: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I certainly am sorry to have worried you and will try not to let it happen again-when I get into the final chapters of a novel it is sometimes almost impossible to attract my attention.
January 2, 1950: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
My method of work is such that I always have a dozen or more stories being worked on.
March 20, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Peter Hamilton (editor of Nebula Science Fiction)
The problem of building up convincing background in a science fiction story becomes extremely difficult in the shorter lengths. In ordinary fiction, background may be assumed or most briefly indicated, but it is a most unusual science fiction idea which may safely be so treated. In all the years I have been writing science fiction I have done only one story under 2,500 words, that story being "Columbus Was a Dope"...
October 9, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
...However, I have been fiddling with experimental methods of storytelling (none of which you have seen) and I am beginning to think that I may be developing a new method which might turn out to be important. It is a multiple first-person technique, but not the one used by John Masters in Bowhani Junction. Mine calls for using camera cuts and shifts as rapid as those in the movies; the idea is to give the speed of movies, the sense of immediacy of the legitimate stage, and the empathy obtained by stream of consciousness-a nice trick if I can bring it off! The greatest hitch seems to lie in the problem of shifting viewpoints, both without confusing the reader and without losing empathy through cumbersome devices. But I think I am learning how to do it.
I don't want to use this technique on commercial copy until I am sure I can force the reader to go along with a novel technique. James Joyce introduced into writing an important new technique, but he did it so clumsily that his so-called novels are virtually unreadable; if I do have^ here a usable new technique I want to polish it to the point where it can stand up in the open market in competition with the usual wares whose values are established and recognized.