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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