I have on my shelf of writing refrences, an interesting cultural artifact from the early 70s. The title is Writing Popular Fiction, and is a hardcover published by Writer’s Digest back in 1972. The author, according to the back cover copy, had sold 24 books since 1967 (yes, that’s only five years) won an award from the Atlantic Monthly, and was nominated for a Hugo award in 1970.
You may have heard of him. His name is Dean Koontz. Yes, that Dean Koontz. And the amazing thing is that, unlike, say, King’s On Writing, this was written a fair bit before he wrote a single thing you’ve probably heard of.
The first thing that strikes you about this book is the lack of pretention. The mechanistic tone Koontz takes here makes early Heinlein look like James Joyce. He is quite in love with the systematic list; the five elements required of genre fiction, seven types of character motivation, eight types of science fiction plots, seven western plot types, four possible viewpoints, seven taboos of the gothic. . .
Here are some of the high points.
Koontz on character motivation:
Any set of character motivations, when examined, fits into one of seven slots: love, curiosity, self-preservation, greed, self-discovery, duty, revenge.
Koontz on the Gothic Romance:
For a year, an editor friend had been urging me to try a Gothic novel […] I declined, principally because I didn’t think I could write believably from a woman’s viewpoint, but also because I simply did not like Gothic novels […] I didn’t see how I could write in a field for which I had no respect. When the science fiction market remained tight, however, I finally tried my hand at a Gothic. I finished the book in two weeks, attached a female by-line […] The editor read it, made a few suggestions, and bought it for $1,500.
Koontz on revision:
One familiar piece of advice given new writers is: “Put it aside for a couple of days or weeks and re-read it when you’ve cooled off.” At all costs ignore this advice. […] When you’ve finished a piece, send it out straightaway and get to work on something new.
This is not to say this isn’t a worthwhile book. In fact, if you can find it, it is useful just for hammering home exactly how much of fiction is craftsmanship. Not to mention it is a time capsule full of surreal anachronisms not the least of which is reading a 28(!) year old Dean Koontz pontificate like a curmudgeon who’d been pounding away since the pulps.
