Sep 30 2008
Pulp is Dead… isn’t it?
Walter Gibson is one of my heroes, and I’ll even argue that he should be one of yours.
Why? Is it because he essentially created “The Shadow” as we know it, writing the first Shadow story in 1931? Is it because he wrote 282 out of 325 Shadow novels? Is it because he held a world record for writing 1,400,000 words in 10 months?
Wait. What? Is that a typo? No, he wrote 1.4 million words in 10 months and sent them in to his publishers, Street & Smith. Shadow stories/novels ran at about 40,000 words each. He wrote two novels per month.
That’s an average of 4,666 words each and every day. On a manual typewriter.
I haven’t read every one of the stories, but I’ve read enough to be excited when I find one I haven’t read. They’re really good, and I can admit that they can be a little weak in places… and then you realize that all of it is a FIRST DRAFT. What do your first drafts look like? Heck, what do your second drafts look like?
I believe we need Gibson as a hero today for one more reason. At first glance, he seems to simply be one of those painfully prolific authors, just like Nora Roberts or Stephen King. Between writing jaunts, he sometimes wrapped his hands in gauze because they hurt so much. He was prolific, but not normally on that scale (if you look at the rest of his life). So what’s the real reason he wrote so many Shadow novels? “That’s how I got through the Depression.”
Are you taking notes, yet?
