A.E. Van Vogt

"A man called John W. Gallishaw wrote a book called "The Only Two Ways to Write a Short Story". I borrowed it from the Winnipeg library, and I read it all the way through. It's an incredibly hard book to read; it's so long. It gave all kinds of examples. He had twenty stories in there, which he had numbered and analyzed line by line. He had an idea of writing a story in scenes of about 800 words, and each scene had five steps in it. If all those steps aren't there in their proper way, then there's something wrong with that scene. First, you let the reader know where this is taking place. Then you establish the purpose of the main character or the purpose of that scene. Then you have the interaction of his trying to accomplish that purpose. The fourth step is, make it clear: did he or did he not accomplish that purpose? Then the fifth step is that, in all the early scenes, no matter whether he achieves that purpose or not, things are going to get worse."

Van Vogt adopted this system, and has always used it, making him one of the few successful professional authors to have built his career on a popular "how-to" guide. He also learned to write in what Gallishaw called "fictional sentences":

"Every type of story has its own type of fictional sentence. I started by writing `confession' stories [for women's magazines]. These stories have to have emotion in every sentence. You don't say, `I lived at 323 Grand Sreet.' You say something like `Tears came to my eyes as I thought of my little room at 323 Grand Street.' And the next sentence, and the next sentence. I did that with the very first story that I ever wrote for them, which I called `I Lived in the Streets,' about a girl who was put out of her room during the Depression. I went to the library every day and wrote one scene. I had just come back from a stint of working for the civil service in Ottawa, on the 1931 census."

It took him nine days of visiting the library to complete this story, and he sold it for $110. He was soon writing and selling more stories to "Confession" magazines.

"I wrote one story for a contest, and won the $1,000 first prize. It was a 9,000-word story. I would say that that would automatically mean between 1,000 and 1,200 sentences. It's not impossible to write 1,000 or 1,200 emotional sentences. It's impossible for an unorganized person, but not for somebody who thinks by a system."

The $1,000 first prize was worth a great deal in the early 1930s--it was equivalent to almost a year's salary in his civil service job. However, he became tired of this genre. He started writing plays for Canadian radio, at ten dollars a time. And then, a couple of years later, almost arbitrarily, he decided to try writing science fiction. His first story sold to "Astounding Science Fiction", the most prestigious magazine in the field.

Once again, he developed a system:

"In science fiction you have to have a little bit of a `hang-up' in each sentence. Let's suppose, for example: The hero looks up toward the door. He hears a sound over there. And something comes in. It looks like a man wearing a cloak. You don't quite know what's going on. Then, you realize this is not a human being. This creature or this being, whoever it is, has a sort of manlike shape. And this creature reaches into what now looks like a fold of its skin. It draws out a gleaming metal object. It points it at you. Is this a weapon? It looks like a weapon, but you don't know that for sure. It's a "hang-up", you see. The author furnishes the information, but each sentence in itself has a little "hang-up" in it."

"I didn't notice, right away, what I was doing. In science fiction I was writing for only one cent a word, so because I work slowly I would wake up anxious, thinking, "work out my story". I'd go back to sleep, wake up anxious, each time thinking about my story. Then in 1943 in Toronto I suddenly realized. It took me all that time to realize what I'd been doing all those years. Had I been Cyril Kornbluth [who died aged thirty-five] I might never have found out how I wrote. It's a good thing my life went past a certain point!

"I took the family alarm clock and went into the spare bedroom that night, and set it for an hour and a half. And thereafter, when I was working on a story, I would waken myself every hour and a half, through the night--force myself to wake up, think of the story, try to solve it, and even as I was thinking about it I would fall back asleep. And in the morning, there would be a solution, for that particular story problem. Now, that's penetrating the subconscious, in my opinion. It's penetrating it in a way that I don't think they'll be able to do any better, thirty centuries from now."

So van Vogt derived his inspiration through his sleep, filling his science-fiction adventures with fantastic images, symbolic figures, a constant sense of discovery and revelation, and free, flying motion (aided by those telegraphic 800-word scenes, which enforced a fast pace). Some critics, such as Damon Knight, complained that van Vogt's plots didn't make logical sense, and consequently his books were failures. This seems as misguided to me as criticizing a dream on grounds of implausibility. Dreams are powerful because they are so full of change and contradictions, in violation of laws of everyday life.

"I have a book here which I ordered from the Department of Health and Welfare--their book on sleep and dreaming--and I read the summarization of all the discoveries that had been made, and it was quite evident, first of all, that my ninety-minute cycle was the correct one. I'd just chosen that automatically; an hour seemed too short. What the brain does, in the first hour and a half, it deals with the previous day: when they wake people up they're dreaming about the previous day. And then in the subsequent ninety-minute periods it's all back history, going into childhood. I would guess that the mind is trying to throw off the shock of the past, and keeps associating from one to the other to the other, and can never dispose of any of it. When it took me two weeks to dispose of a fear incident in my childhood, that seemd a very significant observation and discovery to have made. It faded,and another incident came into view, and I went on and on like that, working with fear incidents."

With such a finely tuned creative system, and a prolific archive of dreams, one must inquire if Van Vogt will take advantage of living in Los Angeles and write for the movies?

"I operate by systems, and until I have a system for writing screenplays, none will ever turn up from my pen. Many times have I had lunch with a story editor or director, and each time they require an outline [a description of the script that may be written]. An outline I cannot write, but I tried, each time. I would then present this unfinished (as it turned out) outline, which they couldn't make head or tail of, in their world. Then a few years later I would come across this thing, and I'd think, well, I can write a short story around this, which I would then do.

He sounds, as always, logical and matter-of-fact about it, but this impression is misleading--forlogic means a different thing to van Vogt from what it means to me, as does reality. Nor does it end here, because, as we will see in the next profile, van Vogt's visions have influenced other writers in the science-fiction field. His strange dreams, themselves a distortion of the world, have been used as a mere starting point for fiction that goes still further into metaphysical realms--and yet, paradoxically, also returns closer to everyday life.