Francis L. Fugate

I read the Kindle version which was published in 2014. The paperback edition currently was published in 2015. The original edition first saw the light of day in 1980.

Roberta and Francis Fugate based their book on the content of the Erle Stanley Gardner archive. This archive was immense and included not just the final drafts of his stories and his art collection, but also his vast number of notebooks in which he recorded ideas, plotted stories, documented his ideas and analysis on how writers can do their job of writing stories that will sell, and recorded his thoughts on how to earn a living from writing so that he could escape the world of The Office.

The book starts with a very conversational tone describing how Gardner, a lawyer by trade, dreamed of earning his living by writing fiction. By all accounts he was a good lawyer, but he did not like being tied to an office and not being the master of his own destiny. He set himself the objective of earning as much money annually from his writing as he was earning from his lawyerly work, and gave himself five years to achieve that. It was his intention that when he achieved his goal after five years he would quit his legal practice. This book documents how he single-mindedly drove himself to achieve that goal, and how he built his Fiction Factory and produced a phenomenal amount of output.

As the book proceeds, the chapters become more specific in how he targeted his market, established who his customers were, i.e. the readers, identified what his customers wanted, and learned how to give them the product they would buy. Along the way he learned how the publishing business worked, and used this knowledge to maximise his sales.

While this book is focused on how Erle Stanley Gardner built his success in writing, his approach could be used by any individual striving for success in any business or enterprise. It includes lessons on market research, networking, administration, documentation, subject matter research, etc…

Gardner first targeted the wood-pulp fiction magazines; the magazines that were very popular and that were snatched up by their readers to provide sensational entertainment. He analysed the stories that appeared in them, worked out what the readers wanted, and then went about submitting material to these editors.

He told the editors he was a beginner in the writing game and that he would take any editorial corrections and pointers that they could provide. He befriended them and established what attributes of a story they preferred and what sort of story they would buy. His view of the market was that the readers were his audience while the editors were gatekeepers to the market. He knew these editors were not interested in literary excellence, but wanted to make money. With this mindset he systematically established what the market wanted and put material in front of editors that had been specifically designed for their magazines’ audiences, and that had been moulded with each editor’s particular preferences in mind.

This focused, business like lawyer/writer, who had a natural sense of salesmanship, went about building his writing business in a very systematic fashion setting daily word-count targets, and documenting everything. He systematically researched plot development, character attributes, techniques for building stories, and then applied what he had learned. To assist him in this work he hired staff and built a machine around him that ensured his stories were being sent out to publishers, their success or otherwise recorded and tracked, and that any rejects were revised and sent out again promptly.

Gardner did not always have success with his stories. He was worried about his rejection rates, so he responded by increasing his output, while at the same time honing his market knowledge and writing skills to increase the acceptance rate and increase his revenue yield.

When reading about Gardner’s output and his success rate I couldn’t help thinking of Edison’s quote when told he had a lot of good ideas. His response was that he had a lot of ideas. Some of them were good. Gardner wrote a lot of stories; some of them sold.

Women were particularly poorly represented in his stories. It was said that in his stories “…a dame was a dame”. My reading of his life is that he did not have a very mature relationship with women. He had difficulty in writing about relationships in his stories and avoided having married couples in his tales after having had very negative feedback to a story which included a wife ironing her dress while standing in her underwear with her husband in the same room. His editor said this was not something a decent woman would do and that readers had complained, so Gardner decided that he did not know how to write about married couples, so he never again had any of his heroes married.

Perry Mason was his most famous creation and there is a chapter devoted to Mason’s origins. The Perry Mason books were very well received and went on to become a phenomenal success. Interestingly enough, Gardner never wrote any of the Perry Mason TV scripts. His analysis was that he did not have the skills required for scriptwriting so he would buy it in. He established a production company to make the programmes, but he hired in scriptwriters to write the scripts. He did keep a tight control on how his creation, Perry Mason, was represented in all the programmes.

Between his writing and his legal work he was working day and night. There appeared to be little room in his life for his wife and daughter. His single-minded drive to succeed was everything. He said at one point that there was time enough to rest in the next life.

To reach the level of success Gardner achieved, one needs to be single-minded, focused, and, it would appear, ignore the needs of others around you. One of his letters to a publisher friend complained that he had to put up with a wife who would not cook or clean, but spent her time going to the casino and shopping. It did not appear to occur to him that she might want a life of her own, or that he ignored his family and did not prioritise his marriage in any way. It appeared he only wanted a wife to look after him and his home. I thought his treatment of his wife was appalling. Eventually he and his wife agreed amicably to live apart and he set her up in a home and financed her life. He visited her routinely until her death. Shortly after that he married his long-term secretary.

The appendices of this book contain his tools for building characters and plots, including suggested motivations and actions at every stage in a story. These are the result of his years of studying stories and his experience of what worked and what didn’t work. He was always looking for the formula for a successful story; a story that captured the readers attention and moved along at a good pace. His primary objective was to make money by selling the stories, so they had to meet the requirement of appealing to the reader if he was to make money. His analysis of stories and how to write them so they would sell was conducted in a very systematic, almost scientific, way. The results of his analysis, research and experience are documented in the appendices of this book.

The advice and tools in this book were designed for two very specific murder mystery markets. The wood-pulp fiction magazines, and the newsstand book market. This must be kept in mind when assessing how one might adopt these techniques to their own purposes. One must also remember that the stories produced from these techniques were not produced with any concept of feminism. The description of plot sequence only has male heroes, and always involves a man rescuing a woman in distress. There is a lot of interesting material and useful ideas in these techniques, but they are dated and need to be used with care taking cognizance of their misogyny and focus on formulaic murder mysteries. Remember, Gardner’s objective was to make money. His desire to write was not from a love of writing, but a yearning to have a lifestyle that he could control and that would get him out of a rigid office environment.

Would I recommend this book?
Yes.

What sort of person would I recommend this book to?
Anyone interested in writing, writers, and storytelling.

I would also recommend it to anyone who is passionate about building a career in any field. It was purely incidental that Gardner went into writing. He decided he did not want a job in an office, but wanted to earn money in a way that let him be the master of his own destiny. He looked around and chose writing and gave himself five years to make a success of it. If it did not work in that time he would have tried something else.

Did this book inspire me to do anything?
Yes. I took many quotes from the book and will study them, and go back to the book, to learn more about storytelling.… (meer)