I gaped. “Page!”
“Hubbard!” he whispered in awed tones.
Solemnly we shook each other by the hand.
CHORUS: Well, this is the first time I ever saw a writer in a library!
These two instances should serve to illustrate the fact that research does not rhyme with writer no matter what kind of mill you pound.
Research is a habit which is only acquired by sheer force of will. The easy thing to do is guess at the facts—so thinks the writer. When, as a matter of facts, the easy thing to do is go find the facts if you have to tear a town to pieces.
Witness what happened last summer.
Staring me in the face were a stack of dangerous profession stories which have since appeared in Argosy. At that time they were no more than started and I sighed to see them stretching forth so endlessly.
I chose Test Pilot as the next on the list and started to plot it. I thought I knew my aviation because the Department of Commerce tells me so. Blithely, thinking this was easy, I started in upon a highly technical story without knowing the least thing about that branch of flying—never having been a test pilot.
For one week I stewed over the plot. For another week I broiled myself in the scorching heat of my self-accusation. Two weeks and nothing written.
Was I losing money fast!
There wasn’t anything for it then. I had to find out something about test pilots.
Across the bay from my place in Seattle is the Boeing plant. At the Boeing plant there would be test pilots. I had to go!
And all for a cent and a half a word.
I went. Egdvedt, the Boeing president, was so startled to see a real live writer in the place that he almost talked himself hoarse.
Minshall, the chief engineer, was so astounded at my ignorance that he hauled me through the plant until I had bunions the size of onions.
I sighed.
All for a cent and a half a word!
I went home.
About that time it occurred to me that I used to write a lot for the Sportsman Pilot and as long as I had the dope and data, I might as well fix the details in my head by writing them an article.
That done, I suddenly saw a fine plot for my Argosy yarn and wrote that in a matter of a day and a half.
Two months went by. Arthur Lawson came in as editor of Dell and promptly remembered Test Pilot in Argosy and demanded a story along similar lines.
In two days I wrote that.
A month after that, Florence McChesney decided that she needed a twenty-thousand word flying story.
“Test Pilot,” says I, “do your stuff!”
Each and every one of those yarns sold first crack out. Article for the Sportsman Pilot, short for Argosy, short for War Birds, twenty-thousand worder for Five Novels.
One day of research = several hundred bucks in stories.
This naturally made me think things over and, not being quite as foolish as editors think writers are, I added up the account book and promptly went to work. Thus, the moral is yet to come.
On the dangerous profession stories which followed, I almost lost my life and broke my neck trying to make them authentic. On each one I kept a complete list of notes and a list of plots which occurred to me at the time. There is enough writing material in that file to last me at least a year. It is the finest kind of copy because it is risky in the extreme, full of drama and high tension. I haven’t any fears about mentioning this, as any writer who is crazy enough to go down in diving suits and up in spar trees deserves all the help he can get.
But research does not end there and that is not the point of this article.
A short time ago I began to search for research on the theory that if I could get a glimmering of anything lying beyond a certain horizon I could go deep enough to find an excellent story.
I stopped doing what I used to do. There was a time when I expected a story to blaze up and scorch me all of its own accord. I have found, however, that there is a premium on divine fire and it is not very bright when used by a pulpateer. This gentleman has to write an immortal story about once every three days to keep eating.
On this plan I began to read exhaustively in old technical books, ancient travel books, forgotten literature. But not with the idea of cribbing. I wanted information and nothing else. I wanted to know how the people used to think here, how the land lay there. Given one slim fact for a background, I have found it easy to take off down the channel of research and canal-boat out a cargo of stories.
In other words, I have no use for an obvious story idea as laid out in Popular Mechanics or Forensic Medicine. I want one slim, forgotten fact. From there a man can go anywhere and the story is very likely to prove unusual.
In one old volume, for instance, I discovered that there was such a thing as a schoolmaster aboard Nelson’s ships of the line.
That was a weird one. Why should Nelson want a schoolmaster?
Answer: Midshipmen.
When did this occur?
Answer: The Napoleonic Wars.
Ah, now we’ll find out how those old ships looked. We’ll discover how they fought, what they did.
And there was the schoolmaster during battle. Where? In the “cockpit” helping hack off arms and legs.
Next lead indicated: Surgery during the Napoleonic Wars.
Wild guess in another allied field: Gunnery.
Again: Nelson.
A battle: On the Nile.
A ship or something strange about this battle: L’Orient, monster French flagship which mysteriously caught fire and blew up, throwing the weight of guns to Nelson.
Incidental discovery: “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck” was written about the son of L’Orient’s skipper.
Back to midshipmen, the King’s Letter Boys: They were hell on wheels, arrogant, ghastly urchins being trained as officers.
And with all this under my mental belt I girded up my mental loins. Complete after a few days of search I had Mister Tidwell, Gunner, which appeared in Adventure.
All that because I chanced to find there was a schoolmaster aboard Nelson’s ships of the line.
This is now happening right along because I haven’t let the idea slide as my laziness dictated I should.
The final coup d’état arrived last winter.
Boredom had settled heavily upon me and I sat one evening staring vacantly at a shelf of books. They were most monotonous. Whole sets stretched out along the shelves with very little change in color or size. This annoyed me and I bent forward and took one out just to relieve the regularity.
It proved to be Washington Irving’s Astoria, his famous epic of the fur trading days.
It had never been brought home to me that Irving had written such a book and to find out why, I promptly started to read it. The result was, of course, a fur trading story. But the method of arriving at this story was so indirect that it merits a glance.
Irving only served to call to my attention that I was out in the fur trading Northwest and that I had certainly better take advantage of the history of the place.
I roved around, found very little because I had no direct starting point. I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica to discover a bibliography of such source books and started out again to ferret them out.
All these books were contemporary with fur trading days, all of them written, of course, by white men. But everywhere I kept tripping across the phrases, “The Warlike Blackfeet.” “The Bloodthirsty Blackfeet.”
This finally penetrated my thick skull. I did not like it because I thought I knew something about the Blackfeet.
Were they as bad as they were represented?
Into the records. The real records. Into Alexander Henry’s Journal. Into this and out of that until I had a stack of material higher than my desk.
And then I capped the clim
ax by locating a young chap in Seattle who happens to be a blood brother of the Blackfeet. Lewis and Clark’s Journal contained about five pages concerning the circumstances which surrounded the killing of a Blackfoot brave by Lewis.
The way this suddenly shot down the groove is remarkable to remember. The Hudson’s Bay Company, the Nor’Westers, the Blackfeet, John Jacob Astor … The story pieces dovetailed with a click.
Coupled with years of experience in the Northwest, these hundred sources jibed to make the story.
The result was Buckskin Brigades, a novel being put out this summer by Macaulay.
Buckskin Brigades came to life because I happened to be bored enough one evening to sit and stare at a line of books on a shelf.
This account of researching is not complete unless I mention a certain dogging phobia I have and which I suspect is deeply rooted in most of us.
H. Bedford Jones mentioned it long ago and I did not believe him at the time. But after rolling stacks of it into the mags, I know that B-J was right as a check.
He said that it was hard for a person to write about the things he knew best.
This gives rise to an ancient argument which says pro and con that a writer should write about the things he knows.
Witnesseth: I was born and raised in the West and yet it was not until last year that I sold a couple westerns. And I only sold those because somebody said I couldn’t.
Know ye: The Caribbean countries know me as El Colorado and yet the only Caribbean stories I can write are about those countries which I have touched so briefly that I have only the vaguest knowledge of them and am therefore forced to depend upon researching the books and maps for my facts.
Hear ye: I wrote fine Hollywood stories until I came down here and worked in pictures. I wrote one while here and the editor slammed it back as a total loss.
There are only a few exceptions to this. I have been able to cash in heavily upon my knowledge of North China because the place appealed to me as the last word in savage, romantic lore. The last exception seems to be flying stories, though after flying a ship I can’t write an aviation story for a month.
The final proof of this assertation came in connection with my Marine Corps stories. Most of my life I have been associated with the Corps one way or another in various parts of the world and I should know something about it.
But I have given up in dark despair.
He Walked to War in Adventure was branded as technically imperfect.
Don’t Rush Me in Argosy, another Marine story, elicited anguished howls of protest.
And yet if there is any story in the world I should be qualified to write, it is a Marine story.
These are my woes. The reason for them is probably very plain to everyone. But I’ll state my answer anyway.
A man cannot write a story unless he is deeply interested in it. If he thinks he knows a subject then he instantly becomes careless with his technical details.
The only way I have found it possible to sidetrack these woes is by delving into new fields constantly, looking everywhere for one small fact which will lead me on into a story field I think I’ll like.
This is not very good for a writer’s reputation, they tell me. A writer, it is claimed, must specialize to become outstanding. I labored trying to build up a converse reputation, hoping to be known as a writer of infinite versatility.
I did not know until two years ago that the specializing writer is persona non grata with an editor. Jack Byrne, for instance, rebuilt Argosy with variety as a foundation. And once I heard Bloomfield sigh that he wished some of his top-notchers would stop sending him the same background week in and week out.
Maybe I am right, possibly I am wrong.
But I believe that the only way I can keep improving my work and my markets is by broadening my sphere of acquaintanceship with the world and its people and professions.
The Devil’s Rescue
written by
L. Ron Hubbard
illustrated by
Preston Stone
ABOUT THE STORY
The literary legend of the Flying Dutchman dates back to 1790. It tells of a ghost ship that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. The phantom ship is a sailor’s portent of doom.
In L. Ron Hubbard’s fantasy “The Devil’s Rescue,” a shipwrecked sailor finds himself rescued by the Flying Dutchman and embroiled in a game of chance to win his freedom.
This story was originally published in October of 1940, coincidently while L. Ron Hubbard was on a sea voyage himself. He had embarked on the Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition from Seattle, Washington in a 32-foot sailboat, The Magician. He was charting the coast of Alaska for the US Navy. During a stay in Ketchikan, Alaska, Ron participated in several local radio programs, one of which was a new program about writing, “The Golden Pen.” It was then he launched an attendant contest for aspiring writers—the genesis for the Writers of the Future competition.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Preston Stone was born and raised in Loveland, Colorado. In preschool he began making images of superheroes and monsters with markers. From there, he expanded the subject matter to include studies of various wildlife, eventually developing a fondness for drawing insects. There was even a time when it seemed he might pursue entomology as a career. Instead, he stayed on the art path, realizing that he simply had an aesthetic appreciation for what most people viewed as ugly or creepy.
High school brought with it the discovery of new art and entertainment. Anime and tabletop fantasy role-playing games occupied much of his time, and he began to emulate the themes and styles he found there.
He continued his education at Aims Community College where he earned certificates in game design and animation. In 2013, he earned a Bachelor of Art and Design, with an art emphasis and drawing concentration from the University of Northern Colorado. He’s currently working as a freelance artist in fantasy and science fiction, and he hopes to one day have his illustrations on the covers of books and his creature and character concept work used in video games and movies.
He is a former quarterly winner of the Illustrators of the Future award. His artwork was published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 32.
He credits any success to the support he received from his parents, who provided the tools, the studio, the artistic foundation, and an attitude of complete acceptance toward his decision to choose a career as an artist.
The Devil’s Rescue
He had been cold so long that he had even ceased to dream of the great logs crackling in the old manor fireplace of his home. He just shivered now and then and ached, becoming conscious of the fact that it was bitter for a moment and then relapsing into a blue ache which ate him from the mop of his salt-encrusted hair to his cracked feet.
He had stopped courting the madness of envisioning great dinners he had eaten, recalling rather the peculiarly delicious flavor of the last biscuit in the breadbox, which moldy and inedible had vanished to its last crumb some two days before.
At the end of sixty hours he had been exhausted with holding himself against the sick lurches, the violent pitches and whipping rolls of the nineteen-foot lifeboat but now he braced himself not at all but lay prone in five inches of water and limply shifted with it from side to side.
It was hell to open his eyes once the salt had formed over them while shut, but some deep instinct in him bade him, now and then, to look up at the tattered ensign which hung upside down on the mast. The savage energy of the wind tearing into the red and white and blue wool wearied him and again he shut his eyes.
It was almost sunset. Sunset of his twenty-second day in an open boat somewhere south and west of that ironically named place, the Cape of Good Hope.
First he had unloaded the cabin boy over the rail and into the gray restlessness of the sea. He had done it with g
reat sorrow at the time, although it seemed to him now that the important thing about it was how strong he had been. What determination had shone out of him that he would not suffer a like fate! How bravely had he braced himself against that oar, bidding the crew bend their backs until the wind shifted and he could set the sail.
Then he had unloaded the cook. It had seemed strange that the fellow had not been able to live longer on his fat. And the wind hadn’t shifted and when dawn rose, the reason why he’d had to carry so much starboard helm the last hour became apparent and so they had dumped the bow oar into the sea.
That was all after the wind had started to blow straight off the Cape. There was nothing astern but auks, he told them. Auks and ice, and they had nothing to lose but their lives which weren’t worth much anyway. And so they’d dumped the bow oar’s dead heaviness into the sea, whipped into a creamy froth now by the rising wind.
About then he had ceased keeping track of the rest of his crew. The captain, had he not been dead on the schooner’s house and in a hundred fathom by now, would have kept a very punctual log about it, doubtless. But not his mate.
And then a couple or five days ago he had finally gotten tired of watching an arm swing back and forth from the thwart, and to still an urge which demanded to discover if man was fair food, hitched himself upright and, after an hour’s work, had managed to slide the body into the thick of a craggy wave which gulped and gave up its prey no more.
He had stared in stupefaction, then, at the biscuit which floated upon the sea water in the bilge. He wondered that the bosun had not eaten it long before. But the bosun’s loss was his gain and so he had eaten.
The foolishness of eating came to him afterwards. For eating would prolong his life yet a little while and he was heartily sick of the way the boat kept lurching, rolling, pitching. If the sail hadn’t blown away long ago he would have tried to steady the thing with it.