Customer Reviews

The fiction factory: Being the experience of a writer who, for twenty-two years, has kept a story-mill grinding successfully

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"The Fiction Factory" is a charming memoir by William Wallace Cook, the author of "Plotto", the original plot-generation aid. Writing under the alias of "John Milton Edwards," he describes the first twenty years or so of his astonishingly prolific pulp-fiction career, including not only the ups and downs and various interesting yarns, but also the techniques he used to grind out 66,000 words a week(!)

At one point, Cook was turning out material so fast that he used three stenographers at once to take dictation and type it up, but in the end he went back to working solo because they couldn't maintain the surprisingly exacting standards of the fiction markets of the day. He was a technology buff who always had the latest model of typewriter. But what really set him apart was his elaborate filing system. He took in many newspapers and magazines, and anything interesting was carefully cut out, filed, and indexed for later reference. The point of this was to front-load his research so that he could whip out a story at a moment's notice, using the material at hand.

I won't claim that the techniques in this nearly-100-year-old book can be cut out and paste down, but it's a fascinating look into the commercial writing of yesteryear.

(Tip: Read the Wikipedia page on "dime novels" before you get too far into the book, so that you understand the difference between a story paper, a nickel novel, a dime novel, etc.)