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Thus in 1951, I was persuaded to write a juvenile science fiction novel in the hope that it would be sold as the begi
I did, plucking Paul French out of the air for the purpose, and eventually wrote six novels under that name. (Some people, with little knowledge of science fiction, assumed from this that all my SF was written under Paul French, a suggestion that simply horrified me.)
As soon as it was clear that TV was not interested in my juveniles, I dropped all pretense, and made use of the Three Laws of Robotics, for instance, which was a dead giveaway. Eventually, when it was time for new printings, I had my own name put upon it.
Again, in 1942, I wrote a short story for an editor who wanted it done under a pseudonym in order to give the impression that it was bya brand-new author. (The reason is complicated and I won’t bore you with it. You’ll find it in my autobiography.) I wrote it, reluctantly, under the name George E. Dale, but eventually included it in my book The Early Asimov as a story of my own.
Also, in 1942, I sold a story to the magazine Super Science stories which printed it under the pseudonym H. B. Ogden, for reasons I no longer remember. (Even my memory has its limits.) So little did I care for the story, and so unhappy was lover the nonuse of my name that I totally forgot about it, until nearly forty years later when I was going over my diary carefully in order to prepare my autobiography.
I was shocked to find there was a story of mine that I had forgotten and didn’t own in printed form. Fortunately, with the help of Forrest 1. Ackerman I got the issue and reprinted the story in the first volume of my autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, acknowledging it as my own. In 1971, I was persuaded to write a book entitled The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, in which I gently satirized sexual how-to books such as The Sensuous Woman. Since the latter book was written by a writer identified only as “1,” my editor felt the joke should be carried on by having my book written by “Dr. A.” Even before publication day, however, it was a
At the present moment, then, absolutely none of my writing appears under anything but my own name.
Which brings up one puzzle. The early pulps occasionally made use of “house names.” A particular magazine would use a pseudonym that was never used except in that magazine, but that pseudonym might be used by any number of different writers. I have never really understood why this was done and if any reader knows I would appreciate being told.
Dialog
Most stories deal with people and one of the surefire activities of people is that of talking and of making conversation. It follows that in most stories there is dialog. Sometimes stories are largely dialog; my own stories almost always are. For that reason, when I think of the art of writing (which isn’t often, I must admit) I tend to think of dialog.
In the romantic period of literature in the first part of the nineteenth century, the style of dialog tended to be elaborate and adorned. Authors used their full vocabulary and had their characters speak ornately.
I remember when I was very young and first read Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. How I loved the conversation. The fu
Thus, consider the scene in which Nicholas Nickleby confronts his villainous Uncle Ralph. Nicholas’s virtuous and beautiful sister, Kate, who has been listening to Ralph’s false version of events, which make out Nicholas to have been doing wrong, cried out wildly to her brother, “Refute these calumnies.”
Of course, I had to look up “refute” and “calumny” in the dictionary, but that meant I had learned two useful words. I also had never heard any seventeen-year-old girl of my acquaintance use those words but that just showed me how superior the characters in the book were, and that filled me with satisfaction.
It’s easy to laugh at the books of that era and to point out that no one really talks that way. But then, do you suppose people in Shakespeare’s time went around casually speaking in iambic pentameter?
Still, don’t you want literature to improve on nature? Sure you do. When you go to the movies, the hero and heroine don’t look like the people you see in the streets, do they? Of course not. They look like movie stars. The characters in fiction are better looking, stronger, braver, more ingenious and clever than anyone you are likely to meet, so why shouldn’t they speak better, too?
And yet there are values in realism-in making people look, and sound, and act like real people.
For instance, back in 1919, some of the players on the pe
That is a deathless cry that can’t be tampered with. It is unthinkable to have the boy say “Refute these calumnies, Joseph,” even though that’s what he means. Any writer who tried to improve matters in that fashion would, and should, be lynched at once. I doubt that anyone would, or should, even change it to “Say it isn’t so, Joe.”
For that matter, you couldn’t possibly have had Kate Nickleby cry out to her brother, “Say it ain’t so, Nick.”
Of course, during much of history most people were illiterate and the reading of books was very much confined to the few who were educated and scholarly. Such books of fiction as existed were supposed to “improve the mind,” or risk being regarded as works of the devil.
It was only gradually, as mass education began to flourish, that books began to deal with ordinary people. Of course, Shakespeare had his clowns and Dickens had his Sam Wellers, and in both cases, dialog was used that mangled the English language to some extent-but that was intended as humor. The audience was expected to laugh uproariously at these representatives of the lower classes.
As far as I know the first great book which was written entirely and seriously in substandard English and which was a great work of literature nevertheless (or even, possibly, to some extent because of it) was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Fi
The book was extremely popular when it came out because its realism made it incredibly effective-but it was also extremely controversial as all sorts of fatheads inveighed against it because it didn’t use proper English.
And yet, at that, Mark Twain had to draw the line, too, as did all writers until the present generation.
People, all sorts of people, use vulgarisms as a matter of course. I remember my days in the army when it was impossible to hear a single sentence in which the common word for sexual intercourse was not used as an all-purpose adjective. Later, after I had gotten out of the army, I lived on a street along which young boys and girls walked to the local junior high school in the morning, and back again in the evening, and their shouted conversations brought back memories of my barracks days with nauseating clarity.
Yet could writers reproduce that aspect of common speech? Of course not. For that reason, Huck Fi
A whole set of euphemisms was developed and placed in the mouths of characters who wouldn’t, in real life, have been caught dead saying them. Think of the all the “dad-blameds.” and “goldarneds,” and “consarneds” we have seen in print and heard in the movies. To be sure, youngsters say them as a matter of caution for they would probably be punished (if of “good family”) by their parents if caught using the terms they had heard said parents use. (Don’t let your hearts bleed for the kids for when they grow up they will beat up their kids for the same crime.)
For the last few decades, however, it has become permissible to use all the vulgarisms freely and many writers have availed themselves of the new freedom to lend an air of further realism to their dialog. What’s more, they are apt to resent bitterly any suggestion that this habit be modified or that some nonvulgar expression be substituted.
In fact, one sees a curious reversal now. A writer must withstand a certain criticism if he does not make use of said vulgarisms
Once when I read a series of letters by science fiction writers in which such terms were used freely and frequently, I wrote a response that made what seemed to me to be an obvious point. In it, I said something like this:
“Ordinary people, who are not well educated and who lack a large working vocabulary, are limited in their ability to lend force to their statements. In their search for force, they must therefore make use of vulgarisms which serve, through their shock value, but which, through overuse, quickly lose whatever force they have, so that the purpose of the use is defeated.
“Writers, on the other hand, have (it is to be presumed) the full and magnificent vocabulary of the English language at their disposal. They can say anything they want with whatever intensity of invective they require in a thousand different ways without ever once deviating from full respectability of utterance. They have, therefore, no need to trespass upon the usages of the ignorant and forlorn, and to steal their tattered expressions as substitutes for the language of Shakespeare and Milton.”
All I got for my pains were a few comments to the effect that there must be something seriously wrong with me.
Nevertheless, it is my contention that dialog is realistic when, and only when, it reflects the situation as you describe it and when it produces the effect you wish to produce.