The Secret of Speed Writing

I’d heard that John Creasey could write a book every two weeks. That astounded me. How was this possible?

I was amazed by the prolific nature of indie writers, the speed and the quality of their work, and their generosity at sharing their insights, at the recent Global Publishing Summit in Seville, so I’ve had to reflect on how they differed from the traditionally published ‘pulp fiction’ books we are all familiar with.

The best example is surely that hilarious sketch of Barbara Cartland in the TV show Little Britain, where she’s dictating her rather chaste romance books and dragging them out to make minimum length novels.

That really struck a chord with me. When I was ten years old, I remember despising Eric Leyland’s boring Flame secret agent books because they always ended at the very start of page 195 and I surmised, even back then, he was stretching them out to barely fulfil his publisher’s contract.

Like so many of us, I was desperate for escapism, anything to get away from the horrible real world, so I read everything that seemed popular and noted the books that were quickly snatched off the library shelves by hungry readers. Usually female, they were often pushing and shoving each other aside, like in an old-school jumble sale, keen to get their hands on the latest returned best-sellers.

In the course of my boyhood research, I’d heard that John Creasey could write a book every two weeks. That astounded me. How was this possible? So I checked out his best-selling series, The Toff, which also didn’t linger on those library shelves for long. Even as a ten-year-old – or perhaps because ten-year-olds are actually very critical – I knew instantly it was crap. With its drawing of a Toff’s top hat and monocle, it was clearly a rip-off of The Saint (which I found equally boring). I read a chapter in the library. It was awful. Then I stuck it back on the ‘returned books’ unsorted shelf, where it was quickly grabbed by another reader, also in dire need of their escapism fix, and maybe less critical – or just more desperate – than I was.

Such books were obviously written on an assembly line. They made the authors a lot of money, but I doubt it made them happy and fulfilled from a creative point of view. I don’t know for sure about authors, but I know this applies to artists. A relative of Lisa’s produces oil paintings on a similar speed principle, they’re hugely popular, he’s world famous and has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, but he’s not happy and is bored by his whole self-imposed assembly line process.

Yet the prolific independent writers I met at the indie publishing summit are genuinely happy with their work and clearly derive tremendous satisfaction from their stories. I was intrigued, and had to know more.

It’s important, to me at least, because sweatshop writing (and drawing) has been the curse of British comics and its downfall. Comic readers are just like my ten-year-old persona – they can spot an Eric Leyland instantly. I recall on Action, desperate to fill the pages, I hired a John Creasey-type writer, a star author at D.C. Thomson’s, to script two of the serials. He had actually been a headmaster, and John Wagner and I met him once and I could sense his thinly-veiled contempt for us, and our anti-establishment creeds, hidden behind his need to make extra money in his retirement. Given my antipathy towards teachers, you might wonder why I would commission him. Especially a headmaster! But it wasn’t just because I was desperate. He had written the hugely successful Cadman for Victor, which was ground-breaking in its day, and encouraged John and I to start our comic revolution. Cadman was closely based on Flashman and – for the first time in comics – showed members of the British officer class to be absolute shits. So, as the star writer of Cadman, I figured he was a safe pair of hands. Being a headmaster, his factual knowledge of militaria was first-rate. He quickly knocked out the scripts, with Creasey-style speed and efficiency, they were illustrated and duly appeared in Action. One serial was reasonably popular. The other died the death, and was hated by readers with a passion that I thought was unique to me and my dislike of Eric Leyland books.

Yet his stories and these books I’ve mentioned were professionally written with plenty of action and a reasonable premise and genre. So what went wrong? There are clues in Biggles, which I also read as a boy.

The World War One Biggles stories were full of passion and I loved them.

The World War Two Biggles stories were clever and I liked their ingenuity.

The post-war Biggles of the Air Police were typical examples of hacked-out speed writing novels and I hated them.

They lacked soul. Just like those two Action stories. One was called ‘The Coffin Sub’, and it bombed not just because it was a ship story, but because it lacked soul. The other was a football story, ‘Play Till You Drop’ about the exploitation of soccer stars. It went down okay with the readers, because I’d given the writer a strong premise – a formula, if you like – but it lacked soul. Similarly, Cadman was written to the Flashman formula, so it was going to work. Anti-establishment stories were so welcome to readers looking for an alternative to the endless jingoism that was around in the 70s and is worse than ever today.

But it’s more than soul that was missing. It was character. Creasey’s sterile books lacked both. They were how I imagine an AI novel would read. Unlike today’s indie speed authors, whose books exude character. So the reader feels they are meeting and hanging-out with good friends. They are drawn into a compelling world and want more and more of it. They want to belong to ‘the family’ they’re reading about. It’s addictive, not just for the reader, but the writer, too. And this helps explain why both parties want long series featuring the same people and worlds.

Author Tony Lee told me at the summit that his detective novels are primarily successful because of the ‘banter’, the characters. I’m sure that’s true for the other speed writers. It’s possibly the warmth of the characters that enable them to write a book a month. Characterisation and heart that was notably missing from so many books when I was looking for escapism as a boy.

Alongside character, the reader also needs to feel safe if the author is aiming for a mass-market, as opposed to a cult success. This doesn’t mean the stories have to be vapid and unchallenging. There still have to be unique angles to make them stand out. Thus Charley’s War is actually ‘safe’ because he and his inner circle of friends and enemies from his world always remain alive. And the story appears to be ‘safe’, building on our accepted knowledge of the Great War and all the State’s jingoistic lies, whilst slyly subverting them. Not always an easy process, but I’m incapable of writing entirely genuinely ‘safe’ stories even though I admire those authors who produce them well.

And the indie writers I met at GPS have done a great job – which I’m sure is partly because they’re free and independent. Lisa’s read excerpts from a number of them and she tells me they’re well-written with some original angles to their tales.

I hope to follow in their footsteps with a historical thriller series (not a graphic novel), but this year I’m booked up with books for French traditional comic publishers – working with three great art creators who all believe (like me) in going that extra mile. So hopefully next year. My target audience as always will be the ordinary man, woman or child in the street, rather than any kind of elites.

And I tell myself that once I’ve got my subversive thriller formula right, giving the illusion of producing ‘safe’ stories, I may speed up. We’ll see.

But I will always build in what Mick McMahon called ‘staring out the window’ time. Listening to the Muse. To ensure the story has that extra something above and beyond any formula. So it doesn’t feel empty, shallow and lacking in heart. I have to avoid what Gerry Finley-Day called a story when it ‘has the symptoms but not the disease.’ Something UK comic publishers never allow for and pay a dismal price at the box office, which they either don’t care about or refuse to acknowledge as it’s just too humiliating or complex for them. But it’s that ‘staring out the window’ time that produces mine, John Wagner and Mick’s best work, and why it’s still republished today.

So when I get back to that thriller series, I’m intending to have some covers of typical mass-market, best-selling, independent, ‘speed books’ on a mood board on the wall in front of me. I don’t care how cringe-making they might be to elitists. But I won’t risk their snobbery by giving examples just now.

They will be there to remind me who my target audience is and why I do this.

Matriarchy versus Patriarchy will be returning next week!