Van Vogt on Writing the Scene

Excerpt from "A.E. van Vogt: A Writer with a Winning Formula."Interview by Jeffrey M. Elliot, 1979,

VV: I consciously – andthis is what discipline (system) means – wroteevery one of the 1,000 as a fictional sentence. For a confession story, this required that every sentence have an emotion in it. The treasured text, which I just mentioned, was The Only Two Ways to Write a Story, by John W. Gallishaw. Gallishaw had observed in the best writers of his day, also, that they wrote stories in what was roughly a series of 800-word scenes. Each scene divided into five steps. And this system I also did in my disciplined way. No piece of music was ever more rigidly organized than the five steps of these scenes – thewordage could vary slightly, but not much. In my naiveté at the time, I thought I was revealing one of my precious secrets when I discussed my method in 1948, in an article on writing science fiction, which was published in Lloyd Eshbach's Of Worlds Beyond. So far as I know, though, only one writer-and I may have misheard him-subsequently told me that he has found the method valuable. In the years that followed, I read a variety of comments on my 800-word scenes. Without exception, everybody had misread the description. An English professor, quoting an American critic, wrote in Foundation, an excellent science fiction publication issued quarterly in England, that I changed the entire direction of my story every 800 words, and that no doubt this was the reason I was known as the master of confusion.

JE: Closely related to your 800-word scenes is your use of story "hang-ups." How do they figure into your approach?

VV: Early in my career, a major technique of mine was to write a "hang-up" into every sentence. The reader who tried to skim, as critics tend to do (they just want to get an idea of what the story is about) would quickly bog down, because he wasn't making the contribution to each sentence that the method required. My regular readers don't get confused, because they're able to make the necessary contribution. The hang-up in each sentence was, by my theory, the science fiction "fictional sentence." A science fiction fictional sentence, as I write it, has to have a hang-up in it, ideally. My first science fiction story – thoughit wasn't the first published – "Vault of the Beast," opened: "The creature crept." The reader doesn't know what kind of creature. That is the hang-up. Another sentence: "This caricature of a human shape reached into one of those skin folds with that twisted hand, and drew out a small, gleaming metal object." There are four hang-ups in that sentence. When I wrote confession-type stories, every sentence, as I mentioned earlier, had to contain an emotion in it. For example, you don't say, "I lived at 323 Brand Street." You say, "Tears came to my eyes as I thought of my tiny bedroom at 323 Brand Street." If your story has 1,000 sentences in it, every sentence should have an emotion in it. It is my belief that stories written with these hang-ups, particularly, will endure longer than other types of stories. The reason is simple: Readers of each generation will contribute meaning from their own time, their own era, filling in the gaps with data that I don't have now or didn't have when I wrote the story.