13,300,000. Thirteen million, three hundred thousand.
That’s a lot.
If you’d won that in the lottery, you’d be set for life (and the dealer rooms at PulpFest and Windy City would be your playgrounds).
That’s roughly the number of words in the 325 lead novels published in The Shadow Magazine from 1931 through 1949. That would average about 739,000 words a year for 18 years.
Of those 13,300,000 words, Walter Gibson wrote 11,777,000 by himself. All for a single pulp character.
Let’s think about that. If you started writing 2,500 words a day, six days a week, it would take you over 15 years to equal Gibson’s output on The Shadow. You likely would be using a computer for your writing; Gibson banged his out on a much slower manual typewriter.
At the same time he was writing those Shadow novels, Gibson was ghost writing books for magicians Joseph Dunninger and Harry Blackstone, as well as writing his own books on magic; pulp short stories (Norgil the Magician); comic books; and radio scripts for “The Return of Nick Carter” and “Blackstone: The Magic Detective.”
Check out the listing in the back of J. Randolph Cox‘s “Man of Magic and Mystery: Walter B. Gibson” to see just how prolific an author he was.
For comparison, the 181 lead novels in Doc Savage Magazine total about 6,930,000 words. Of those, Lester Dent wrote or rewrote about 6,000,000 words.
In an article from the New York World-Telegram from the early 1930s, William Engle writes:
As (Walter Gibson’s) semi-portable, 18-pound noiseless typewriter clicks faintly, traditions fade. His works, in volume, surpass Nick Carter by two to one, and the hallowed words about Old King Brady are not half so many as the ones now about The Shadow.
He can write anywhere, anytime, he said, and sometimes is in finest fettle in the midst of a party, but inspiration plays no part. Before he taps the first sentence, he knows the last; he has beside his typewriter a several-thousand word synopsis, a cast of characters, a description of background, and a half-dozen packs of cigarettes.
Why so many words? Remember that back in the pulp days, writers were often paid by the word. The faster you could write, the more you could get paid.
Just food for thought as you write your way through National Novel Writing Month.
Hat tip to Geoffrey Wynkoop for posting the World-Telegram article on the Facebook group The Shadow Knows!.
