Hello.
Have you read Roald Dahl’s short stories? How about “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”? It’s a fabulous I’VE HEARD TRUE story about a very smart tall ugly young man with bad teeth who figures out how to make a machine that can produce stories. All you have to do is push a few buttons and in a minute or less you get a story that is perfectly magazine ready.
He tells his boss all about it and at first he’s skeptical. Can it work? How can a machine pump out literature and even if it did work, would the stories sell?
The young man’s response is this:
“Nowadays, . . . the handmade article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass production, especially in this country–you know that. Carpets . . . chairs . . . shoes . . . bricks . . . crockery . . . anything you like to mention–they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. and stories–well–they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale . . . We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!”
His boss is thrilled and so they build the machine and like magic, it works! They sell stories! They get rich! Then they decide to move onto novels and this is wildly successful too. Finally, the young man has the ultimate idea. He’s going to absorb all the famous writers.
His boss doesn’t understand. how can you do that?
He says:
“‘I’ve got a list here sir, of fifty of the most successful writers in the country, and what I intend to do is offer each one of them a lifetime contract with pay. All they have to do is undertake to never write another word; and, of course, to let us use their names on our own stuff. How about that?’
‘They’ll never agree.’
‘You dont know writers, Mr. Bohlen. You watch and see.’
‘What about the creative urge, Knipe?’
‘It’ bunk! All they’re really interested in is the money–just like everybody else.'”
So they go out and try to convince all the big shot writers to join up with them. In fact, the first full year of the machine’s production “it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.”
The narrator of the tale is tempted to join up because the pressure is so great. And the “screw turns tighter for those who hesitate to sign their names.”
What is the last line of this story?
“Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.”
would you sign up? Could you resist? should you resist?
P.S. Project Writeway to start next week. It’s on!
Throwing Up Words 