William Faulkner will be dead 50 years this July. How to “celebrate” such an occasion? Publish his books! The Modern Library (Penguin) will be releasing some new commemorative editions of his books this year, starting with two volumes in March 2012.

People want to imagine great writers carefully crafting their work for weeks, months, years at a time. Flannery O’Connor was an incredibly slow writer. But the Faulkner of these letters is a frantic craftsman who cranks out short stories as fast as he humanly can because he badly needs the money. He’s even nailed down the timeline. He knows, for example, that if he can write a story in a week, get it in the mail by Friday, that an editor will buy it the following week and he’ll have the check the week after.

What a charming world to have lived in, that such a process could proceed with such alacrity!

If you’re interested in how writers actually make a living, I urge you to get a hold of Welty’s book, Faulkner’s, or both.

Some tidbits from Welty’s essay:

1. *Faulkner “hoped to hell” that Paramount Pictures would buy his novel, Sanctuary, because when his father died, Ma Faulkner only had enough money to live for a year. “Then it is me,” he writes.
   

2. *At one point he’s working on two novels at a time, and cranking out one short story a month because he’s got to pay his and his mother’s bills, and he can never rule out the possibility that his brothers and other relatives will hit him up for money.
   

3. *He thinks of everything he writes in terms of its earning potential, because, as he says: “By God I’ve got to!”
   

4. *At one point, he starts cranking out TWO short stories a week, and he wonders if he can keep up this kind of schedule because it’s killing him.
   

5. *To help him out, his New York publishers begin advancing him money. (Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch say these sorts of arrangements were the origin of the modern-day publisher’s advance, but I don’t know enough about the history of publishing to say more than this.)
   

6. *Faulkner goes to Hollywood to make some cash and bitches that the studio contracts are so weaselly that he longs for a relationship built on “good faith and decency,” like the one he has with his editors back in New York. (I think he is safer in his grave than in modern-day publishing.)
   

7. *He hits upon a plan to write six short stories, sell them each for a $1,000 apiece to the Saturday Evening Post, and live off the windfall for six months while he writes a book. But he’s freaking out because he’s only been able to sell one of these short stories and that wasted effort can now only be pitched “into the trash.” To hell with fame, craft, acclaim. Genius writer Faulkner wants to chuck his work in the trash because it can’t make him any money.
   

8. *His usual outlets were paying him $300 to $400 a short story but the Post was the king at $1,000 a pop.
   

9. *One year he’s come up with a crazy scheme to hock his mules and mares to raise some cash but he runs out of horseflesh to pawn.
   

10. *At one point he confesses that he doesn’t have a carbon copy of the short story he sent, and can’t afford to wait for his agent or editor’s requested changes because he needs the money too badly. So he rewrites the story from memory, incorporating the edits, and sends it on its way.
    

There’s lots more, but I think you get the point. Writers write for themselves, and they write for money. Some of the best writers wrote quickly, but that did not taint the work. The stories were just fine because they had talent in spades. It pains me sometimes when I read Dean Wesley Smith say we should just write and publish, write and publish, and not knock ourselves out with ceaseless revisions. But if I read him right, he’s espousing an ideal. Dean can do it, Harlan Ellison can do it, Faulkner did it.

I think of the creative writing classes I’ve taken or the MFA programs some friends of mine have pursued, and cringe to recall how much time I/they wasted sitting around on our asses talking about how to make the story better. The lesson of Dean, Harlan and Faulkner is probably this: You don’t make the story better; you make yourself better by writing as often as you can.

Oh—that hastily rewritten piece of crap that Faulkner spat out from memory turns out to be “The Bear,” one of the most-read and most-anthologized Faulkner stories, ever.

What a talented son of a bitch. We should all be so money-hungry.

I’ll leave you with one last Faulkner quote: “The man who said that the pinch of necessity, butchers and grocers bills and insurance hanging over his head, is good for the artist, is a damned fool.”