Leigh Brackett on Words and Writing

Leigh Brackett on living and writing with her husband, Edmond Hamilton:

You were asking how living and working together affected us. We almost broke up our happy home I think right after we were married. I had an order for a 40,000 word novel from Startling Stories and I said, “I think I've got an idea for an opening.” And he said fine. So we figured if we collaborated we could do the stories twice as fast, write twice as many, and make twice as much money. You know, which we didn't have much of at that time. So I went out in the kitchen and pounded the typewriter and came back in with a couple of chapters and I said, “What do you think of it?” He read it, said it was great, but where do you go from here? I said, “I don't know.” He looked at me, said, “You don't know! This is the so-and-so bleep adjective deleted way to write a story I ever heard of!” (Laughing) He used to write the last line of the story before he'd ever write the first one.

--Leigh Brackett, excerpted from "An Interview with Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton" by Dave Truesdale and Paul McGuire III, from Minicon 11, April 16-18, 1976