BABS CARTLAND

BARBER CARTLAND 

LITERAL ANTI-CHRIST 

So I keep seeing this post going around about Barbara Cartland and like, how amazing she is ? 

The post states she wrote 723 novels in her life time and 23 novels in 1976 alone. At the time I thought wow. Thats...

But then I did the maths or Math, whatever. Anyway, it all sounded a bit suspect. Like VERY SUSPECT. 

I mean think about it. 23 Novels in one year? The average novel is 85k. And we're talking about no internet, no computers, no artificial aid of any kind. 

Back then you only had a physical library and clunky typewriters. If you made a typo mistake, you had to use white nail-varnish paint called 'Typex' to fix the error. Plus you couldn't do any editing or re-arrange paragraphs, without cutting up physical pages and glueing them back together. All this takes time. 

But even if you could write 23 novels, thats like two novels a month at 85k. 

To put that into perspective, you would need to conjure up 85,000 words every two weeks. If we assume there is 168 hours in a week and minus say eight hours a day for sleep (56hrs) gives you just 112 hours a week to complete half a novel (say 40,000 words). 

That means you would be writing on average 5,700 words a day. And thats just typing. No time for coffee breaks, 'thinking cigarettes' or agonising over wether your protagonist needs more character development. 

Its not impossible but the output is literal pantsing, no plot and just formulaic. I don't know about you but I wouldn't get much sleep. Like zero. Not to mention I would probably reach BURN-OUT before the end of the month. But thats just me.  

But as far as everyone else is concerned, Babs Cartland is up there with Jesus and the Apostles. Untouchable. A christ-like role-model for all aspiring peasant writers. But that just means that your own little novel will never be good enough. And all your peers will tell you so. 

And of course she wrote 723 novels. And 23 in just one year. And as anyone online will tell you: how many novels did you write last week dickweed? 

So I did a bit of research. Not much tho. Because somebody as big as Babs Cartland is bound to have thick bio's galore and my small peasant brain can only take in so much. Plus unlike Babs, I don't get paid for my writing. Just putting this together, alone took me like three hours to write.  

But even just mulling over a few token articles and wiki, it was interesting to note that at least one writer had openly complained about her flagrant plagiarism. 

So how was Cartland able to write 23 novels in one year and 723 in total? Simples: She had previously married the heir to a printing fortune. Which certainly made things easier. The marriage didn't last of course, but by that point she had gone up the social ladder enough to be mixing with the elites.

Her daily writing schedule included falling out of bed at whatever o'clock, followed by a leisurely lunch that included tea and scones. Then she might spend three hours in the afternoon, depending on how she felt, lying on a couch and dictating her 'ideas' to the secretary. This entailed using well known X,Y,Z plot formulas, lifted from other books. Then Babs would toddle off to see friends, while the poor secretary was putting in all the hours, working flat out round the clock to wrestle Cartland's dictations into prose. 

Thus after two weeks, hey presto! A full manuscript ready for the printers. Cartland does it again! No thanks to some 'borrowed ideas' and flogging the poor secretary for all her worth. If anything said secretary should have at least got credit as a Ghost Writer. But I guess not. 

Meanwhile, Cartland was celebrated and her prestige allowed her to get away with churning out books like so many hot turds.  

The moral to this rant is: if you want to be a respected writer, don't aspire to be Barbara Cartland. If anything, the real writers of this story are the poor secretaries paid peanuts, and the people she ripped off, who poured out their heart and souls onto paper, while Cartland took all the credit.