Why would anyone wish to be a writer? I've been a published writer since I was thirteen, and I can tell you why I began, but why I keep at it? Well, now, that's the question isn't it?
I started wanting to write when doctors forced me to remain in bed for one entire year, the year between four and five years old. I had a heart murmur, and if that weren't all, I managed to acquire all the different kinds of Measles during that year as well.
At that time doctors believed you could go blind if exposed to sunlight while ill (and I was very ill) with Measles. So I spent most of the time in the dark.
My mother became the only voice and connection to the outside world, except for the doctors, of course. (They actually made house calls back then.) She read to me until her voice left her, but the next day, she would return and continue reading.
She chose L. Frank Baum's OZ books...all of them (for the uninitiated there are many more that the first, The Wizard of OZ, which to tell the truth lacks when compared to the other works). It may have been dark in my room, but my head filled with pictures and people and grand adventures.
By the end of the year, I could read on my own. My first experience with teaching came in First Grade, my murmur healed, my measles over. (I'd skipped Kindergarten because of the year in bed.) It seemed I already knew how to read, so my teacher assigned me the task of helping the children who were having difficulty learning the skill.
My dedication knew no bounds! I knew the value of books: they opened the eyes of imagination to worlds unthought of. To deny anyone the key to that door was unthinkable. So I taught reading for three years to the children in the First Grade, to the great annoyance of my other teachers who were often forced to excuse me from their classes to help in someone else's.
Of course I kept reading. I read everything I could find in my parents' house, my grandparents' houses, the library, and finally I started asking for books...nothing else...just books for presents for my birthdays, Christmas, or any other time someone asked me what I wanted. A really punk Christmas was a Christmas without one book....
By eight, I had read all of the OZ books and waited for the ones by the illustrators. I had read all of Louisa May Alcott, "The Little Colonel" series, Charles Kingsley, and two books by George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblins and The Princess and Curdie, which left me with a profound sense that there was something I wasn't getting, something which lay just beneath the surface, and I had to find out what it was. There were many other books, Black Beauty and The Black Stallion being two which stood out; the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson; and mythology. (Mother had a textbook from Hockaday in Dallas for mythology, and I couldn't get enough of it.)
So these are the early influences, and why I decided I must be a writer: who wouldn't want to affect people's lives the way these authors had affected mine?
I had a marvelous education at Casady School in Oklahoma City. One teacher, Mr. Bloodgood--sadly deceased--made us write a "theme" every weekend of the school year. Sometimes he would assign a topic; sometimes he gave us our heads. (I laugh when people think writing 500 words is a big deal.) Each theme, typed and double-spaced, was at least five pages long and no more than six. The training and feedback helped me more than I can say.
I always wrote: in my diaries, in journals, for school, and later for newspapers, children, novels and business. I've really written everything except technical.
But there is a wonderful saying: "I hate writing, but I love having written"--that's probably a paraphrase, and I can't remember who said it. (It's not in Bartlett's so I'm lost for the moment. Forgive me.) But it is so true!
When I decide to write, I also see everything else I really should be doing, and because writing can be put off, it is. That is until I met Jack Bickham. (Jack is also now dead through no fault of mine.) You may not know his name, but he wrote over seventy-plus published novels in his time. He's the author of "The Apple Dumpling Gang." He also taught me how to write, by teaching me how to sit in front of the typewriter, paper, computer, and just begin. He didn't care what I turned out; I just had to be in front of the computer, etc., at an appointed time of day, for an appointed amount of time or for a predetermined number of pages produced. To pass his class, you had to write 300 pages of a novel in one semester. To get a good grade, you had to write a pretty good one.
His mantra was: "Your brain is a muscle, and it needs to be exercised. When the process first begins, your brain will rebel, and you will think ' this hurts too much; I think I'll stop.' But you can't stop! The moment your brain figures out you're not going to quit no matter how much it rebels, it will become easier and easier to begin the blank page in the middle of things, not from scratch."
It worked.
The second thing I learned: "writers write." This truth hit me squarely between the eyes over coffee with another friend, who was a university professor.
"You say you are a writer?"
"Yes, I am, " I said.
"What have you written lately?"
"Oh, not much. I'm really just writing for myself."
"Then don't call yourself a writer."
"What?"
"W-r-i-t-e-r , one who writes. If you're not writing, you're not a writer. And if you do write "for yourself," then you're either a coward or fooling yourself. You're certainly not doing anyone else any good, since all of your writing is probably in a drawer."
"But--"
"Hit a nerve? Well, look into that drawer, get something out that actually says something, polish it until you can see yourself in it, then find a publisher of that sort of thing, and send it out. And that means putting a stamp on the envelope!"
I did. I was ashamed not to. The article sold, and a children's book that I'd been doing as a lark, got me a series with Golden Books. Who knew?
OK, so now you know. Writers write, not because they have to, the plain fact is we don't. We choose to for lots of reasons, but the main reason is communicating with some other person out there.
It's hard. Anyone who thinks writing is easy hasn't done it. (Why do you think we all try to find distractions?) The first draft (which is what my blogs are--sorry) is fairly easy and fun. We just babble on about anything. The second draft--oh, God!--pure torture. You find out your heroine has inexplicably changed names two, maybe three times. You've lost a plot thread, and you've got to find it, unravel it, place it seamlessly into the narrative, or nerve yourself to dump it. It adds nothing, but it's so well written!
My particular flaws (yes, I do know what they are) are verbosity (an example of which you are now reading, brave soul you!), falling in love with my characters and forgetting about plot, and reading way too much Dickens as a child and adult. (How can you not love Dickens?) I take the long way round, when the more direct route would serve better. I'm too direct when the long way would add a lot. In short, the first draft equals total rubbish. But I find the nuggets of "possibly great stuff here," and I begin again. But this time, I'm clearer about what I want to say, where I'm going, and who and what I need to get there. By the fourth or fifth draft of a novel, it's getting pretty darned good.
So why do I write? Because I choose to communicate with you, and occasionally, I'll actually have something useful to say.
For my final helpful hint: Rent the DVD of "Finding Forrester" with Sean Connery. It's full of great advice and pretty faithful to the creative process and hard work that is writing.
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