A Writer's Tale

Chances are, though, you won’t get rich and famous.

In which case, you’ll just be a poor, unknown hack.

If you want to be something more than that, walk away from the well paved road and blaze your own trails into unknown territory.

Here’s how to do it.

Sit down and ask yourself this: If I could read a book about anything, what would it be about? Where and when would it take place? What would the main guy be like? What sort of gal would I love to read about in a book, if such a book existed? What might happen to these people that would be really neat?

And so on.

Find the answers to those questions.

Then figure out if such a book already exists.

Which means you need to be well-read.

If your ideal book already exists, you would be ill-advised to go ahead and write your own version of it.

If it doesn’t exist, you’re in luck.

Write it.

Write it your way.

As Polonius said, “To thine own self be true.”

As Ricky Nelson sang, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve gotta please yourself.”

Set out to please yourself. With a little luck, you may end up pleasing others, as well.

 

Rule 2

“Learn How to Write.”

I have always been a master of stating the obvious.

The obvious, however, is quite often undervalued and overlooked.

I find it astonishing that a great many writers pursue their craft and sullen art without having a halfway decent grasp of language, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.

Just about everyone has daydreams about being an author.

We all like to tell stories. Most of us are able to read and speak English reasonably well.

We have even written things, now and then: letters, thank you notes, maybe reports of various kinds at school and work. So it seems a simple matter to write a story.

Easy as pie. Anyone can do it.

At a cocktail party, a famous writer (possibly George Bernard Shaw) was told by a famous surgeon, “When I retire, I plan to write a novel.” Said the author, “When I retire, I plan to operate on people.”

The author’s comment may seem like a wisecrack, but it is dead-on accurate.

Learning to write well is probably no easier than learning to remove a kidney or replace a heart valve.

It requires years of study and practice.

Some aspiring writers think they don’t really need to know proper usage of the language.

They think that whatever miserable errors they make will be fixed by an editor.

Wrong.

Most editors (especially here in the U.S.), know less than the writers.

If your story should somehow end up on the desk of a good editor, he isn’t likely to fix the writing for you. The rare, good editor would be so disgusted by your crappy writing that all you’d get is a rejection slip.

Chances are, however, that your manuscript will be read by a lousy editor. Such an editor might accept badly written material simply because he doesn’t know any better.

If that happens, you can be certain that nobody will end up correcting it. The mistakes will be over the heads of the publishers, just as they were over yours. Your book will be published in all its pathetic glory.

Full of mistakes that would win you a flunking grade from any good high school English teacher.

Even if all editors were masters of the language, no writer should ever submit a piece of work that is not written well enough to earn an A+ in any English class in the country.

We have a responsibility to use the language better than anyone else.

A writer submitting a careless, error-inflicted manuscript is like a police officer robbing a bank. It just shouldn’t happen. It should never be tolerated. It’s a perversion of Nature.

This is not to say that liberties cannot be taken. Rules broken. Experiments conducted.

Tricky stuff pulled.

But manipulating the language in order to create special effects is not allowed for people who can’t pass “bonehead” English.

And this is not to say that all mistakes can be avoided. The language is so complex that nobody can get it right all the time.

Mistakes will happen.

They are inevitable. Even if the writer somehow throws together 150,000 words without a single error, the printer is sure to blow it here and there. Errors will slip by.

All the writer can do is try…

Strive for excellence even though it may be unattainable.

Rule 3

“Write.”

The famous science fiction writer, Jerry Pournelle, once told me, “All you’ve got to do is write one page a day. In a year, you have a novel.”

A short novel, at any rate. (By current standards.)

But the point is this… If you want to be a writer, you must sit down and turn out pages.

Even as little as a single page each day can result in a full novel over the course of time.

How long does it take to write a page?