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------- -------[The basis for a talk given to the seventh grade at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School, on Monday, October 20th, 2003.] -------I’m going to begin by reading a very short story that I wrote last spring. Then I’ll talk a little about writing, see if you have any comments or questions, and if we have the time, read a short chapter in an unpublished novel. The story is called ”By his Fruits” -------Is that a true story? No, but the bits and pieces are: the cabbages, the street person, the conductor. They happened at different times and are glued together by the fictional fruit. It took about an hour to write this story and a week to get it in final shape. Every time I’ve looked at it for the past seven months I’ve changed a word or two. The title is from the bible, “by their fruits ye shall know them,” but it could be from a book on business management. Titles are fun to play with. -------I’m going to talk about writing this afternoon, but I don’t mean the often very good writing in newspapers and non-fiction books or the papers and reports we all have to write. I mean literary writing: stories, novels, poems, plays, essays, journals, and letters. What people call creative writing. But everything we do is creative. To be human is to be creative. Creativity is our evolutionary advantage, what teeth are to a tiger or a long neck on a giraffe. So I’d call it writing-for-fun, or playing. -------Why would you write? Probably not for the money. All but a few best-selling novelists have other jobs, often as English teachers I write because I enjoy it. It’s very satisfying to create a world that expresses your ideas and feelings and captures your experience. But there are other reasons. It’s sociable. Sending letters, sharing stories, and being in a writing group puts you in touch with interesting people. Writing can also open up a kind of sixth sense. I carried a camera when I was in the Army in Germany in the early 1960’s. It made me look at everything more carefully. Writing is like that. You start to see stories, poems, and anecdotes wherever you look. It makes your life more interesting. Some people say it can also help you find out about yourself. -------I want to tell you how I became a writer and am still becoming one, but first here are my seven best thoughts on writing: -------1) Anyone can write. Until I was fifty years old, I thought writers had to have a special talent, and they’d know they had it. I was wrong. -------2) If you want to be a writer, start writing. You can write about anything, and you learn how by doing it. They say write what you know. That makes sense, but you should take chances, too. Gertrude Stein says if you write only what you know, it’s not writing, it’s typing. -------3) Read. Most writers read a lot. Reading is hard for some people, but there are ways around that. Talk to your teachers. -------4) Get teachers, friends, and especially other writers to read your work. Take what they say seriously, but make your own decisions. When you read their stuff, be kind but honest. -------5) Edit your work. Make it better, but know when to stop. When I was a kid, I once saw a big wooden mallet at a friend’s house. When I asked about it, he said it was an artist’s mallet. The artist’s family has to hit him on the head with it before he ruins his work. -------6) When you’re ready to publish something, talk to people. Read Writers’ Market. It comes out every year and tells you what each publisher wants and doesn’t want, like “No talking animals!” -------7) Don’t get discouraged. When my wife and I were kids, we both got the message that if something didn’t come easily, it wasn’t for us. That’s not necessarily true. -------Okay, here’s how I eventually became a writer. -------My father was born in 1909 in a railroad flat in St. Louis, Missouri. I thought for a while he meant he was born on a flat car, but a railroad flat is just an apartment with rooms opening off one side of a long hallway and a coal bin at the back. -------Tarzan of the Apes was published in 1912 in the All-Story magazine. It was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, an unsuccessful businessman with a wife and children to support. He was paid only $700, but between 1912 and his death in 1950, he wrote 50 more novels, based on his daydreams during his bad years. They sold over 50 million copies and were translated into 80 languages. He was one of the most successful novelists who ever lived. He had his own town, Tarzana, California. I’ll read the first two sentences of Tarzan.
-------“I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.” -------If you haven’t read it, you can see why. This isn’t how Stephen King or J.K. Rowling starts a book. It gets better, Tarzan swings through the trees and kills lions with his bare hands, but it’s all written in flowery late-Victorian prose. Yet hundreds of millions of people ate it up. Tastes change. Burroughs never claimed to be a great writer. He said he meant to make money by entertaining people and helping them escape their troubles. -------In 1917, my father was eight years old and living in Oak Park, Illinois, just a few blocks from Frank Lloyd Wright. The U.S. had entered the fighting in Europe, so my father and his friends dug trenches in their back yards and played war. All that summer, he watched a man sitting at a table in the next yard, writing in longhand. It was Edgar Rice Burroughs, working on his fourth novel, A Princess of Mars. My father was hooked. He bought every Burroughs novel from then on. -------I was born in 1935. My parents read me children’s books, and my father told me stories he’d made up about Elmer the Elephant and The Little Red Ant. My mother says I learned all my values from Elmer. -------Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, coloring books were full of tanks and battleships, so you needed lots of gray and green crayons, I was six years old, and my father read me Tarzan of the Apes. -------By 1945, the war was over, and I’d moved on to The Hardy Boys. The first one, The Tower Treasure, was written 1927. Frank and Joe Hardy were 15 and 16. Seventy five years later they’re still 15 and 16. The author, Franklin W. Dixon, hasn’t aged either. The first twenty-five Hardy Boy books were actually written by Leslie McFarlane, for the Edward Stratemeyer Syndicate, which also published the Nancy Drew mysteries. The later volumes were written by other ghost writers. The early books were already dated by the 1940’s. They made fun of the police and were mildly racist and sexist, not intentionally; they just reflected society. They were also pretty weak. There was one scene where Frank and Joe and their friend Chet Morton were camping in a spooky woods. I remember thinking this should be exciting, but it wasn’t. It needed more description and better dialogue. The author should leave something to his reader’s imagination, but the Hardys left everything. I told my father I thought I could write a better Hardy Boys book. -------My father was a wonderful man. We were good friends until his death in 1989 at the age of eighty. But nobody’s perfect. Instead of saying, “There’s a thought; give it a try,” he said, as 99 out of 100 other fathers would have, “Why not write something of your own?” -------Like what? Moby Dick, Jane Eyre? I didn’t know what to write, so I didn’t write anything. But I never blamed my father; he got me reading. -------By 1950 we used to go to the Public Library every Friday after supper and check the new book shelf. That’s where we found J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I still have the set my father bought in England. -------In 1955, my sophomore year in college, I took a course in English Literature. My teacher the first semester liked my writing and gave me A’s, which I felt I deserved. I don’t remember his name. The second semester was taught by Paul Fussell. He later became a well-known author. He was a war veteran and wrote many books that were not exactly anti-war but against the glorification of war. He also wrote a best seller titled, Bad, or The Dumbing of America, about how, as a nation, we don’t read, can’t write, and don’t know anything. -------I turned in my first paper, and it came back covered with red ink. I was horrified, and I’m ashamed to say I threw it in the trash without reading it. I think Fussell may have felt my writing was worth correcting, but I didn’t see it at the time. I lost my chance to learn something from a great writer. -------I thought then, and for many years afterward, that to be a writer you had to be a special person with a special talent, and that YOU WOULD KNOW YOU HAD IT! Not so. -------In 1967, I became a Reference Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the best job in the world, and I worked there until I retired in 1999, and my wife and I moved to Eastham. -------As a librarian, I had to write guides, lectures, and web pages. I had a boss who was a good editor and helped me learn to write clearly. I wrote articles for library journals, including one in the 1970’s for the Journal of Library Technology with the title, “A computer in the Library.” Imagine that! You don’t get paid for this sort of writing. You put it on your resumé. The first writing I was paid for was a chapter in a reference book. I was paid $700, the same amount Edgar Rice Burroughs was paid for Tarzan, only it was worth a lot more in 1912. It was very hard work. I could have earned more with far less time and effort doing almost anything else. -------By 1985, my wife and I had read our four children all the neat stuff, Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, The Little House on the Prairie. Our fourth kid wanted more. He wanted stories at six in the morning. I’d always assumed that story-telling, like writing, took a special talent, one my father had and I didn’t. But my son insisted, so one morning I opened my mouth and said, “One day, George the Green Pig was sitting on his porch drinking coffee, when up the path came his friends the three mice, Albert, Charles, and Alexander.” For hundreds of mornings after that, I’d say those words and hear myself tell a story. He wanted more books, so we read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It took us a year to get through the four volumes. -------When we were finished, we tried to find something we liked as much as Tolkien, but we couldn’t. That’s when I first thought that if I could tell stories, maybe I could write them. I decided to write a sequel to the The Lord of the Rings. -------What I liked about the Rings wasn’t the wizards and the monsters but the strange countryside and the down-to-middle-earth hobbits, fond of mushrooms and gossip, and armed against evil with humor, kindness, and good sense. I couldn’t use hobbits, so I decided to use rats. I’d never heard of Redwall, and this was before the Rats of NIMH. The idea came to me from a Scientific American article that described rats as cooperative and highly intelligent, and also from once seeing some very large rats. I was with a bicycle group, camping in a bandstand at a waterfront park in Gloucester, Massachusetts. We wandered over to the water at dusk and looked down at the beach. "Hey,” someone said, “look at all the really big cats...!" The rats became my hobbits, characters that didn't need to be drawn in the detail humans required, but who could embody generosity and humor, intellectual curiosity, and respect for the natural world. -------I filled two notebooks with the Rats while riding my Philadelphia commuter train in the mid-1980's. Then I bought a computer. Every evening, my son read from the screen what I’d written that morning from 5 to 6 a.m. Like Scheherazade, I had to write five pages a day or explain why not. The story begins at Fort Hill in Eastham and jumps, with the help of poisoned mushrooms, into an alternate universe. -------When The Waterrats was finished in 1990, I sent letters and sample chapters to fifteen publishers before Scribner’s Books for Young Readers wrote back and asked to see the full manuscript. I was lucky. John Creasy, the great mystery writer, had 700 rejection letters before he sold a book. Scribner's kept The Watterrats for two months and then sent it back with the comment that I had created "an engrossing imaginary world,” but a 700 page rat epic was too long for them. They might be interested in something around 200 pages. -------I wrote Shadow Walkers in four months. My son was very helpful, especially when he convinced me the book was only half finished. I dedicated it to him and to the memory of my father. It takes place a few years before the action in The Waterrats. Peter, his sister Sara, and their friend Tom go on an adventurous trip from Eastham to Provincetown and back. I think of it as my Hobbit. -------Scribner’s bought it and paid me a generous advance. I realize now how very lucky I was. This is it. It’s out of print, and I don’t have many copies, but I’ll give this one to your library. -------Shadow Walkers got good reviews, but it wasn’t reviewed by the New York Times, which is bad news in the publishing world. It sold 2000 copies before it faded away. I wasn’t discouraged. It was a thrill to have a book published, and I wrote because I enjoyed it. I’ve written seven more novels since Shadow Walkers. I haven’t tried very hard to sell them. Writing is easy compared to selling. -------By 2003, I realized that this was a good thing; my books weren’t ready. I’d joined a writers’ group at the Chatham Library. It’s tough. You can bring only five pages and have to make copies for everyone. You can’t defend your work until it’s been torn apart. I’m slowly running three novels and some short stories past my new colleagues and learning a lot about writing. The sort of things I’m learning are: to write with greater clarity, to see things from the reader’s point of view, to find alternatives to a long series of is’s and was’s, to cut unnecessary text, to “show” not “tell”, and to use more dialogue. You never stop learning. -------I’m editing a sequel to Shadow Walkers, about the rats’ adventures in a big city, and a novel for adults based on my experiences in the Army in 1960. I’m rewriting a short novel in which the Green Pig and his friends travel to the Near East, and the pig explains modern science to the mice. I’m halfway through writing a fictional biography of my father, drawn from hundreds of his letters, and I’ve written 20 short stories, 6 of them about a retired gangster living on the Cape. I start early and write for three or four hours every morning. -------I hope someday I’ll have another novel, or a collection of short stories worth publishing. I’ll let you know. ------- |
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