Theft of Swords (The Riyria Revelations #1-2)

I was really young, no more than seven or eight, and a friend and I were playing hide-and-seek, and I found a typewriter in his basement. It was a huge black metal upright with small round keys. I completely forgot about the game and loaded a sheet of paper. I swear, the very first thing I wrote was: “It was a dark and stormy night, and a shot rang out.” I thought I was a genius.

When my friend found me, he was clearly oblivious to the value of the discovery I had made. He wanted to go outside and do something fun. I thought about explaining to him that I couldn’t imagine anything that could be more fun than what I was doing. I looked at the blank page and wondered what might come next: Was it a murder mystery? A horror story? I wanted to find out; I wanted to fill the page; I wanted to see where the little keys would take me.

We ended up going alley-picking until my mother called me for dinner. Alley-picking was the art of walking down the alley between the houses and seeing if there was anything cool being thrown away that we could take for ourselves. I had hoped that someone was throwing away a typewriter—no one was, and I went to bed that night thinking about that typewriter, thinking about that page and that first sentence.

What made you start writing? Were you a big reader? Did you ever add to that first sentence?

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I hated reading in my youth. The first novel I tried was a book called Big Red, which was about a boy and his dog. I was on my way to my sister’s farm and would have nothing to do for four hours. This was before DSs, DVDs, VCRs—before all the entertainment acronyms. It was also before Sirius, and I knew that twenty minutes after we left Detroit there would be nothing but static on the radio—hence the reason for the book. I finished it out of a sense of perseverance rather than enjoyment. When I was forty I wanted to be able to say, “Yes! I read a book once! It was excruciating, and took half a year, but by god, I did it!” Then whomever I was speaking to would look upon me with awe and know they were in the presence of a learned man. The reality was, the book was boring and put me to sleep.

Then I read Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I loved them in a way I never dreamed it was possible to love a book. When I closed the last page of The Return of the King, I was miserable. My favorite pastime was over. As I mentioned before, this was before all those letters, before Xboxes and PS 2s and 3s, back when television had only three stations and cartoons were something shown only on Saturday morning. I went to the bookstore with my brother looking for another series like that one and was dismayed to come up empty.

There was nothing to read. I sat in my room, miserable. I made the mistake of telling my mother I was bored and she put me to work cleaning the front closet. I pulled out what looked like a plastic suitcase.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“That? That’s your sister’s old typewriter. Been in there for years.”

I never finished cleaning the closet.

Can you tell us about your background in writing? Where did you go to college? Do you have an MFA?

Usually this question comes from aspiring writers, and they always look disappointed when I tell them the answer: I never took a class in writing or English, beyond those required in high school. I never read a book on creative fiction. I never went to a seminar or a writers’ conference. And I didn’t attend my first writers’ group until after I had published my first book. What I know about writing I taught myself.

My family didn’t have the money to help me pay for college. My father, a crane operator at Great Lake Steel, died when I was nine, and after that my mother paid the bills with the money she made as a gift wrapper for Hudson’s department store and my social security checks (that stopped coming when I turned eighteen). Still, I was pretty good at art and received a scholarship to the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, but it ran out just after my first year. I did manage to land a job as an illustrator/keyliner, though. Then kids came along and my wife made more money, so I stayed home. I was twenty-three.

By this time we had moved to the remote northern corner of Vermont, literally over a thousand miles away from everyone we knew. I had lots of time on my hands, particularly when our daughter was taking naps and the idea of trying to write a publishable book rose to the top of my consciousness. I was teaching myself to write by reading books. I went to the local general store (yes, just like in Green Acres) and looked for the books with the golden seal indicating they were Nobel or Pulitzer Prize winners. These were not the books I would normally choose to read. At the time, I was into Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, and Frank Herbert, but I was trying to learn—so I figured I should learn from the best, right? I purposely forced myself to read widely, especially the stuff I did not like. They were the ones that always won the awards, the abysmally boring novels with paper-thin plots and elaborate prose.

I would pick a particular author, read several books by them, and then write a novel using what I had gleaned from reading their books. I didn’t just write a short story—I wrote whole novels, then rinsed and repeated with the next author. I found something in each writer’s style, or technique, that I could appreciate, and worked at teaching myself how to do what they did. In a way, I was like Silar from the television series Heroes, where I stole powers from other authors and added them to my toolbox. From Steinbeck I learned the transporting value of vivid setting descriptions. From Updike I found an appreciation for indirect prose that could more aptly describe something by not describing it. From Hemingway I discovered an economy for words. From King, his ability to get viscerally into the minds of his characters … and so on. In addition, I wrote in various genres: mystery, science fiction, horror, coming-of-age, literary fiction—anything and everything. I did this for ten years.

My writing improved with each novel. I finally wrote what I thought was something worthy of publishing and spent maybe a year and a half trying to get an agent before I finally gave up. Ten years and untold thousands of hours is a long time to work at something and achieve at least what I thought at the time to be nothing. Ten years, ten books, a ton of rejections, and not a single reader. It was time to give up this pipe dream.

So how did you “get back on the horse” as it were? What got you to start writing again?