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?
It was years later; we had left Vermont and were living in North Carolina. The kids were old enough for day care and I went back into advertising. I had been a one-man band running an advertising department at a software company, and then I left that to create my own advertising agency, where I was the creative director. As to writing novels, I had vowed never to write another creative word.