About

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary has twenty two entries for the verb “write” and another seven for the noun “writer” specifically; but, there are really only a few definitions that are relevant here:

write
–verb (used with object)  

I can assure you that line items 13, 14 and 16 are especially relavant to this little exercise. I daresay it’s the WHY of “why am I doing this?” But, it doesn’t QUITE hit the nail on the head… 

writ⋅er
–noun  

Ah, and there we have it. Definition one, “as an occupation or profession.” That’s it. That’s the one.

I have, for most of my life, been associated with the profession of writing; either by family association or by my own personal endeavors. When I was six years old, my mom joined a local writers club in Vancouver Washington. Not because she wanted to be a writer, but because a friend of her’s told her it was the best way to meet other women who enjoyed romance novels, and to find out about new things coming out before they “hit the shelves.”

Joining the club had one simple stipulation, you had to write a synopsis and three chapters and send them off to a publisher; i.e. making you a “real” author-in-waiting. So my mom did. She had no great love of the synopsis, nor any expectation of being accepted, she just needed the rejection letter to keep up her membership for another year. On the advice of a friend she started with her favorite publisher (Pocket Books) and sent it all off to the slushpile. Three months later it came back with a two-book contract offer.

She went on to publish more than twenty novels over the next two decades. She traveled to conventions and trade shows and book signings around the country. She won awards and had genre bestsellers. She got fan-mail from around the globe. She was cool.

I also thought she was unique. I didn’t think that writing was really a talent, more like a random freak-of-nature accident that caused random individuals to have an ability to put thoughts and words into an interesting sequence. And I perceived it as a truly rare talent. I NEVER met another author except through my association with my mom. But my mom certainly met hundreds upon hundreds of people that wanted to be authors but didn’t have the innate spark; that inborn random freak-of-nature accident that turned prose into writing.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden once said “Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.” I had met many people who could cobble together a plot, I had met very few who could tell a story. But, boy-howdy, let me tell you that there were a LOT of people who thought they could. On average I’d say my mom saw a hundred writing “samples” a year from people who wanted some advice on how to “break into the business” from someone who had already fooled the gatekeepers and was too nice to just say “no.”

I listened as my mom perfected the art of saying “it’s a good start, every draft brings you one step closer to having a finished manuscript.” Which was a nice way of never actually telling people “you have a dismal grasp of simple grammar, you haven’t a clue what mood, tense or voice you are writing in, and re-using your favorite descriptive adjective (yes, singular, as in “always the same one”) in every paragraph is probably not going to give your writing a good overall sense of flow.”

I knew what she wanted to say because when it came to her own children, she was a pretty uncompromising editor. When I was ten years old, my mother would hack through my writing with a red pen like the most ruthless of copy-editors; a trait that pretty much never wavered until long after I’d moved out of my parents house. I still have drafts of my ninth grade English papers that look like someone massacred a dictionary and used my hard fought efforts to tidy up the crime scene.

It didn’t help that my spelling was attrocious atroscios atroscious really bad.

All that editing, all that coaching, all that extra practice and those raised expectations, it all helped me learn to write better prose. But, perfect prose does not a story make.

When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, old enough to grasp what the effort entailed, I wrote a novel. 56,533 words over twelve chapters, to be precise. It was a gary-stu wish-fulfillment pile of dreck that stole liberally from Star Wars and The Labyrinth, but I was inordinately proud of it. I remember gathering the whole stack of pages together and asking my mom to read the first chapter. She said the most horrifying thing possible, “it’s a good start, every draft brings you one step closer to having a finished manuscript.”

I knew in that terrible moment the honest truth, it sucked and no amount of reworking could possibly rescue it from the heinous pit of sub-mediocrity it had been born from and would ultimately languish in for all time.

I was crushed. I knew in that moment that I did not have “the gift.”

A smart person would STOP writing at that point, at least as an exercise of professional interest or personal entertainment. As far as professional interest goes, I can honestly say that I didn’t give another thought to writing “for money” again for nearly a decade. As for personal entertainment, well…I simply couldn’t help myself. I discovered that the ideas for stories came unbidden. Constantly. And until I wrote them down and worked them out they plagued me incessantly. It became a situation where it was either write it down and get it out of my head, or risk bursting from the very seams of my existence.

It became my secret vice. I would write when I could steal a moment from my job, or my spouse, or whatever it was that I thought I SHOULD be doing with my time. I felt like I had no right to the ideas, I wasn’t good enough for them. I felt like a thief sneaking in and touching treasures I was never meant to hold.

In high school I had an English teacher explain why students don’t write masterpieces with a quote that said “you cannot truly write about life until you have gone out and lived it first.” (I have searched all over the internet for the source of that quote to no avail, so until then, it’s attributed to Becky Becker of Gem State Academy in the early 90’s.)

I grew up, I lived life, and along the way I discovered that life had started seeping into the things I wrote. A little at first, a touch here and there; and over time, the more I wrote, the more life seemed to breathe into the prose I couldn’t contain.

And now I’ve come full circle. I’m realize that “the gift” isn’t some magical bolt that falls out of the sky by some accident of genetics; it’s just time and effort and developing an ear for what works when your inner monologue is dictating.

The other thing one has to do to develop as a writer is actually spend time writing, and then putting what you’ve written out there to be read. And that’s what this site is going to be about: about what it takes to write, helpful links to great things OTHERS have posted about writing, reviews and exampls of great writing, and actual examples of what I’m writing…for better or for worse. Some things are going to suck. Some things will be “a good draft”. And some, a small few, might actually just have a hint of “the gift” about them.

Only time will tell.