This week I turned the big FIVE-OH. Alas, I am now sliding down a short slope to senior citizenship. Please forgive me, then as I share a few thoughts about my writing journey thus far. Philosophers and historians say that you can never really know where you stand now unless you see the road you've traveled to get there. Here is a bit about my road.
I was always a scribbler, and ended up being the editor of my high school paper – that is Junction City High School back in Oregon in the ancient days of 1978. Somehow I parleyed that position into getting my first paid writing gig: being a high school sports stringer for a local newspaper. Before long I had a full time writing assignment covering local city government and doing business profiles for a local weekly newspaper. In no time I was writing feature pieces for some regional sports mags and a couple of local farming publications.
I thought I had reached a new level when I had a 1,200 essay published in Writers Digest, which I had sent in on spec way back in 1980. It was a new experience for me, breaking into a national publication. The experience was also telling. Jim Brohaugh was the editor, and we ended up doing several rewrites to the piece before he was satisfied with it. I was frustrated at times, not used to having to seriously rewrite anything I wrote. When I sent off the final version I nervously waited for a reply, having talked myself into thinking it wasn’t good enough. “I think it shines,” Jim wrote back. It was a $120 check I received, and I thought I had made it.
Well, I hadn’t made it. Life got into the way with the horrible economy of the early 80s and I found myself out of a newspaper job and with no prospects. Desperate to find a source of income to support my new family I joined the Army, and writing took a long detour.
But I learned many lessons in those early days. Perhaps the most important lesson was simply how to write under deadline. While interviewing someone, or attending a council meeting, I would already be thinking of parts of the story as pieces to a puzzle I could move about in my head. By the time I’d sit at my typewriter – in those pre-computer days – the story was already written. I simply needed to put on paper what was already in my buzzing in my brain.
Even today, I have an ability to find information and quickly organize it in my mind into a working structure. It is even faster with today’s software options. Better, now that I am starting a transition from strictly nonfiction to more fiction writing, I find the story, and the characters, are already well developed in my head, clamoring to get out.
Another lesson I learned is that it takes a lot of writing to become a better writer. When I was 17 on until I reached the age of 23 I wrote, a lot, everyday. I was paid by the inch of published copy. I needed a lot of copy to pay my bills. It had to be good copy, because the editor would cut anything that didn’t make the grade. Quality and quantity was the formula. I’d estimate that in those four years alone I wrote over one million words.
Now, I am not a great writer, I know this. I’ll never have the voice of a Faulkner. But the good news is that if you do anything often enough, diligently enough, you eventually get better at it. Business management theory says that it takes 3,000 hours of doing a job before you really become good at it. Those early years gave me the time to put in those hours, to write those words, so the process of writing is much cleaner and efficient now.
In my next post, I think I’ll talk about some of my experiences learning to grow into that new phenomena, the Internet.
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