A Craftsman on His
Trade
Mark Twain was fond of telling a story about the process by which boys mature into
men. To paraphrase the old curmudgeon, he said, "At sixteen I believed my father to
be one of the most ignorant men in the world. At twenty-one I was amazed to see how smart
he’d become in five short years."
Perhaps the story is apocryphal. But it nonetheless strikes a parallel with the way in
which writers mature at their trade. Certainly it typifies how I finally wised up to what
the craft of writing is all about. The path I took might be characterized as the
long-way-round.
All my life I wanted to be a writer. In1969, I decided it was "now or never."
I sold everything I owned and quit my job. A week later I moved into a cabin located in a
remote stretch of mountains. While I had worked as a journalist, I had no formal training
in writing fiction. Nor had I ever read a book on the craft of writing. What I had instead
was determination and a rough degree of talent. I gave myself a year to write a salable
novel.
Three years later I was still an "unpublished author." I had written four
novels, none of which found a publisher. Hard at work on the fifth novel, I was convinced
my writing showed improvement with each effort. Odd jobs kept food on the table and I
continued to hammer away at the typewriter. Then, within a period of ten days, my agent
sold the fourth and fifth novels. The latter was purchased on the basis of a
half-completed manuscript.
There’s nothing extraordinary in my personal tale. Lots of writers have endured
hard times along the road to being published. Yet there is a tale to be told in what
happened afterward. In some ways it is a precautionary tale, for it happens to many
beginning writers. The central point, however, relates to the way a writer matures at his
trade. Some learn faster than others.
When I began writing in 1969, I was all too aware that I knew nothing about crafting a
novel. By 1973, when I’d had four novels published, I was convinced that I knew
virtually all there was to know about writing. The belief was strengthened by the fact
that no editor had ever asked for revisions on any of the books.
By 1974, with six books published, I had convinced myself that I was the next Faulkner.
I saw my work as literature—literature in the sense that it was art. Some writers
will recall I wrote articles in journals drawing unfavorable comparisons between genre
fiction and literature. To put it charitably, I took myself very seriously indeed.
Then I got lucky. In 1975, I found a mentor by the name of Jerrold Mundis. A superb
writer, Mundis has received critical acclaim for his works of literature. Under a
pseudonym, he also realized considerable success in writing commercial novels. Mundis did
me the great favor of editing every sentence of two books, after they had been published.
Once you’ve seen your own work –in book form—treated to the red pencil, you
learn the true meaning of angst. It was a humbling experience.
By the end of 1975, I realized I was not all that brilliant of a writer. Even though
I’d had eight novels published at this point, it became apparent that I had a good
deal to learn about my craft. In effect, Mundis had employed a variation of shock
treatment, and it worked. I was receptive, at last, to a long overdue message. A message
that led me to the Guidelines to Good
Writing.
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