Organizing the chaos in your mind!

I always get a kick when somebody tells me: ‘I’ve often thought about writing a book.

I don’t discourage them, I’m pleased that they think so highly of my craft that they want to do it, too.

BUT…would you expect somebody to work on a car without tools? Or, what does a young girl’s face look like when she puts on make up with no instruction, no help, and has never done it before?

The car won’t run and the girl’s face will look like her younger sister scribbled on it with a crayon.

Writing seems simple, we all do it in school, but on this page I’m going to tell you about the things I did to become a writer. I hope it encourages and inspires you, or at least stops you from wasting your time.

EXERCISES

I read the dictionary. Good book, but terrible plot. It took me two years, doing a couple of pages a day. I actually wrote down all the words I didn’t understand. I ended up with over two hundred pages. I still have that book somewhere. I should put it up for free download. It is quite humbling to see all the words that you don’t understand. And this doesn’t include scientific terms, or slang.

I wrote a book a 50,000 word book in two days. It wasn’t very good, and I threw it away. But over the years I’ve done that three or four times, and some of them are pretty good.

Instead of reading a bunch of books on writing, I searched out books on editing. Told me a lot more about writing, and how to understand and connect with editors.

I taught myself Latin. I wanted to understand not just what words mean, but their roots. I wanted to understand the concept behind the symbol that a word is. I found this absolutely fascinating.

One day I was at the Getty in Los Angeles, the one on the hill above the 405. They had an exhibit of religions tomes written in the middle ages. I was shocked and delighted when I found that I actually read them.

I learned from a Latin program on my computer until the disk stopped working. I haven’t looked at Latin in years, probably can’t understand it anymore, but I have a profound grasp of concepts when it comes to words. Oddly, one of the abilities I picked up from this is when I need a word, and I don’t know it, it appears in my mind. Just pops in, I look it up and, sure enough, it’s the word I need.

Defined the parts of speech as studies in motion. A noun is, a verb is motion, a preposition is a location, and so on.

Defined punctuation as emotion.

And I did other things, a lot of other things.

I didn’t bother with school because they wanted me to study things like Moby Dick and Romeo & Juliet, which do not educate one as to how to write. Instead, I analyzed books by people like Lee Childs, John Sandford, Bernard Cornwell. I wanted to know how to write books in the modern fashion, not dissect dead people who might be great, but only for the effete snobs coming out of college, and who all to often become agents and editors.

This was a bit of a mistake, it turned out, because it’s those effete snobs who end up buying manuscripts.

And, a hint, I might refer to people in the publishing business in a raw manner, but don’t you. If you are a writer they are your first audience, and you’re going to have to find the middle ground between commercial, and what the people in the publishing business think they want.