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Publishing New Writers,

November, 2001 (no.211)

Editor Bruce L. Cook, P.O. Box 451, Dundee, IL 60118.  Fax (847) 428-8974.

If [you] can continue to send me more useful information of any sort pertaining to writing it would be greatly appreciated. Your March newsletter has already been of a good deal of help to me. 

Thank you

Dave Fox

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          Surveys of published writers have revealed that most of those who reach success in publishing do so only after years of effort.  The years before success finally arrives are often spent trying to support ourselves and our families while working in non-writing jobs.  Generally, this means that we have to somehow fit reading and writing into our daily lives and that can be challenging.

            I believe there are methods one can use to ensure that we succeed in writing to whatever degree we want.  I will offer some of these here.  Please don’t think my humorous approach means that I’m not serious about offering real help.  I’m deadly serious because I’ve had to face this struggle myself.  I just don’t want  to whine about it.

            First is the Flaubert Method:  Have a disease which prevents your holding a job but does not  completely disable or kill you.  Spend the latter part of your life in a single room with sealed windows, a single door, and rarely admit visitors.  This creates a kind of sensory deprivation which will enable you to remember in excruciating detail every person and event that occurred before your confinement.

It also gives you time for reading the work of others.  Write all that down, adding enough imaginative plot to make it into novels.  It helps if you can write your first book and get it banned in your own and several other countries.  This is free advertising.

            This sounds funny but versions of it actually exist and it actually works.  I don’t have a disabling disease, I have a sleep disorder: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.  I cannot sleep before 2:30 AM and yet always awake at 9:30 AM.  This guarantees that I won’t be showing up at the workplace anywhere near 8:00 AM.  

For years, I’ve worked afternoon jobs.  This gives me the first four or five hours of the day to devote to my writing.  Writing as soon as I awake has released my full creative potential, which before had been effectively blocked by the rush to work and on the job pressures. 

            I can now write a 3,000 word short story in eight hours.  I have written a 90,000 word novel in thirty-two days.  Just try telling me I’m crazy.

            Second is the Stephen King Method: Go for the jobs which are unpleasant and which offer no prestige and inadequate income.  Mr. King reports in his recent memoir that his early jobs after college were (A) working in an industrial laundry where he loaded sheets and table cloths “seething with maggots” into giant washing machines, (B) working as a back country English teacher while living and writing in a doublewide mobile home. 

            We’re talking really miserable and even desperate jobs, the kind that'll make writing in closets while you’re dopey with fatigue seem like a dream job.  This will also humble you by giving you a firsthand taste of the economic class system in the United States.  It will enable you to write stories about those who are poor and different from the mainstream population. You will write about people like the girl you knew in high school who wore the same clothes throughout the school year.  Your desperation will  inspire you to recreate that girl with powers that she will use to wreak fiery vengeance upon those classmates who tormented her.  You will send out your manuscript and not hear anything for several months. Then your publisher will call and inform you that  you are so rich that your knees buckle and you’ll sink to the cracked and peeling linoleum.

            The H.P. Lovecraft Method:  This is a variation on Flaubert’s method.  H. P. Lovecraft was not  a robust and outgoing type.  He is best known for his florid-lurid tales of ultra-dimensional gods like Cthulu who menaced mankind  from the other side of Space.   He published a couple dozen of these books, but that wasn’t his primary output as a writer.   His  social life was conducted via letter writing.  He constantly wrote letters to friends and acquaintances.   He died young, but in his brief lifespan he managed to write something like 120,000  personal letters. 

            Actually, I have little idea of how Howard found the time for all that writing, plus adequate reading. The point here is that he did find it and, with it, he found not only success as a writer but lasting fame and notoriety. 

            The Genius Method:  This may be the easiest path of all.  Simply be born with a humongous intellect.   You will inevitably be channeled through a first-rate education and go on to be something like a college professor  or lawyer.  You will be able to read at double the rate of ordinary mortals.   And your urge to write will impel you to write book after book, and many will have popular appeal.

            Examples of this include men like the late Isaac Asimov, who wrote over five hundred books and science fiction novels.  His IQ was 200+.   Asimov began as a Biology professor.   But lawyer John Grisham certainly qualifies too.  Anyone who can get through law school and achieve success in Law is no dummy.  Together, Grisham and Asimov illustrate another prime directive to writers: Write what you know and what you love.

            Put simply, the answer to the question of how to fit writing into your busy life is this:  You will find the time.  Everyone who’s ever felt the constant nagging, hopeful impulse to write has found the time to do it.  Everyone who's found relief, hope or insight from reading has found the time to read. The truth is, we’re addicted.  We can’t stay away from the pen and paper or keyboard and word processor for any length of time.   Stephen King wrote, “Art is the servant of life...”   I add that we are the servants to our Art.  Forever and ever, amen.