Just Keep Writing

People often ask how I came to write my first novel. My wife Anne and I had a little oil company caught up in the eighties oil bust. Angry creditors threw the company into involuntary bankruptcy on the day before Thanksgiving in 1983, soon tossing us as debtors-in-possession and appointing a trustee. What ensued in our lives was total chaos.

Anne was devastated and I was incensed. We had an IBM AT (one of the first personal computers) and a DOS-based word processing program called Framework. With self-righteous adrenaline coursing through my veins, I began writing a novel loosely based on our company’s bankruptcy.

That finished novel still resides in a box somewhere in my garage. Yes, I made all the freshman errors that a new writer experiences (bad plot, skewed point of view, too much description, screwball dialogue, etc.) but I learned one thing for sure - I love to write. I began checking books about writing out of the library and I began haunting local writer’s gatherings (you may remember my story about attending a romance writer’s conference).

I also learned that there are more new books published every year than there are readers to read all of them, and since a writer only makes a buck or so for every volume they sell, there’s often little profit in the endeavor unless you are John Grisham or Clive Cussler.

With that in mind, here is my advice to every one of you that thinks you have a book lodged deep within you. First, find the motivation and then write it as fast as you can. That’s right, don’t edit a thing, just regurgitate it, and get it on paper (or in a computer file) as quickly as you possibly can.

Don’t even start if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Don’t do it for the money, but because you love the tactile feel of a pen or pencil in your hand, and adore the mental vision of blue ink forming beautiful patterns on a blank sheet of paper.

Do it because you love creating fantastical worlds and plots, and because there’s a story in your head that needs extracting before your brain bursts from the pressure, and above all keep writing, even if your own mother laughs when she reads your magnum opus.

Gondwana Press