PERSPECTIVES

John Ritter explores ruins atop the fifth-century Lion Rock fortress, Sigiria Rock, Sri Lanka.

Writers Create Their Own Blueprint

No road to published author is the same, but most are paved with persistence, curiosity, affinity for reading and language, a thick skin. My upbringing and newspaper career headed me in the right direction. I had the freedom to commit to writing a novel. I don’t think in terms of creative talent. A writer has more or less of it than others; beyond that is speculation. For me it was more about putting in the work, grinding it out.

An accident of birth landed me in a family of book readers and respecters of the printed and spoken word, a middle-class, white-bread home where parents held kids to high standards, where meals were a teaching platform—state capitals, U.S. presidents, countries of the world, daily vocabulary word.

We moved around a lot: Kentucky, Texas, Wyoming, Southern California, annoying to a kid—out with old friends, in with new—but it broadened me. Along the way I acquired a reading bug—biographies, history, forgettable fiction—and a high-school English teacher who encouraged me. Under pressure to choose an undergrad major, I fell into my father’s profession, journalism, more out of indecision than any burning desire to right the world’s injustices. I read classic literature with the rest of the liberal arts crowd, not especially warming to it but seeing what good writing was.

Journalism school exposed me to an unforgettable editing professor, a game-changer whose booming baritone I hear to this day: “The verb, the verb, the finite verb!”  Somebody to give me direction, seed a process. My writing was pedestrian, the inverted pyramid’s who, what, when, where, why, along with windy college research papers.

I went east after graduation, worked at upstate New York newspapers. A journalist’s “reporting” and a novelist’s “research” aren’t much different: digging for information, interviewing, figuring out how stuff works, gaining a feel for human behavior, crafting a story. Novels are products of imagination but usually grounded in reality, the world, events. There’s worse preparation for fiction-writing than reporting.

I escaped cold New York winters and edited sports copy for a year in Phoenix. A pit stop before landing at start-up USA TODAY in Washington, where I spent three decades reporting and editing. One year a colleague and I were named Pulitzer Prize finalists in investigative reporting. I had influential editors, true of anybody who spends years in the business. I learned how to break out of newspaper writing’s staid format. I collaborated with my wife, a photographer, on a few magazine articles, getting a taste for the demands of longer-format writing.

My family moved to the Bay Area in 1997, and for the next ten years I traveled the coast and intermountain West covering stories of national interest to editors back east. Raising a family, enjoying California, I was plateauing as a reporter—confident of my skills, a good writer, not unhappy at the prospect of finishing my career doing what I was doing.

As digital media cut into print profits, newspapers began culling higher-earning staff. I took USA TODAY’s buyout offer and right away decided to have a go at a novel. My experience helped but the learning curve was steep. I had no formal training in fiction-writing, no workshops, classes, or mentoring on my resume. I narrowed my reading to top-drawer fiction, pulling titles from awards lists: Greene, Styron, Hemingway, Proulx, O’Hara, Conrad, Doctorow, Chabon, Garcia Marquez, Just, Mantel, and many others. I studied their writing, highlighted language and metaphors I admired, slowly switched mental gears away from deadline nonfiction.

I don’t remember the genesis of my first story idea, but I plunged in, naively, plotting it, researching it. I read how-to fiction-writing books: show don’t tell, build tension always, kill the clichés, surprise the reader, make characters’ lives worse. I’d read but didn’t believe that a writer’s first try at some symbolic device usually sucks. I came to believe it—along with Hemingway’s famous line: The first draft of anything is shit. 

    Reading mine after letting it sit awhile, I almost quit. I rewrote and revised,  handed it to a freelance editor an agent recommended. Turns out I hadn’t counted words; it was close to 300,000. (You read that right.) The editor liked the story, suggested breaking it into a trilogy. I took that advice and many other criticisms large and small, went back to work.

    I carved off a Book One, rewrote and revised, queried agents. Dozens of rejections later I almost quit again. Shelved the manuscript, took a break, dusted off the kernel of another idea I’d had for years, wrote a draft of a crime mystery, started devouring crime authors. Enlisted the same editor—who’d published his own first novel by then—absorbed his critique, revised and rewrote, queried again. Stopped this time at about thirty rejections, took a couple months off, had an epiphany of sorts: relax, stop trying to write this story like you think it should be written, write it like you want to write it. Throw out all the it’s-supposed-to-be-done-a-certain-way baggage. Go after it with my own distinctive voice, nebulous as that was. Have fun with it, be outrageous, push some norms. What did I have to lose?

    The effort earned me several dozen more rejections, one serious nibble, but no takers. Now, truly I thought I should quit, at least take a long sabbatical. I’d given it my best shot, known the odds going in. I couldn’t see grinding on with no success.

Two or three months after my last few queries, an email dropped in my inbox. TouchPoint Press was willing to take a chance. Disingenuous as it sounds, I don’t write for the money. I don’t expect to make much from Fatal Conceit. Gravy if I do. Getting published is about validation, proving to myself I could do it. More important, a lease to keep writing.

    I offer no profound-sounding advice to writers. I don’t pretend this drop in the sea of crime fiction is deep or revealing or singular. No pontificating about lessons learned. I have this unique experience of mine—that’s it. Tortured road? That of countless writers has been far more tortured. Countless writers have had it easier. I believe there’s no formula. What I can say is, to borrow a lyric from Ol’ Blue Eyes: “I did it my way.”