The Journey Begins

A few years ago my friend Jill asked me to collaborate on a book for NaNoWriMo. Jill is kind of amazing. Funny. Clever. Knows more about writing than I’ll ever know. I was so clearly out of my league. I’m sure she’s blushing as these words seep out into the aether, but she’ll just have to accept these truths.

I didn’t want to embarrass myself so I decided I had to learn how to write. By writing, I don’t just mean putting words in an order that the reader understands. As a scientist, I’ve had to write grants to convince a stingy National Institutes of Health to fund my research. I’ve written research articles, book chapters and reviews. So I know how to write. 

What I didn’t know was how to create a world with characters I care about. Characters whose story fascinated me. Notice I said, “characters I care about,” and not characters that would appeal to a reader. Stephen King writes, “...write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.” 

That I’m quoting from Stephen King’s book, On Writing, hints at my path to learning how to tell a story. I turned to the advice of other writers. Notice that I said “other writers”. I now think of myself as a writer.

As I studied, I was led to agree with this from Stephen King. “This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.”

This is a hard line for King. I would be more charitable. Other author’s insights and advice about writing is often simultaneously sagacious and bullshit. If it doesn’t resonate with your tastes, your working style, your world view, then it’s bullshit. When I hear Brandon Sanderson describe his process, I think bullshit. Not because he’s incorrect, but because I can’t write with that level of preplanning. 

I appreciated King's book because it was more descriptive than prescriptive. That’s not to say that King’s description of his process is so idiosyncratic that it misses universal truths. Here’s one that resonated with me.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

King’s writing philosophy and process also resonates with me.

• I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

• You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible.

But don’t think that King avoids giving his students useful prescriptive rules of thumb.

• …that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. 

• “That’s so cool” should have to stand in the corner and that those using the far more odious phrases “at this point in time” and “at the end of the day” should be sent to bed without supper (or writing-paper, for that matter)

• The adverb is not your friend.

• The best form of dialogue attribution is said…

To be sure, reading about writing is fascinating but in no way did it make me a writer. Only writing can do that. And write we did. In the month of November Jill and I created a sixty-thousand word story with characters we love. Was it good enough to publish? After fourteen drafts it is. Some of the first draft survived the process but much of it didn’t. Eyes of the Sentinel will be published sometime in the fall of 2026. More on that journey later.