Flights of Fancy

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends… Yeah, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Good stuff. Today I’m going to get into what was a magical decade for yours truly, the 1990s. Why? Pull up a chair…

Throughout the decades before this, there is a pattern: I want to be a writer, but I don’t know what I’m doing. But right around 1990, I discover the world of how-to-write-books books. Unbeknownst to me, there has always been a whole library of works by successful authors, marginal authors, professors, and unfortunately, scammers even back then, all writing books about how to structure a story, create the characters who will inhabit it, and bring it to life. Wow, that’s a pretty long sentence, something most all of the professionals warn against, but I think we’ve established that I was always a pretty rebellious student.

The difficulty I encountered was with the books I chose. One would concentrate on characters, another on plot, yet another on setting, and so on, and I lacked the experience to read all these separate treatises and bring them together. Notwithstanding all that, in 1996 I finished my first manuscript, a modern fantasy called Temple of Exile. I pantsed it, which, for those unfamiliar, means wrote “by the seat of my pants.” i.e., I had no outline and no idea what I was trying to accomplish. I just sat down and started writing. My problem, looking back on it, was that I never saw a dog run or rabbit hole that I could resist exploring. It was a rambling 140,000-word mess that might have been good at 80,000. Trust me, it will never see the light of day, but I had finished a novel, and sparked by that accomplishment, I never looked back.

So, what had changed in my life to make me able to follow a project to completion? I’ve given a lot of thought to that, and what I’ve come up with is that the distractions fell away. First, in 1991, I got a job as an inspector. As opposed to my 9-to-5 clerical position, this one was around the clock, seven days a week, morning, noon, or night, and a fair bit of it was “hurry up and wait.” Well, I didn’t just sit staring into space while I waited. I carried my notes around with me and wrote copy in longhand for transcription later. in 1994, my sons turned eighteen and left school. They still believed that my name, Jack, was short for jackass, but I made it clear that if they had a run-in with the law or a rival gang, don’t call me. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but without authority figures constantly taking me to task over their nonsense, a good part of my mind was freed up to deal with fictional drama. In 1996, my wife was able to take an early retirement, thanks to my new higher-paying position, and her sensitivity to unreasonable bosses had always kept me on edge. Now that was gone as well.

And the last big factor of the nineties was that in 1998, the Science Fiction Book Club offered, as the selection of the month, The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing by Evan Marshall, a high-powered New York agent who knew what quality writing looked like. I never figured out why the Sci-Fi Book Club thought that was a good fit, but it sure got me focused. Marshall offered a highly disciplined approach to writing in which you decided what sort of story you were going to tell, what characters were going to be in it, how many scenes each of them would have, and what actions they were going to take to drive the story before you ever wrote Once Upon a Time.

I’m not going to get into the great “Plotter vs. Pantser” wars, the writing world’s equivalent of the Hatfields and McCoys. I know plenty of writers who just pick up a pen and start writing. They write great stories, and I envy them for their ability to do it that way, but it doesn’t work for me. I need that discipline, and if I don’t get it, my writing is guided by the phrase, “Ooh, look, a bunny!”

So, thank you, Evan Marshall. I never became the Great Writer I thought I was going to be when I started out, but I’ve published a few books and stories that have sometimes made enough during a given month to cover my internet bill, and much more importantly, earned me dozens of friends in the writing community who have afforded me countless hours of pleasant discussion; I hope I’ve done the same for them!

Next week I think I’m going to cover the 2000s all in one piece because this minutiae isn’t necessary to recount the last quarter-century, and once I get on the other side of this background stuff, I can get into the meat of what I started this blog for, the writing. Get ready for some smooth sailing, and then we can get serious. See you next week? No, see you next week!