Becoming a good writer requires three characteristics that are common to every successful person: (1) an early love of what you do, (2) training in your area, (3) and practice, practice, practice.
I was very fortunate in the parents that I had. My mother and father were exemplars of hard work and expected the same of their children (we all did work hard). Mother believed in reading and read to us early and often and then had us read early and often. She also encouraged other artistic endeavors like music and art. My sister and I had piano and art lessons and participated in theater.
Once my older sister went to school to begin her formal education, whenever she returned from school, I would grab her books and try to learn what she was learning. When I was three, my five-year-old sister challenged me to a story-telling duel. She wrote a story. I wrote a poem about people who lived under the earth and tried to draw the people above the earth into their subterranean world. We traded papers, read each other’s story, and my sister said, “You win!”
In elementary and middle school, my stories or poems were the ones the teacher chose to read aloud to the rest of the class. Among other children I was known as a storyteller, and in a gathering other children would request that I tell a story, so I would weave a dream for them that kept them rapt in the narrative. When my father retired from the military, he went to college to become a teacher. He knew I was a voracious reader and writer, so when he was assigned to read Light in August by William Faulkner and became stumped by the intricate narrative, he recruited me to read it and explain it to him. So a fourteen-year-old boy had to explain to his father the incest and miscegenation of Faulkner’s tangled tale.
High school was a little different. My family moved to Florida and I was put into an average track, but my English teacher soon noticed that I was the only one reading all the assignments, including the romantic poets and Addison and Steele. The next year, I was in the advanced track, but even there I was ahead of everyone else. I remember one assignment was to read the first 40 pages of Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. When the teacher began the discussion, no one else was responding, so she went around the class and asked how much each student had read. The largest amount was 10 pages . . . until she got to me. I said, “A hundred pages.” The rest of the class moaned.
College was similar. I enjoyed learning and didn’t declare a major until my advisor called me in to tell me I had to choose one. “What do you like to do?” he asked. “Read and write,” I replied. I became an English major. I continued to read and study more than other students. In an Introduction to Literature course, we had to read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I did, but I also read four other novels by Faulkner, although they had not been assigned. I finished my B.A. at FSU. Later I got an M.A. from FAU—my thesis involved a comparison of (whom else?) Faulkner and Alan Paton, a South African Writer.
I wrote my first novel between 19 and 21. I still have that manuscript written on yellow typing paper on a manual typewriter. From time to time, I had agents, but none of my novels (I had written ten manuscripts by the time I was 32) were ever picked up by a publisher although the rejections were often complimentary with a “good luck” added. I read an interesting quote just this week: “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours” (Halpern). I could write a good novel in six to nine months, working four to six hours a day. I was also writing poetry and short stories and essays. One novel ate up a thousand hours, so by 32 I had put in my ten thousand hours. I had published articles and poetry (some of which won awards).
For ten years, I worked as a technical writer and proofreader for an insurance company. When they laid me off, I took up writing mysteries. As a young man, I had enjoyed mysteries and science fiction and had read hundreds of such novels. Suddenly, such ideas were in my head again. Now I have a publisher and have written eight mysteries (half a dozen more are at various stages of completion) and two science fiction novels (three more are planned for the series). I’ve also written one literary novel and books of poetry and short stories. I was a writer from a very early age, I studied writing and read a lot of it, and I practiced, practiced, practiced. Any hard worker can do the same in any field he or she chooses.
Jerry C. Blanton
Work Cited
Halpern, Sue. "Making It." The New York Review of Books 28 May 2009: 8-12.
