When Hazel asked Aaron Neville if he taught
himself to yodel, he said, "No, I just did it."
Brew just wrote
his first nine novels, but after that he taught himself. He experimented. He practiced.
A. J. Libeling writes about the myth of the natural, the athlete who can do something
at tournament-class level without learning how.
You have to learn how, through
trial and error.
Some people-athletes-have coaches, who can streamline the
process.
Artists usually don't have a coach, or a mentor, although they will
have older examples they respect and follow. Learn from. By studying them, privately.
And of course they learn from their own mistakes.
Now writing has been professionalized.
You can get a masters degree in creative writing.
Indeed, you are expected
to specialize, early, and concentrate on poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction.
This is because of the realities of the marketplace. You must brand yourself, and
it's easier to do if you stick to one category, or genre.
Until your brand
is established, your publisher won't publish anything you write outside your specialty,
and you'd be foolish to write anything you can't publish.
John D. MacDonald
wrote a nonfiction book, about a crime, and a trial, but it didn't do as well as
his mysteries.
Stephen King wrote On Writing, but he was an acknowledged
master by the time he wrote that, and a how-to book by an acknowledged master is
a logical extension of the franchise.
Old Folks combined genres in the same
book. He invented a new genre, daily typewriting. It suited itself to his conditions
of production, namely working full-time at a stultifying job and writing nights and
weekends, publishing short pieces in little magazines that pay in copies and on the
worldwide web, which you pay to do yourself.
The better he did this the more
it satisfied him, and his coterie of steadfast readers, nerds, bookworms, the self-taught,
the unschooled, but the harder it made it for him to find a conventional publisher
for his work.
What were they going to do-take something off his web site
and publish it, as is? Take something from a little magazine that would go defunct
with the next issue? Take a story here-not even a story: a prose vignette-a poem
there, a review, an essay, or a letter? Vignettes and feuilletons?
What bin would they put it in?
Put it in the Old Folks bin. Old Folks was
his own genre.
Daily typewriting, c'est moi.
Three books which
influenced Old Folks when he was starting out were Norman Mailer's Advertisements
for Myself, Kurt Vonnegut's Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, and Mario
Puzo's The Godfather Papers. Each contained occasional writings, or miscellanea.
I guess Old Folks writes miscellanies.
A publisher might publish a miscellany
by one of its established authors, as a favor, a professional courtesy, but such
collections don't sell well, and they certainly wouldn't do it for a newcomer, or
publish a series of such books.
They were books only in length, not in their
design.
Well, before Old Folks, that was true.
But Old Folks designed
his books that way.
Christ, they had an outline.
You could see the
structure taking shape.
Sometimes he would outline a book before he wrote
it, sometimes only afterwards. But it had an outline. A form.
A subject.
If it had a title, that's what it was about.
What was Why Are We in Vietnam?
about? Bear hunting in Alaska.
Was The Executioner's Song fiction
or nonfiction?
If a book was about a poet, or by a poet, it would have poems
in it--would it not?
If it was about or by a miscellany writer it would jump
around in genres. Wouldn't it?
I didn't plan to do it this way, I just did
it. And this is what resulted.
But I liked what happened, and kept doing
it.
Now, here I am.
Doing it.