My mother had thousands of paperbacks and she would write inside the front cover when she read them. Some of her books were 20 or 30 years old and she read a half a dozen times or more. I do that as well, it’s like keeping touch with an old friend, checking up on them every few years.
I write for fun and my own edification mostly, I’ve never wanted to write “the great American novel” just stories that people could enjoy, what they used to call a “beach read” which I guess was supposed to be kind of an insult that you were reading something for fun instead of something more serious like an encyclopedia I guess. Well folks, I’d be more than happy to see somebody lying on the beach enjoying my writing anytime, life is too serious anyway.
My first attempt at writing was just horrible, stilted characters in cliche situations and I threw it away after the first chapter.
I don’t know what changed in my writing exactly except I started listening to my characters. When you give a character life they develop a personality of their own and you just need to listen to them and become the narrator. My book “Texas Toast” for example started with the ending, my first vision was a faceoff at the end of the book between the characters and the line; “you’re toast, Texas toast.” I kind of wrote the book backwards from there. It was fun, characters seemed to appear when I needed them and I wrote most of the book sitting on the couch with my laptop, the TV blaring and me not even noticing.
I always give credit to my mother for my love of books and writing. As a kid every Saturday we went to the Concord library which was a small town in Michigan. They usually limited you to three books a visit but the librarian let us take as many as we could carry. I remember in 7th or 8th grade the English teacher giving extra credit for every book you read and being kind of embarrassed because other kids were reading a book every couple of weeks and I was reading two every day. I didn’t start writing much until college when I bought a typewriter, I’ve never liked writing with a pen and a pencil, too slow and my handwriting is bad anyway. I remember taking a creative writing course and typing the first draft of a story then going back to type the final draft and being thrilled I only had a few spots needing white out. For those of you who don’t know, white out was called “correction fluid” and you painted it over your mistakes, blew on it to help it dry and then typed over it. Not sorry to see that stuff go. One thing I learned from that course was that you really shouldn’t kill off your main character, I mean that kind of ends your book series, right?
Introduce your brand
Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point. If you sell something, use this space to describe it in detail and tell us why we should make a purchase. Tap into your creativity. You’ve got this.
