Becoming a Writer

How to Become a Writer

People often ask me how to become a writer.  I don’t know. 

I do know is how I became one.  So, this is my story peppered throughout with my advice

 

By Keith Drury

 

If you really are serious about becoming a writer this “emerging story” addresses the questions people often ask who seek to get published.  It does it by autobiographically telling my own story and seldom instructs or preaches directly.  It will (when finished) answer a common question I get—“How can I break into writing a book.”  But a few warnings first: It is too personal: I am usually uncomfortable giving away so much personal information online, but in this case it is perhaps the best way to accomplish the purpose. It is rough. It doesn’t even reach up to “journalism, let along “writing.”  It is not a polished work and the copy following is only a second draft and thus ignores its own advice at times.  In editing this second draft I see it as a wonderful example of taking twenty words to say three—thus it is more BLOG-like than an example of good writing.

 

Having made those excuses—here is the first half:

 

 

Childhood reading

I might never have become a writer if my father hadn’t sold our TV.  My parents were “early adopters” of television.  In 1952 my uncle Hobart, a wealthy executive with U.S. Steel, bought our family a television to help my parents “provide an enriched environment” for their favorite nephew—me.  It was a  great gift and I immediately became hooked to Howdy Doody.   But the TV was trouble for my dad’s ministerial career.  It put him on the liberal edge of our denomination.  It created a furor among some of the conservative pastors in Western Pennsylvania where he served my denomination as a District Superintendent.  They referred to the antenna on our roof as “devil’s ears” and organized an active resistance effort against their DS who was “getting liberal.”

 

My father was a master of the “strategic retreat.”   He seldom stayed and fought and never encouraged his pastors to, either.  When trouble began he usually just left.  My dad attempted to befriend his opposition but they wouldn’t hear of it.  Then he simply ignored them until their movement grew large enough to make his life uncomfortable—to which he responded with a smile, then walked away.  He moved across the state to pastor a local church.  In 1957 he left the work of a District Superintendent and re-entered pastoral ministry, work that had been cut short when he had been elected a DS at age 36.

 

That’s when he sold our TV.  His new church in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania didn’t make him do it.  They just hoped he would.  They asked, “Do you own a TV?”  He said he did.   They mentioned that none of the board members at this church owned a TV—with obvious implications.   Beginning his strategic retreat, my dad said, “We carefully monitor what we watch.”   They elected him as pastor anyway.  After winning the battle with the board he withdrew his forces from the war: he sold the TV before loading our moving van, using the money to purchase a “Hi Fi” record player (which was far less interesting as TV since all we had were pipe organ records).

 

This is how my home was both early adopters of television, and one of the latest to have one.  This provided me with six full years of TV-less home life.  So, I read.  Had they kept their TV, I might not have become a reader, or a writer.  Becoming a writer passes through the doorway of reading.  It is this fortunate TV-less teenage life that opened up the world of reading to me, and eventually the world of writing.

 

The Sugar Creek Gang

My earliest introduction to adventure was from the Sugar Creek Gang book series by Paul Hutchens.  My parents had bought each one for me. These were short books, about 100 pages each.  I was captivated enough to finish one each evening before going to bed.  I had about 30 books by Hutchens in total I think, but in a month I had been through the entire series.  So I read them over and over again.  I am sure that I read some of those books a dozen times—I began to anticipate the next page—even to the location on the page of the discovery of the mind shaft, or when the appearance of the mountain lion in camp.  I didn’t have a “literature enriched environment” so I just recycled the books I had.  At the time I did not know how much this would create a foundation for understanding writing, and flow, and plot, and word selection.  In Paul Hutchens’ series I found the adventure and mystery I longed for, yet it was all wrapped up in a Christian package.  He introduced me to adventure. Paul Hutchens let boys be boys. 

 

Grace Livingston Hill

Lois Metzgar, my junior high sweetheart was on a parallel track, reading Grace Livingston Hill’s Christian romance novels.  She loaned me several of these books and I read them because I was hungry for books.  But their girlish relational-based stories didn’t grab me.  Admittedly Hill was a great writer, and still has a significant following long after her death (she was one of James A. Michner’s models) but I didn’t care for them.   I was more interested in trapping tigers and doing something real dangerous, than chatting in the parlor.

 

Zane Grey

Eventually I wore out my Sugar Creek Gang series.  Or they wore me out.  I scouted the house for other books.  I still do not understand why I had not yet discovered the notion of a library.  But I never thought of it.  In my father’s bookshelf, among his collection of sermon books by Paul S. Rees and Clovis Chappell.  I discovered a set of handsomely bound novels with striking bindings—cream colored with blue titles on the spine—a series by Zane Grey.   My aunt Garnet had given them to my father though she had never read them.  My father hadn’t read them either.  This is how they came into my possession as virgin books.  I remember handling that delightfully bound first volume, caressing it with my fingers, paging through and reading a paragraph of adventure here and there.  I swooned.  I took my new love to bed with me that very night.

 

I was hooked on Zane Grey.   Here I discovered all the adventure of Paul Hutchens without being so preachy.  One by one I read through the entire set of Zane Grey novels, and then re-read the entire set at least twice, maybe three times.   The first time reading the book, I would be captivated by the story line.  The second time through I began to see how the writer was telling the story.  In subsequent trips through the books I eased closer to the writer’s thinking until it was almost like we were tapping out the story together. 

 

James Fenimore Cooper

I found my next writer-mentor in the library.  I walked home from school each day past the Monroe County Library.  I had passed it daily yet never recognized it or realized it was packed with interesting books. An ancient converted home on Main Street, it had wonderfully creaky wooden floors.  I wandered into this smallish library one day.  Here I discovered entire sections of adventure books like my treasured Zane Grey novels. And I met James Fenimore Cooper.  He immediately began to mentor me.  I consumed his books, but more slowly than Zane Grey’s—sometimes taking two weeks to read one.  They were tastier and took time to digest.  It was a new experience for me to live with a book for several weeks.  Actually live in the book.  I was only dimly aware of my surroundings at school, for I came alive in another world—one of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories: the Deerslayer, the Pathfinder the Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, the Pioneers.  I lived in these stories during my junior high years (my report cards showed it).  Cooper’s sense of place permanently imprinted me.  I can picture his richly described settings 40 years after reading them—settings where only a few words of dialogue may have passed between the characters—amazing!   Cooper painted such settings so clearly that I could enter the story and live in his diorama for several weeks.  I suspect this junior high romance with place set me up for later adopting James A. Michener as my favorite writer of my adult years.   

 

Louise Dickinson Rich

In that tiny library I also found my wife—Louise Dickinson Rich.  Well, I might never marry that great Maine writer, but I started searching for her double. Her book, We took to the Woods had a profound impact on me.  She told the adventurous story of her family’s escape to the wilderness of Maine searching for a simpler life closer to nature.  She became my model woman—smart, willing to take risks, resourceful, positive, and a lover of nature.  I suspect every girl I dated after reading that book (and the woman I finally married) wishes I’d never met Louise Dickinson Rich in the Monroe County Library.

 

 

Jack London

            With nobody to guide my reading I stayed with the adventure book genre.  In class one day I read the short story To Build a Fire by Jack London.  I was enthralled.   I wanted more.  I found it—this time in my high school library.  London mentored me as we snow-shoed through Alaska and drove great teams of dogs.  Together we went on great and dangerous sea voyages.  I took two trips through Call of the Wild and White Fang.  But I also loved Sea-wolf and Cruise of the Snark,  reading with trepidation  (I could not swim until age 17).  What great stories.  And when I discovered Jack London’s life was about as exciting as his stories, I was even more enthralled. 

 

Snowshoes

I was a boy of books and adventure.  It is hard to read adventure books and not go adventuring.  Books affect actions.  My route home from school ran directly down Main Street in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.  Besides passing the library I also walked passed Wycoff’s department store.  There I found—snowshoes!  Exactly like those described in the Jack London stories.  There on the wall hung a set of 57” Wallingford rawhide snowshoes. I stopped daily and sat on the “husband’s chair” across from them daydreaming.   I suppose they were there for display purposes, but they had a price tag: $17.50.  I knew those snowshoes could take me into my future, to places otherwise closed to me. 

 

I had to have those snowshoes.  I imagined myself snow shoeing though huge drifts of sparkling snow following the faint outline of Jack London ahead of me.  I knew I could never achieve my destiny in life without those snowshoes. 

 

At the time I received 50 cents a day for buying lunch at school.  My allowance was my only route to my snowshoes.  I skipped lunch for a couple months until I had enough money to buy my Wallingfords.  Hauling them home I announced, “Now I’m ready.”   I became more than a reader of Jack London—I joined his ghost every time more an inch of snow fell.  I began the live the books I read.

 

The influence of books

            I read plenty of other books between seventh grade and graduation, but there is not space for them here.  These writers above were the ones with the greatest influence.  Interestingly, the books I read were not at all like the ones I would eventually write.  My early reading was not about the conten