The writing life, part 2...
Aug. 15th, 2001 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpBack a long time ago, I recall my mother telling me that the path to becoming a writer lay in writing. That may sound obvious, but like many obvious statements, the practice is a bit less obvious than the theory.
She told me that if I applied myself and put 1,000,000 words down on paper (a mere 8 reams filled with text), that I would undoubtedly become a successful writer. I rather doubted that such a simple expedient would work (indeed, you also have to try to sell what you write), but much, much later I found out that John D. MacDonald started his writing career after a stint in the service during World War II and wrote 825,000 words before selling his first piece. He went on to establish a successful writing career, writing dozens of best-sellers, including a series of well-known novels featuring his "salvage consultant," Travis McGee.
What is hard is putting the theory into practice. What to write about? The beginning writer immediately starts to think about plots and typically, gets wrapped around the axle at that point. The plot becomes all-important, overshadowing the real crux of the matter: characters. The issue of plot becomes a tar baby. Believe me, I know; it's why I turned to non-fiction writing, but I digress...
I cheated in achieving that million-word goal. I started translating technical articles from Russian to English, after having "edited" such translations for a couple of years for a New York publishing house. I managed to break into the business by translating words and phrases (and sometimes, paragraphs) of text that had been overlooked by freelancers, and eventually convincing my boss to let me take a crack at translating an article that had been lost in the mail coming back from the technical editor.
He laughed when I sat down at the typewriter...
...but stopped laughing when the technical editor pronounced my work as good as anything he'd seen from our usual stable of freelancers. (In retrospect, I wonder what he meant by that crack, but again, I wander...)
From that moment onward, I supplemented my 9-to-5 income with a pittance derived from translating. I forgot about writing articles.
I translated a lot. When Galina and I moved to Florida, I took a giant step and bought a top-of-the-line IBM Selectric typewriter, with an autocorrection feature that was to kill for. I bought it on time, and paid for it out of my translation income. I translated a lot of words on that machine.
A year later, the typewriter was paid for and I was seriously thinking of buying a computer to take advantage of the ability to rearrange my words inside a word processor before committing them to paper. I settled on an Osborne-1, on the basis of it having all the memory anyone could wish for (64 KB) and the fact that WordStar and other "industrial strength" software came as part of the purchase price.
I believe the translations were a big help to me because they relieved me of the need to think of what to say when I wrote; the text of the translation took care of that. I was thus free to concentrate on how to express what was being said. That was very helpful.
At work, I had been drafted into the Controls Department of the engineering company that paid my salary, on the strength of having been exposed to a programming course as an undergraduate. The company had won a huge contract to upgrade a materials-handling system for a power utility in Georgia, and we were supposed to supply a state-of-the-art, microprocessor-based control system for it.
I quickly became the lead (and only) programmer for the job, working in BASIC. In my free time, I started to read computer magazines and noticed that some of the writing was... well... I felt I could do better.
So, when I heard that a new magazine devoted to Commodore computers was to start publication soon, I sold Galina on the idea of buying a VIC-20 (Commodore's low-end machine at the time), writing an article or two about it, and then seeing how things developed.
Galina was not too thrilled about the prospect, but gave in, after chiding me about the well-known difference between men and boys ("the price of their toys"). I don't think she thought I was serious about writing.
A call to the editor established the obvious. Anything I sent in would be evaluated "on spec," meaning if they didn't like it, they owed me nothing. If they wanted to publish it, they'd pay me $125.
I was excited, but I also needed to write something. But what?
One of the suggested exercises in my BASIC primer was to write a program that would accept two large numbers as input and then output the exact product of their multiplication. (In BASIC, the default result of multiplying two large numbers is a floating-point approximation of the product.) I had done the exercise, and it was a curious thing for a program to do, but not curious enough to stand on its own. What to do?
At this point, my thoughts turned to one of my favorite columnists, Steve Ciarcia, who wrote for BYTE in those days. He would invariably present his hardware column in parallel with a tale that ran along the lines of "there we were, my buddies and I, trying to solve a problem." One column, which presented a project to modulate an audio signal into a laser beam (and later capture the beam and demodulate the audio back out), told the tale of an acquaintance whose job as a forest ranger was going to prevent him from listening to The Big Game, so Steve whipped up this project to allow line-of-sight rebroadcast of the play-by-play via laser.
So I started to think about the packaging for the program. Eventually, I worked out a story line that involved a snotty kid (someone's cousin from somewhere) who liked to sucker-bet adults about number multiplication in BASIC ("betcha the answer isn't exact!"). My article then explained a little about how numbers were handled in BASIC and in the program, and then at the end I was all set for the kid to try to bet me, but it turned out he'd spent all his previously ill-gotten gains on ice cream and didn't feel so good.
They bought the article. It was my first article sale, I was on top of the world, and Galina was pleasantly surprised, methinks.
I need to drop this tale for now and take care of some more pressing issues...
Cheers...
She told me that if I applied myself and put 1,000,000 words down on paper (a mere 8 reams filled with text), that I would undoubtedly become a successful writer. I rather doubted that such a simple expedient would work (indeed, you also have to try to sell what you write), but much, much later I found out that John D. MacDonald started his writing career after a stint in the service during World War II and wrote 825,000 words before selling his first piece. He went on to establish a successful writing career, writing dozens of best-sellers, including a series of well-known novels featuring his "salvage consultant," Travis McGee.
What is hard is putting the theory into practice. What to write about? The beginning writer immediately starts to think about plots and typically, gets wrapped around the axle at that point. The plot becomes all-important, overshadowing the real crux of the matter: characters. The issue of plot becomes a tar baby. Believe me, I know; it's why I turned to non-fiction writing, but I digress...
I cheated in achieving that million-word goal. I started translating technical articles from Russian to English, after having "edited" such translations for a couple of years for a New York publishing house. I managed to break into the business by translating words and phrases (and sometimes, paragraphs) of text that had been overlooked by freelancers, and eventually convincing my boss to let me take a crack at translating an article that had been lost in the mail coming back from the technical editor.
He laughed when I sat down at the typewriter...
...but stopped laughing when the technical editor pronounced my work as good as anything he'd seen from our usual stable of freelancers. (In retrospect, I wonder what he meant by that crack, but again, I wander...)
From that moment onward, I supplemented my 9-to-5 income with a pittance derived from translating. I forgot about writing articles.
I translated a lot. When Galina and I moved to Florida, I took a giant step and bought a top-of-the-line IBM Selectric typewriter, with an autocorrection feature that was to kill for. I bought it on time, and paid for it out of my translation income. I translated a lot of words on that machine.
A year later, the typewriter was paid for and I was seriously thinking of buying a computer to take advantage of the ability to rearrange my words inside a word processor before committing them to paper. I settled on an Osborne-1, on the basis of it having all the memory anyone could wish for (64 KB) and the fact that WordStar and other "industrial strength" software came as part of the purchase price.
I believe the translations were a big help to me because they relieved me of the need to think of what to say when I wrote; the text of the translation took care of that. I was thus free to concentrate on how to express what was being said. That was very helpful.
At work, I had been drafted into the Controls Department of the engineering company that paid my salary, on the strength of having been exposed to a programming course as an undergraduate. The company had won a huge contract to upgrade a materials-handling system for a power utility in Georgia, and we were supposed to supply a state-of-the-art, microprocessor-based control system for it.
I quickly became the lead (and only) programmer for the job, working in BASIC. In my free time, I started to read computer magazines and noticed that some of the writing was... well... I felt I could do better.
So, when I heard that a new magazine devoted to Commodore computers was to start publication soon, I sold Galina on the idea of buying a VIC-20 (Commodore's low-end machine at the time), writing an article or two about it, and then seeing how things developed.
Galina was not too thrilled about the prospect, but gave in, after chiding me about the well-known difference between men and boys ("the price of their toys"). I don't think she thought I was serious about writing.
A call to the editor established the obvious. Anything I sent in would be evaluated "on spec," meaning if they didn't like it, they owed me nothing. If they wanted to publish it, they'd pay me $125.
I was excited, but I also needed to write something. But what?
One of the suggested exercises in my BASIC primer was to write a program that would accept two large numbers as input and then output the exact product of their multiplication. (In BASIC, the default result of multiplying two large numbers is a floating-point approximation of the product.) I had done the exercise, and it was a curious thing for a program to do, but not curious enough to stand on its own. What to do?
At this point, my thoughts turned to one of my favorite columnists, Steve Ciarcia, who wrote for BYTE in those days. He would invariably present his hardware column in parallel with a tale that ran along the lines of "there we were, my buddies and I, trying to solve a problem." One column, which presented a project to modulate an audio signal into a laser beam (and later capture the beam and demodulate the audio back out), told the tale of an acquaintance whose job as a forest ranger was going to prevent him from listening to The Big Game, so Steve whipped up this project to allow line-of-sight rebroadcast of the play-by-play via laser.
So I started to think about the packaging for the program. Eventually, I worked out a story line that involved a snotty kid (someone's cousin from somewhere) who liked to sucker-bet adults about number multiplication in BASIC ("betcha the answer isn't exact!"). My article then explained a little about how numbers were handled in BASIC and in the program, and then at the end I was all set for the kid to try to bet me, but it turned out he'd spent all his previously ill-gotten gains on ice cream and didn't feel so good.
They bought the article. It was my first article sale, I was on top of the world, and Galina was pleasantly surprised, methinks.
I need to drop this tale for now and take care of some more pressing issues...
Cheers...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Keep up the good work
Date: 2001-08-16 12:16 pm (UTC)Na Zdorovia
Re: Keep up the good work
Date: 2001-08-16 01:06 pm (UTC)Cheers...