A Word of Explanation ===================== The writer who sits at their desk with an empty piece of paper staring back is like the explorer who stands at the edge of a new continent, uncertain of how to proceed. The basic process in writing a novel, a short story, or a play is one of constant exploration. Why does this defect in character lead to that behavior? Where do we go from here? How do you bridge the awful gap between a stirring start and a worthy conclusion? This book provides visual proof of how inescapable this constant exploration is, how imprecisely it is sometimes pursued, and how it can lead to many false starts. Exploration is, as many adventurers in exotic lands have discovered, a process of trial and error, of selecting and rejecting a variety of courses before deciding on what is most profitable. Discovering the proper course of a narrative is like the charting of a new river as one follows its twists and turns. The manuscript pages reproduced here show an exploring mind at work. Although the pages are rarely laid out in neat columns of tidy sentences, they do represent the search for exact procedure, the right name, and, sometimes, the deviation from the norm that would be more appropriate. They are offered as they came from my desk, and, obviously, each page was subsequently pored over and evaluated. More important, the pages that outline entire books, or substantial chapters within those books, depict ideas and choices caught in mid-flight while the writer was struggling for control. I call this a workbook, for it shows in step-by-step fashion how the manuscript for a published book moves through a complex chain of operations from initial concept to finished book. It is therefore not a book on writing, for that’s only one third of the job, nor is it a book on editing, because that comes late in the process. And it certainly isn’t a book on the preparation of the finished manuscript for the printer, because that concluding part of the system is left in hands other than the writer’s. No, this is a portrait of exploration. A workbook that begins as close as possible to the moment when the idea for the book is first conceived, moves through the tentative early steps, looks at how the writer herself or himself edits his own work, then moves to the skilled editor, the uniquely gifted copy editor, the illustrator or cartographer, and finally to the provisional galleys, which signal that the work is truly in print and, with some polishing touches, is eligible for publication. Shown are the sweat and grime of these various steps—considered romantic exercises by those who have never performed them. The virtue of this workbook is that it presents these steps as they apply to passages of such limited length that the reader can keep them in mind while turning the pages. By following individual sections, paragraphs, sentences, or even specific words, the reader can trace the writer’s thought processes. The subject matter has been chosen from two of my published books, the novel _Journey_ and the nonfiction _The World Is My Home_, and it will be interesting to judge which of the two forms presented the more difficult problems. Actual pages are shown, often as they came directly from the typewriter or word processor. I use the former exclusively, my secretary the latter, for it requires a dexterity I do not have. Although all original editing was done by hand, it is the ease of the secretary’s word processor that makes true editing possible. My books have been praised—or condemned—as being ‘easy to read.’ The book that follows proves the truth of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s growl: ‘An easy read is a damned hard write.’ Because in my old-fashioned cut-and-paste kind of editing I use paper of different colors to keep track of what I’m doing, throughout this book to achieve differentiation and clarity, a mix of Bendays has been used. I invite the reader to check ‘Bendays’ in the dictionary, for it is one of the miracles of the printing profession and will be used here to good effect. JOURNEY ========== _A Canadian Novella_ ====================== * * * Salvaging a Canadian Manuscript ------------------------------- * * * The genesis of my novel _Journey_ was extraordinary. I had for some years worked on a long novel about Alaska, and whereas the main body of the manuscript hit those topics that would generally be of interest and might to some degree be familiar to the American reader, I was determined that anyone who read the book would be aware that Alaska had been in Russian hands longer than in American, and I planned some good chapters on that point. I would think that any sensible writer on Alaska would be obliged to dwell on that inescapable fact. But I also had a highly personal agenda. I’ve always been an admirer of Canadian history, the Canadian landscape, and Canadians in general. However, my interest this time was not in Canada as such, but in the great Mackenzie River, perhaps the least known and appreciated of all the world’s great rivers. I was detcrmined to do the Mackenzie justice, and to let the world know that there had been a Canadian gold rush to parallel the well-known one through Seattle and Alaska. With those motives impelling me, I fitted into my Alaska novel not a separate chapter about the Canadian gold rush through the little town of Edmonton in Alberta, but rather an extended episode within the long chapter about the gold rush in general. Selecting from the hundreds of 1897–1909 characters who filtered through Edmonton, I chose four upper-class Englishmen with their Irish servant and set the five loose from their London club, brought them across the Atlantic by a new type of ship and across Canada by the transcontinental railroad recently put together by Canadian and American geniuses. Now they found themselves on a branch of the Mackenzie, and, perilously late in the autumn, they ventured north, intending to sail as far as they could before the great river froze and then, close to the Arctic Circle, to hunker down for the winter and wait for the spring thaws that would allow a speedy trip to the gold fields. Xenophobic to a ridiculous degree, Lord Luton, leader of the party, was determined to make his entire trip on what he called empire soil—that is, without touching the United States or its properties; this ill-conceived plan led to disaster and the death of three of his team. When the manuscript was finished, my editor and I saw that this segment of the chapter on gold had grown so long that cuts were obligatory, and I acquiesced in eliminating the Mackenzie tale. _Alaska_ was published without it and no one could have noticed the loss, for the episode had nothing to do with Alaska, since its characters never set foot in that territory, and its deletion in no way damaged the novel. But I had spent so much research time and energy on the story of the splendid river that I could not easily surrender it, and after finding that not even the passing of years dimmed my enthusiasm, one day I had a friend call a Canadian publisher with a proposal: ‘Jim Michener has a short novel about Canada half done and he wonders if you’d like to publish it.’ ‘We’ll fly down to Florida and look it over’ was the response. Thus the expanded novel outlined on the opposite page came to be written and later published. This workbook explains the steps whereby this unplanned relationship produced a book. It has been my habit, when brooding over the possibility of writing a long manuscript on a specific subject, to reach a moment of decision and on that day to type out, in the upper-right-hand corner of a sheet of typewriter paper, a statement of what propelled me to this decision. The next day, in the opposite corner, I type out the basic ideas to be presented in the book. In the space below I write the probable chapters as I am able to devise them at the moment. This single page becomes my intellectual and artistic guide for the next three years. * * * Mapping the Terrain ------------------- * * * I am tempted to say that maps were more important to this novel than to any of the other writing I’ve done, but that would not be true, for the maps to both _The Source_ and _Centennial_ were crucial to their narratives. But _Journey_ presented special problems because the great Mackenzie and its unique lakes had to be detailed but most important of all was that nest of little twisting rivers far north of the Arctic Circle where gold seekers made life-or-death decisions. The Bell, the Rat and the Porcupine, three little nothing rivers, intertwined in a remarkable way, for if one negotiated them properly, one found a low navigable pass across the top of the Rocky Mountains and the relative safety of the majestic Yukon. If one missed the cutoff through ignorance or arrogance, one found oneself in the dreadful Peel River and faced a very real risk of death through having to lay over an extra winter in the Arctic. Maps had to show this. And when the party whose fortunes I was following did get frustrated by the Peel, I had to have maps of an area that had not been properly mapped. I had to draw my own, with each lettered spot a focus of terror. * * * The Original Draft—Unedited Carbon Copy --------------------------------------- * * * If any aspect in this book warrants giving it the title ‘Exploration,’ it is this group of ten pages, which show exactly what comes from the typewriter as I try to steer my thoughts through a difficult problem. At the time I wrote this passage I was convinced it formed an exciting segment of a chapter in my Alaska novel. It focused on the little-known Canadian gold rush that occurred simultaneously with the great American rush to the Yukon. Since I had high hopes for this chapter, I wrote it with enthusiasm but with no firm direction. If I seem to be fumbling around in these pages, you must remember that in the famed Alaskan gold rush of the late 1890s, the rush, that hideous torture of getting to the fields, did occur in American Alaska, but the gold itself was found only in the Canadian Klondike. Even that great wandering river, the Yukon, which was the scene of one of the most memorable episodes during the rush, was completely Canadian insofar as the gold mania was concerned; it did not enter Alaskan territory till a short distance beyond Dawson City. I hoped to make the American reader aware of these contradictions. As I worked I had no intimation that this material would ultimately be published as a Canadian book. It was part of my American novel, and a strong part. Each of these provisional pages was typed slowly with two fingers on a heavy old-style manual typewriter. Because I like to cram the maximum number of words on a page, I use narrow margins and type right to the bottom of the page; this excuses me from frequent changes of pages and carbons. To print the maximum number of characters per line, I invariably use a machine with an elite typeface, as compact as is practical, and I go to great pains to find and nurture those old beauties. When I decided to move to Alaska to try my hand at a novel about the state, I stipulated only one requirement: ‘I must have an old elite manual typewriter.’ When I reached Sitka, where I would live in a log cabin for much of three years, I found a very nice machine awaiting me, a huge heavy affair with the biggest pica type I’d ever seen. Look at the various pages from that first typing and you’ll see what I mean. My margins are narrow, the last line scrapes the bottom of the page. So I am being conservative, but the type looks as big as a barn, necessitating the constant rolling in of new sheets of paper. I am not happy when I look at those carbons. For use in this book they have had to be retyped on a word processor, which fortunately approximates closely the big type originally used. In all respects this is my original effort at writing a novel. As I work I follow two rules: ‘Search for the right name till you find it. And write as if you knew everything in the world.’ In obedience to the first I do not hesitate to change the names of my characters even in the middle of a sentence if a better surfaces, and I am free to do this experimenting because when the page of typing is transferred to a word processor, it’s a simple trick to tell that wizard machine: ‘Throughout the manuscript, change the name _Herbert_ to _Alistair_,’ and in a short time the processor obeys. Resonant names are of major importance to me and I play around with them, thanks to the processor. Because in this first draft I am struggling to outline a narrative progression, I do not interrupt my thought processes to check with almanacs, atlases, or encyclopedias to verify dates, spellings, or other data; I am aware as I type that I don’t have the facts, but I am secure in the knowledge that I’ll be able to find them when I go back to edit. So, for uncertainties I either leave a blank or type in what I guess to be the correct information adding immediately after the data a series of question marks: ‘Magna Carta was granted by King John???? in 1215????,’ with the intention of dealing with them later when I have my research books at hand. I advocate this strategy, because the forward motion of the narrative is all-important. The other device I have used to good effect is to draw a big round penciled O in the left margin opposite any passage that I realize is not what I seek. I rarely stop typing to correct it then, for I react poorly to interruptions, but when the draft of the segment is completed, those big gaping O’s stare at me until the marked passages are emended and improved. * * * Editing the First Draft ----------------------- * * * Typing out the first draft of a manuscript is fierce work and often frustrating, for composition goes neither swiftly nor accurately and disappointments are many. But whipping this first amorphous mass into some kind of order and direction is one of the more pleasant experiences a writer can have. Now it becomes clear that the chapter is viable, that there are passages that can be improved, and in my case those big warning O’s in the margin summon me to duty. This close editing is so enjoyable and rewarding that I can scarcely wait to get to the typewriter in the morning and confront that day’s tasks. I see a dozen spots where the narrative can be clarified or invigorated, and those dangerous passages that merely tell about the action without showing it. ‘Let the people back into the scene,’ I tell myself. ‘Let’s hear their voices.’ Now a peculiarity of my work habits imposes itself, not onerously but with clear demands. When I have been typing out my first draft I memorize the start and finish and look of each page, engraving its number in the upper-right-hand corner in my mind. For example, it is then and forever VIII-137 (its identification as Chapter VIII of the long Alaska novel remains inviolate). When I have to enlarge that page with an insert, I try to avoid numbering it VIII-137A, although sometimes I cannot evade it. I want it to remain VIII-137, and so I keep it, as if protecting its validity. To kill a scene and rewrite it at greater length, I cut out the inadequate section with ruler and sharp Stanley palm-fitting knife, type its replacement, and with a small plastic bottle of self-dispensing Elmer’s glue paste in the new material. Obviously, this results in some pages that are markedly longer than the normal eleven inches of standard typewriter paper. Occasionally, the revised pages reach double or even triple length, but the integrity of the manuscript’s pagination has been retained. And the long pages can be doubled back on themselves to allow normal filing. I do not recommend this peculiar habit to others. I mention it only because it works for me. Besides, with the new word processors, the ancient art of cutting and pasting, dating back to the 1450s and Gutenberg, is no longer necessary. With enviable skill and speed, the writer using the new machines can do with the flick of a finger what I laboriously do with ruler, knife and pastepot. Of course, in using the processor the record of the brainwork entailed in drafting revisions is lost, so that memories of how the writer worked, what he did with material of poor quality, and the steps he took to correct it are gone. Today writing is more swiftly accomplished, but the thought processes involved in rewriting are not preserved. Of course, it would be technically possible to record and save the portions of a manuscript thrown away, but this would require so much detailed work that no one I know deems it practical. Some of the more interesting pages of this book would not have been possible had I used a word processor with the speed and facility that experts can manage; the handwritten notes would have been lost. On the other hand, when I started assembling once-printed pages to illustrate various points, the meticulous printouts of the various stages were on file in the computer and it was easy to reprint them. I might ask for a fifty-page printout of a long-vanished state of the manuscript, and within a few minutes there it was on my desk. The facing illustration shows how a pair of my pages from the original copy look after I have inserted so many changes that each has become ridiculously elongated. The various additions are highlighted. Three additional pages of normal length on which I did extensive work follow. Above: Page 140 with five inserts. Right: Page 137 with five. Areas marked in red identify passages carried over from the rough draft. Notice the pencil circles in the left margins, indicating material to be studied further. This work was done when these pages were still intended for _Alaska_. Conversion into a novella had not yet been considered, nor had any editor seen this material. * * * The Printout of the Revised Version ----------------------------------- * * * When the original draft has been edited, revisions have been made and new scenes added—all done by me with two fingers on my old typewriter and often printed by hand with pen and ink because my handwriting is abominable—the collection of cut-and-paste sheets goes to my secretary and her word processor. There the disorderly mass is converted into clean, crisp pages with ample margins and space at the bottom. The typeface of the processor will obviously differ from that of my old typewriter, and this alone imparts to the printout the impression of being a real manuscript. But the difference is not only in appearance; the entire segment has been tightened, refocused, and in a curious sense purified. It can now be taken seriously. Since it would not be profitable to reprint my entire edited copy, I have chosen five brief sections that illustrate how new material, unmarked, has been fitted in with the original material identified with Bendays. The original material will also be highlighted by Bendays on the published book pages reproduced later. It may be instructive to see how many of the words, phrases, and sentences of the first attempt survive, for although I’m not a good writer, I’m a masterly rewriter. All editing on the pages following has been done by me alone, and I do not consider it to be in polished form because the moment it comes clean and neat from the processor, a score of people will begin to attack it: agents, editors, copy editors, and, above all, the writer himself. Often entire passages, sometimes of considerable length, will be eliminated. Others will be added, and line corrections of the most minute changes will be made. When I handed this corrected manuscript of a segment to the publisher of _Alaska_ I liked it as a glancing view of the Canadian contribution, but since the complete manuscript for the entire book was overlong, something had to be cut, and my salute to Canada was jettisoned. It is interesting to note what happened to this relatively brief segment of my Alaska novel: in the first carbon, 5,000 words; this heavily edited copy when still part of that novel, 8,000 words; the final version when part of the Canadian novel, 18,000 words. In another manuscript the numbers could well be in reverse: the writer’s first output is 18,000 words; his own editing cuts this to 8,000 words; professional editing cuts that back to a tight 5,000 words. That is what intensive editing is all about. * * * Editorial Counsel ----------------- * * * Having committed myself to publishing the Canadian material as a separate book, I tried to estimate the complexity of the task I faced: In their present condition these pages could not possibly stand by themselves. Too brief. Not enough fleshing out of the five main characters. No women. And the physical setting in the last part has been scanted. In their original setting within the novel these pages were just about right. I had wanted to speed through the Canadian diversion from the main story, I needed to rush back to the Alaskan portion. So on purpose I had adopted a highly compressed form. In that setting it worked, but now the rules changed. In the process of some disciplined thinking, I made a list of things that would have to be done to achieve the conversion, and I caught most of the obvious lacks that others will note in the next few pages. Had I relied solely on my ideas, the elaboration might have been satisfactory, but now a radically new factor intruded and I would have been stupid not to welcome the insights it provided. I would be edited by two brilliant young women with wide publishing experience, Dinah Forbes in Toronto and Joni Evans in New York, neither of whom I knew personally but both of whom had strong publishing credentials. Ms. Evans had recently joined Random House, my longtime publisher, after a meteoric career at Simon and Schuster. She is an extremely bright young woman with an uncanny grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of any publishing venture, and a sharp sense of how to capitalize on the former and eliminate the latter. Her first letter to me, printed below, shows that she fully understood our peculiar problem—how to convert a long short story into a full-fledged novella—and her advice centers on that exclusively. Obviously she touched on many points I’d already considered, but the acuity of her comment was so sharp and delivered with such force that she nailed down ideas that I might have been considering only tentatively. There was nothing tentative about Joni Evans, and her strong opinions helped. Dinah Forbes, with the Canadian house of McClelland & Stewart, focused primarily on the closing portions of the narrative in which conditions in the Canadian Arctic dominated the story. An expert in Canadian studies on the far north, on the Indian tribes that live there, and especially on the character of the bleak landscape, she brought to my attention research sources that could not have been discovered by myself. The letter in which she summarized her recommendations is a gem of editorial counseling in that it identifies and proposes possible solutions to crucial problems. The value of her work is shown in this comparison. In my original manuscript the segment dealing with the Canadian Arctic comprised only 33 lines. When I finished absorbing the new material she had brought to my attention, I felt compelled to add passages that brought the total to 559 lines. The assistance she provided was invaluable. I must stress that in sharing the excerpts from the two letters, I have chosen mainly those passages that deal with the closing scenes of the novel. In their comments on the preceding portions—the ship voyage from England, the train ride across Canada, the long boat ride down the Mackenzie River—both editors were equally perspicacious. They gave advice that was substantial. Other writers may properly ask: ‘Do all editors provide so much help to their writers?’ I cannot answer that question, for I do not know the habits of editors, nor whether other writers would be as receptive to counsel as I am. Also, in the case of _Journey_, mine was a unique situation: expanding a portion of a chapter into a novel while working with two different publishers in two different countries. If Ms. Forbes in Toronto and Ms. Evans in New York had not been understanding and cooperative, I could never have completed the project. I thank them for having set high standards in the editing profession. The last two pages of this section illustrate the notes I made for myself while awaiting recommendations from the two women. Because I was absent from my desk I had to work in longhand, for me a most difficult task. A look at my cursive handwriting will explain why in my notes to my editors and secretaries I laboriously print everything. * * * Ms. Evans’s Recommendations on the Manuscript --------------------------------------------- * * * * * * Ms. Forbes’s Recommendations on the Final Pages ----------------------------------------------- * * * * * * Specific Queries ---------------- * * * During every stage of editing, including even the moments before handing the manuscript to the type-setter, anyone involved in the project is free to point out places in the narrative that can be improved. Editor, copy editor, house lawyers and especially the author review the manuscript to catch last-minute errors. In the notes that follow, suggestions from four different readers have been melded into one report, and, finally, page 185-A is representative of the work done. I said earlier that I kept inviolate the original page numbers without using the device of 185-A, B, C, yet here that firm rule seems to have been ignored. The reason? The transformation of a chapter segment into a full-length book required inserts of such length that the system broke down. To help my secretary keep track, I cut the new material into page-size lengths and mailed them off to her; I was working in Maine, she in Miami. * * * What Finally Goes to the Typesetter ----------------------------------- * * * Since many of the words in the original segment intended for a minor place in the novel _Alaska_ had already been carefully researched and edited, they could be retained as the basic structure of the proposed novella. It would not be instructive to reprint the entire intermediary version of the manuscript because it would be redundant. However, a few selected pages of the reworked copy will illustrate how the geography was more carefully explained, how characters were more fully described and, especially, how scenes containing dialogue were either introduced or expanded. One pair of facing pages shows how inserts replace cut passages. * * * Editing the ‘Despair’ Galleys ----------------------------- * * * Looking at the next two sets of pages, those showing the text as it appears in actual type, evokes nostalgia. How different bookmaking is today from when I started! A revolution of such staggering dimensions has occurred because of mechanical marvels that I can scarcely believe are possible. Merlin and his magic wand must have been at work. When I was an editor at the Macmillan Company, we received galleys from the printer in the form of long white sheets of paper, each containing two or three normal book pages of copy, and editorial work consisted of manipulating those galleys skillfully and intelligently. The problem was this: the author’s words had now been set by Linotype into hard lead, and to change even one word involved an intricate process. The line of lead containing the error had to be located, lifted out, and corrected, but if that one line was in any way altered as to length—either lengthened or shortened—all subsequent lines in that paragraph also had to be reset, and the cost could be substantial. So the governing rule was this: ‘If the error is in the last line of the paragraph, correct it. At the beginning of a long paragraph, either limit the correction to that one line or forget it.’ Suppose the error did occur in the first line of a fifteen-line paragraph. To make a correction involving a change in the length of the line and the recasting of the fourteen following lines could cost not pennies but dollars, and such expense reflected poorly on the editor, so we became unbelievably skilled in restricting changes to one line, and an editor’s desk customarily contained paper on which lines were matched letter for letter, so that the change could be confined to that line. For example, here is how one might make a correction in a murder mystery where the killing had to take place on the eighth floor, but the text read otherwise: in their apartment on the ninth floor in their rooms on the eighth floor in their quarters on the eighth floor The first correction, _rooms_, doesn’t work, but the second is a perfect fit. I became a wizard at making the most intricate corrections within one or two lines; I would type out six or seven clever alternatives, rarely failing to find a fit, and this skill served me well when I became a writer, because now the expense of resetting a fifteen-line paragraph fell on me. The cost was deducted from my royalty check, and I believe that in a long book I failed to engineer a perfect fit only once or twice, but even those few failures irritated me. There is a manuscript extant in which Mark Twain, a canny man with a farthing, faced a disaster at the start of a very long paragraph in _Huckleberry Finn_. He had written: ‘So Tom and I got our canoe …’ but his editor pointed out that in the preceding chapter the rascals had clearly lost their canoe. Something had to be done, and Twain was equal to the challenge; he changed the clause to read: ‘So Tom and I found a canoe …’ Today computer typesetting permits alterations, often of a substantial nature, at any point in a paragraph; even so, I sometimes find myself hesitating about changing a word at the beginning of a paragraph. However, my editors tell me: ‘Make the change. Nowadays it costs pennies and we absorb the cost.’ The galleys that follow show how energetically editors and authors now make changes. In the old days, after the long galleys were corrected, a crucial step was taken; the copy was rearranged into numbered pages, and they became sacrosanct. Corrections had to be limited not only to single lines but also to one page, and again people like me with a publishing background became skilled in adhering to the rules. Today the computerized press can repage an entire chapter or even a whole book with a touch of a button, and these galleys illustrate that freedom. * * * Editing the ‘Desolation’ Galleys -------------------------------- * * * I had titled the third portion of the manuscript ‘Despair’ because I focused on the experience of the two men trapped in that bleak Arctic wasteland between the two mountain ranges when they could find no path through the mosquito-infested tundra. My work in wartime naval aviation had required me to circulate to airmen instructions regarding their behavior if forced down in the areas north of the Arctic Circle, and I was awed by the basic instruction: ‘If you land on the Arctic tundra during the mosquito season without a net to cover your entire body, you will be driven crazy by the end of the first day, and by the end of the second you will be dead.’ I therefore saw the predicament of the travelers in these spring months, the worst of the season, as doomed, and ‘despair’ was the word to depict their plight. But anyone who chanced to work on the manuscript in either Toronto or New York felt that this word prejudiced the flow of the story: ‘After all, they do survive, and the reader is entitled to that ray of hope. Focus on the land, not on their defeat.’ So the title of the chapter became ‘Desolation,’ which I must admit was an improvement. The men did survive because Lord Luton would not permit the terrors of the land to defeat him. The preceding paragraph may give the impression that the manuscript was a basket case on which eager medics performed miracles, but that was not the case. Moreover, I had published many of my books with minimal or no help from editors. _The Bridges at Toko-Ri_, for example, which I wrote to prove that I could turn out the orderly short novel that was true to the Aristotelian proprieties, was printed much in the form that it left my typewriter, as were my works on Japanese art, but because of my peculiar background in publishing I saw a book as the end product of the cooperation of many talents and not as the solo flight of one intellect. I was, of my generation of writers, one of the few who had worked as an editor, and I knew at intimate first hand what the fruitful relationship between writer and editor and copy editor could be. I also knew that many of our greatest writers in past centuries had tailored the conclusions of their novels to meet the dictates of their publishers, often with excellent results. So I saw publishing in a way that was rather different from how others might view it. I sought professional suggestions and profited from them. I certainly did not accept editorial dictation, nor did I ever receive any that I can remember, but I did maintain a voluminous correspondence with the skilled editors who saw my books through the press. In these galleys I recognize the handwriting of my longtime copy editor at Random House in New York, the estimable Bert Krantz, dictator of the appropriate phrase. Her task was to run the completed Canadian manuscript through the American system, and she was incapable of letting go any galley without tidying up some phrase. I often wondered what she would do if Random House were to publish Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address.’ But many times she saved me from grotesqueries or downright error. I was not aware when I wrote the notes to the preceding segment that at the bottom of page 189 I had explained to my Canadian editors why I justified—that is, equalized—wordage when a line already set in type had to be corrected. But there it is, as in the old days. * * * The Published Version --------------------- * * * * * * It Never Gets Easier -------------------- * * * THE WORLD IS MY HOME ====================== _Three Segments from a Nonfiction Book_ =============================================== * * * Getting Started --------------- * * * When I finish writing and correcting a manuscript to my own satisfaction, I ship it off to my publisher in New York, and it is about fourteen months before I see the finished book because editors, lawyers and copy editors have much work to do on the project. During those months there is a good deal of correspondence between the editor and me, but the queries from New York come at spaced intervals, and that still leaves me time to think about my next book. Because I have a fertile mind, I seem always to have seven or eight viable choices for the next project, and with great care I ponder which to choose. Upon closer inspection I find that of the seven or eight for which I had secure hopes, four or five are not as promising I had thought or my expertise in those fields is inadequate. I junk those and never look back. That still leaves me with three or four eminently eligible subjects, and I do a vast amount of reading and even outline plots, but on some morning in the ninth or tenth week, a bell seems to ring and a clear voice tells me: ‘All right, Buster. For better or for worse, this is it!’ And a choice is made: ‘I’ll do this one and forget the other three.’ On that day of decision I roll a clean sheet of paper into my manual typewriter and type out in the upper-right-hand corner a brief statement about the frame of mind I was in when I made my decision. I spend the rest of that day contemplating the magnitude of the task I’ve set for myself: the year of research, the two years of sitting at my typewriter seven days a week for more than a hundred weeks. As explained earlier, on the next day I type out in the upper-left-hand corner of the same page a kind of summary of the content of the proposed book, and then I immediately outline in the space left the ten or twelve or fourteen chapters that I suppose will constitute the book. Remember, I’ve been thinking about this for more than a year, so it is not surprising that I am able to list most of the chapters and in the order I hope to tackle them. Never do I get them all right; rarely do I get more than one wrong. Notice that in this case of a book of reminiscences I erred in the placement of ‘Reading’ and corrected it immediately, but what is not apparent is that I missed entirely what was going to prove one of the best topics of the entire book, ‘Travel,’ segments of which are dealt with in this present essay. To make way for it, belatedly, I dropped ‘Reading.’ The subjects entered that second day appear in black ink. Everything subsequent is marked by the appearance of ink in another color. Note that I did not know, at the beginning, what subtopics I’d be dealing with in IX ‘Trios’ and XI ‘Bestseller.’ Even late in the day I had not yet made up my mind. If I work two years on one of my large books, having done a wealth of work prior to starting, that’s 730 workdays, and if the book contains 730 pages, it’s obvious that I produce one page of work a day. Of course I do better than that, counting the heavy rewriting I do and the time I must take off for nonwriting obligations. On a good working day when all goes well I can complete six or seven pages, between 7:30 A.M. and 12:30 P.M., never in the afternoon and not more than three or four nights a month. I get it done in the morning or I don’t get it done. Have I ever got fairly well into a manuscript and abandoned it? Three times. I had a novel on Mexico more than half written but then I lost forward motion, abandoned the manuscript, filed it away and lost it. Happily, some thirty years later I recovered it and was able to complete the novel. I was well into a vast novel on the siege of Leningrad when health problems knocked it cold, and an attempt on another subject proved abortive. But if I suffered pain at their demise, I did not experience regret, for an inner monitor warned me: ‘The project died for a logical cause,’ and I was content to turn to a better. I have rarely attempted any book without having considered it for at least ten years, and in two cases I have notebooks and photographs that prove that a subject on which I had done much preliminary work did not come to fruition until forty years later. * * * Research Methods ---------------- * * * For reasons I am not sure I understand, my writing has been strongly driven by geographical factors. I’ve been an invetrate wanderer, not because I was dissatisfied with my homeland but because I had an insatiable desire to see and know the rest of the world. This impulse has carried me to more than a hundred nations and innumerable corners of all the continents except Antarctica, an omission that galls me. In tackling a new subject, even one on which I am well informed, I am never easy until I have drawn with reasonable care and accuracy a set of maps depicting the areas to be covered, and the casual observer might be astonished at the pains I take in addressing this task. For _Alaska_, to cover the intricacies of Canadian scenes—Alaskan, Siberian, and Russian—and the seas and seaports like Seattle, I drew some thirty major maps, many of them repeatedly until I knew exactly where the great Mackenzie River flowed and how the Chinese-Russian entrepôt Kyakhta in Mongolia related to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk. I drew as many for _Hawaii_ and _Texas_ and almost as many for the South African novel. For _The World Is My Home_, the subject for the second half of this workbook, I required only two major maps, which showed where I had traveled and written about: Asia and the Pacific Ocean in the front inside cover; the United States and the Atlantic at the back. By using red lettering to indicate areas about which I’d written complete books and black to show those towns and locations about which I’d written substantial chapters, I hoped to show the wide scatter of subject matter I’d dealt with. The map shown opposite is constructed of half of each of the rough endpapers I had provided. The work I’ve done in Europe and America is thus ignored, but since I’d done so much work in Asia and the Pacific I preferred to stress those areas. And the map does fit nicely into my work program. There was no sensible place to use as a marker for _The World Is My Home_, since it dealt with all areas, but because one of the episodes dealt with in this workbook is Tonga, I have indicated that island on this map and on the two smaller maps that cover the areas adjacent to that island. These were study maps only and were not intended for publication. I also had the practice of drawing architectural schematics for any major buildings or settings with which I would be dealing, and although I am neither a skilled draftsman or a capable sketcher, I could create usable pictures of the items that interested me. I did this for almost all the books on which I worked, so that in total I must have made well over a hundred maps and sketches. This is interesting in that I have never taken notes, in the college sense of the phrase, and certainly never worked with three-by-five index cards. My mind does not work that way, for I learned early on in my college education that I wasted time filing information away because I never returned to it later. But what I do is turn to the very last blank page at the back of any book I’m using and list there the page numbers and a one-word index of data to which I might want to return later. An important research book might contain as many as fifteen citations, each of them referencing a significant bit of data. In that way I can keep three or four hundred books at my fingertips when needed. Upon completing a manuscript after two years of such intensive study, I have acquired such a breadth of knowledge that I could probably teach an advanced course on the subject. But when the job is done, I quickly cleanse my mind of that vast accumulation, and some years later am unable to cite even three good research studies on a subject like Hawaii, Poland, or the astrophysics of space. One aspect of my research in arcane documents, maps, diagrams, and general information deserves comment. Through the years my friends and I have heard repeated and quite circumstantial rumors that I employ a large staff of researchers to do my leg-work and even to write major portions of my books. The truth is that I do all the research myself, but I have an assistant, John Kings, who looks after the business details of my office and schedules the appointments and speaking engagements. He is a manager whose help is invaluable. I can tell him at the start of a day that I need, say, a good biography of Tennyson, and since the University of Texas at Austin, where he works, has twenty-three different highly specialized libraries on the campus, I expect to have almost any book I require on my desk by five o’clock on the day I ask for it. Never have I been disappointed. Moreover, Mr. Kings knows that in that instance I need not only one biography of the poet but three or four, and there they are. However, I do all the reading myself, all the research, and all the writing. When I wrote _Texas_ I had the assistance of two doctoral candidates to locate materials for me, but it was I who did the reading and the writing. For _Sports in America_ I had the assistance of a longtime sportswriter who found the batting averages and other records of the athletes I wanted to write about. He was proficient, but I did the writing. But when a manuscript is finished I usually employ, at my expense, some local expert to tear it apart and identify where I might have gone wrong. Such help has enabled me to avoid gross error, but despite such research and such attention to detail, I have published no book that has been free of error, and some of them have been infuriating. A major aspect of the art of writing is the art of paying attention. * * * Travel Orders ------------- * * * I fought a long and curious war in the South Pacific. Although exempt from the draft on two counts—I was overage and a Quaker—I fell into the hands of a draft board chairman who despised my guts and was determined to make me serve. When he hounded me into the Army despite my age, I could still have claimed exemption because of my religion, but as a professor of history I had known for some time and had taught that Hitler and Tojo were world-class menaces, so I felt that the honorable course was to fight them. Ordered to report to the Army at Fort Dix on Friday morning, on Thursday afternoon I cut a deal with the Navy that allowed me to enlist as an ordinary seaman. I said I would rather ride to war on a battleship than march over uncertain terrain, but what convinced the Navy that they could use me was the fact that in my early twenties I’d had papers in the British merchant navy—honorary, to be sure—but I did know the Mediterranean, the North Sea, and the Baltic, the first intimately. When the officers heard about this they grabbed me, saying: ‘We need men for the battles that will come in the Mediterranean,’ but the word did not trickle through to the proper authorities, for I was sent immediately to the South Pacific as an aviation expert. There I provided our forward aviation units with maintenance instructions as we took one island after another from the Japanese. I flew in almost everything that had wings and participated in bombing runs on Rabaul and Kavieng, but, to be truthful, except for a stint in Samoa, I never did anything a capable woman secretary couldn’t have done better. When my assigned tour of duty was ended and I was scheduled to return home as a certified hero—I had worked a lot of the battle areas and survived two plane crashes—the officers in Washington responsible for staffing the Navy saw in my records that I had attended some nine universities or the equivalent, where upon they sent an urgent message to Admiral Halsey’s staff: ‘Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, Chief Naval Historian, needs a good legman in the South Pacific. Lieut. James A. Michener in your command looks the type. Although he is scheduled to come home, see if he will extend his stay for another full tour.’ When faced with this proposal I did one of the smartest things I ever did: I played dumb and said I was eager to go home, whereas in truth I was not eager at all. My wife had also enlisted, in the WAAC, and was serving with distinction on General Eisenhower’s London staff, so there was no home to go to. As I had suspected, the Navy was so eager for me to re-up, as they called it, that they enticed me with a set of the finest orders an officer ever had: ‘FAGTRANS to all bases in the South Pacific,’ the acronym meaning First Available Government Transportation. The ‘available’ was all-important; it carried no priority, but it did mean that if I could glom on to anything that was moving, I could travel about by air, ship, or, in Australia and New Zealand, train. On those orders I traveled to forty-nine different South Pacific stations and in time came to know the area as few Americans ever would, from the minute frontline posts like Sterling, Tulagi, and Emirau, to cities like Sydney and Christchurch, to the heavenly spots like Samoa, Tahiti, and Bora Bora, and the remote islands like Pitcairn, Easter, and the Marquesas that the war never touched. In _The World Is My Home_, my recollection of those days written in 1988 and published in 1991, the long Chapter II ‘Tour,’ recounts the crazy happenings during one of my extended visits to various islands as I collected materials for Admiral Morison, whom I was fated never to meet. I doubt that my reports ever reached him or that he would have made much use of them if they had. In the pages that follow, I borrow two typical incidents from that tour to illustrate problems that writers encounter when publishing nonfiction. The first describes how an early memory of 1944 was ineffectively recalled in 1988, but is later saved by the almost magical reappearance of the principal details I had reported forty-four years earlier. The second deals with an appalling mistake I made when writing about Tahiti. * * * Mapping the South Pacific ------------------------- * * * The segment ‘Tour’ from my memoir concentrated on that watery empire known popularly as the South Pacific. This name has no meaning for serious geographers, but in common parlance it does exist and is defined by the lower half of the map shown here. It extends farther west to include important sites like Bougainville, Rabaul, Kavieng, and sprawling New Guinea. The islands of the South Pacific have always had an aura of romance. Consider the gifted writers who fell under their spell: Melville and Maugham in the Marquesas; Loti, Nordhoff and Hall in Tahiti and Pitcairn; Frisbie at Pukapuka; Margaret Mead in Samoa; the note-worthy Louis Becke, the violent Jack London, the poetic dreamer Rupert Brooke in the islands generally; Richard Tregaskis at Guadalcanal. And Gauguin’s _Noa, Noa_, a lovely piece of illustrated writing (or writing with some sketches) is widely read and admired in the South Pacific. Two American popularizers helped create the illusion of paradise: Frederick O’Brien, whose 1919 book, _White Shadow in the South Seas_, inflamed imaginations that were subsequently titillated by the motion picture travelogues of James Fitzpatrick that were shown throughout the world. Each of the films ended with a syrupy good-bye: ‘And so as the sun sinks beyond the horizon we bid a reluctant farewell to this beautiful island.…’ It was to such idyllic places in the South Pacific that my precious FAGTRANS carried me. * * * Planning a Hectic Chapter ------------------------- * * * If you look back at the original outline of the book The _World Is My Home_, you will see that it contained no chapter entitled ‘Tour,’ nor did it surface when the first seven chapters were rearranged. In fact, when I started writing, it was still not part of the plan, but I was only a short way into the manuscript when I realized that the authenticity of the dramatic change in my life that came one night on a deserted airstrip in Noumea would lack emotional and intellectual preparation if I failed to explain the impact of the war on my thinking. In my first tour of duty I had seen my nation methodically develop awesome power, I’d seen the Japanese bastions at Rabaul and Kavieng rotting in the sunlight along with their men, and I’d watched the loss of good men at Guadalcanal and the heroism of others who flew rescue missions on the Black Cats out of Tulagi; I barely survived a couple of bad crashes myself. Then, suddenly, I was catapulted into a languorous paradise, and that was a story of a much different character. * * * A Source of a Firsthand Account ------------------------------- * * * The name Tonga rings in my memory like a golden bell that alternately peals joyous and mournful music. My association with the island started when the admiral in Noumea delivered a directive that was both succinct and mysterious: ‘Grab the first flight to Tonga and find out what in hell’s going on … and about that little red truck. Isn’t anyone in charge?’ The good part of my assignment started the moment I landed, for I found myself among some of the gentlest people of the South Pacific, who lived on more than a hundred and fifty separate islands, with the tidy little town of Nukualofa as capital. The islands boasted an odd assortment of treasures: a majestic queen who stood six feet eight inches tall and weighed three hundred pounds; a great sea turtle that was known to be two hundred years old and maybe three; a gigantic stone assembly shaped like the Greek letter _pi_ whose origins no one could decipher; and the largest collection of fruit bats in the world, which darkened the sky as they flew out at nightfall. The morning after I arrived I got to work, reviewing records and interviewing scores of Americans and Tongans alike. When I felt that I had a fairly good grasp of what had happened when the admiral wasn’t looking, I wrote a rather full report of what had obviously been a hilarious and most unmilitary affair. But all that happened in 1944—decades ago—and unfortunately I did not have at hand a copy of my on-the-scene report to refresh my memory of the outrageous affair. I could not recall details or believe that they could have happened when I did remember them. My first draft, which appears on pages 85–90, was a drab affair, but I did not lose hope that the situation would improve: ‘When more details start coming back to me I’ll be able to build something usable on this shaky underpinning.’ Then a remarkable coincidence saved me. Some years back I had told my literary agent, Owen Laster, about my wartime adventures on Bora Bora and Tonga: ‘Years from now some researcher in Navy files will come upon my extensive reports on those two islands, and he’ll be able to combine them into a hilarious portrait of how the United States Armed Forces operated in the South Pacific when the fighting war passed north to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He’ll have a gold mine.’ This possibility so excited Laster that he initiated a search for the missing documents, and although his aides failed to locate them, they did encourage the Navy archivists to search for and discover a later report that quoted so copiously from my earlier work that I was able to reconstruct details I had forgotten, such as my mission to help keep the islands near Tahiti on the side of de Gaulle’s Free French rather than with the traitorous Vichy French, who were so strong in the area. How these long-lost summaries came into my hands was a miracle that I shall describe later. When I read my report about Tonga, wonderful images began to flood back: an island girl of enchanting beauty, American soldiers firing at the millions of fruit bats as the creatures came out of their caves at night, a huge warehouse, an ineffectual island commander, a gung-ho medical doctor who had always dreamed of military glory, a thieving rascal named Tipi (one of the most capable foreign agents ever to confront the Navy), and the Little Red Truck. This oblique glance at my report gave me the help I needed, for I had written about the everyday life of Tonga: the riots, the night raids, the placing of docile natives under house arrest, and the social life of Nukualofa. What a cascade of emotions my long-dead report awakened! How eagerly I went about the task of re-creating those exciting days. At the close of this Tongan segment I reprint the final edited version as it appears in _The World Is My Home_, and there I have marked those passages that survived from the rough draft. How few they are! How little they contribute to the vitality of the story. I think this illustrates the value of firsthand data. Also, remember that I was relying not on my manuscript but on reactions by an outsider who was not interested in the things that particularly interested me. But those passages about events nearly half a century ago exploded in my mind, evoking passionate images and sounds and the craftiness of that truck. Why, if my memories of Tonga are now so joyous, did I say that my experience ended dismally and with lasting frustration? Alas, my two reports—one on Bora Bora, the other on Tonga—have never been found. They were written with what I can only call love. I was describing how American GIs made contact with Polynesia, one of the world’s most alluring and hypnotic areas. I shall always be grateful that I was allowed to witness this bewildering, lovely, and instructive confrontation, and recalling it now makes me think that had I been an Air Force historian serving in Saudi Arabia from August 1990 to April 1991 I could probably have written just as compelling unit histories about our troops there as I did about our men in the South Pacific. And I suppose that when I had done so, some older academic historian working for the Air Force in 1996 would say: ‘The kind of rot Michener wrote about ought not to be part of the official record. Makes the Air Force look bad.’ And he would burn my reports, but not before borrowing the best passages for inclusion in his own. The passages he borrowed would save my account. * * * Carbon Copy of the Original Statement ------------------------------------- * * * The Tongan episode has been chosen for incorporation because the difference between the opening effort and the final version of what happened is so vast that one can hardly escape seeing the creative process in operation. The first version was pretty bad, the second a bit more spirited. But the first must not be denigrated, because the desideratum here was to get the setting and the story line established, and this effort accomplished that purpose. I have always felt that in writing the first draft it is obligatory to maintain forward movement, to keep the sequence of ideas firmly established but to follow various tangential inspirations to their logical conclusions. To flounder about in what is popularly known as ‘writer’s block,’ so often seen in the motion pictures about writers or other creative people, is to indulge in self-pity, and when I see the tortured novelist angrily tear up his manuscript, or the painter slash his canvas with black paint, or the composer crash his hands on the piano with frustration, I often wonder how you depict a sculptor expressing his disgust with his block of stone. Once, while being interviewed on camera, I came up by accident with an appropriate summary of this problem: ‘Michelangelo has been painting all week on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He’s bone-weary and his eyes no longer focus, so on Friday night he hits the local bistros. On Saturday afternoon he gets drunk with the Pope, and on Sunday he really ties one on. On Monday he’s so hung over and so spaced out he’d risk his life if he tried to climb onto that scaffolding. But come Tuesday morning, whether his head is clear or not, whether or not he’s feeling inspired, he’d better be up at that ceiling, with his brushes in order and his paint properly mixed, because he is a professional and he cannot indulge himself in prolonged idleness, not for any reason.’ In writing of Tonga my problem was to recall distant events as clearly as I could and, since they were the meat of the story, to present them as interestingly as possible, and this I did, to the limit of my capacity at the moment. But I was hampered by the fact that back in 1945 I had written a detailed account of the incident of the Little Red Truck, but it had been lost in Navy files, and it irritated me not to be able to recall the smaller details that gave the story color and an insight into one aspect of military life. My topic was ‘What do soldiers and sailors do in idleness when the fighting war has long passed them by?’ This was the problem that Tom Heggen had faced when writing _Mister Roberts_, and as I labored at my typewriter I was fully aware that I was not telling the whole story, but even so I felt compelled to get the framework properly set, so I charged ahead. My first try appears just as it rolled out of the typewriter, without a word being changed. My typing is poor because a minor stroke has slightly incapacitated my left index finger, but even with this impediment I have been able to type millions of words since. As you will shortly see, I type most material two or three times. I invite you to study the result of this first attempt and make two judgments: ‘Was it worth the effort?’ and ‘Could it be used as the basis for subsequent improvement?’ * * * Working on the Unsatisfactory Original -------------------------------------- * * * I did what I could with the flawed original and was able to recall either new episodes or helpful details to enrich those I already had, but as I ended I had to acknowledge that the real story had eluded me. Events on Tonga had been both hilarious and instructive, and I had missed conveying both aspects. My second attempt accomplished little, and since I subsequently cut it apart without having had a carbon copy, I cannot display its inadequacy, but pages from my revision shown here indicate how I worked and with what care I went over every sentence before thinking to type it up and send it off to New York for editorial attention. An obvious question arises: If you don’t get it right until the third version, why not try to start with that version when you first sit at your typewriter? The explanation cuts to the heart of creativity: that acceptable third version does not spring full blown from a mind in control of everything. It is slowly uncovered as one does his spadework during the writing of the first two versions. * * * The Miraculous Surfacing of My Lost Report ------------------------------------------ * * * In the summer of 1990 I chanced to sail into Tahiti’s main harbor at Papeete and a memorable night ensued, for the captain of our Windstar liner had invited to dine with us a notable South Pacific explorer, Bengt Danielsson, who had sailed on the _Kon-Tiki_ with Thor Heyerdahl and who, himself, had later explored and reported on various aspects of the South Seas. He was a formidable Swede in his late fifties, a real Viking, tall, heavily bearded, and with a rumbling voice. I had visited with him at his maritime museum in Stockholm, and to find him seated beside me aboard ship in Tahiti was an unexpected pleasure. In the course of exchanging sea stories he told me: ‘Michener, I went to a lot of trouble to scout the little Treasury Islands to see whether there really was the miserable little village on Mono that you said was named Bali-h’ai—the one you used in your book as the name of the place where the French planters sequestered their marriageable daughters in 1942, when American soldiers and sailors began arriving in the islands. I couldn’t find it, no one had ever heard of it, and I concluded you were lying. But then one day high in the hills I came upon it, just as you said. Name nailed to the signboard as it was on the day you climbed there. I wrote a report for one of the journals. You were not fraudulent.’ Gratified to be established as truthful at least part of the time, I listened with delight as he continued: ‘And when I was researching materials on Bora Bora I came upon a copy of the detailed report you wrote on that island, and it showed me something I hadn’t known, that you’d also worked on the other French islands during the bad times of Vichy influence in the region. It was a most interesting document, and proved again that you’d done what you said and visited where you claimed you did. It was a good report.’ I had no comment. The realization that my work still survived was joyous news, for even I had sometimes doubted that what I remembered of those wild and crazy days had ever happened, and as I bowed my head in gratitude I heard the really astonishing news: ‘And when I worked with the Tonga material I found your riotous account of what happened there. It was amazing.’ As he spoke there in the captain’s cabin, I could see on my desk back in Florida the second version of my Tonga story, the account we’ve just seen, and I knew that if I could get hold of my 1945 report all gaps could be filled: ‘Where is it now?’ ‘In the Navy archives across the Potomac in Alexandria, Virginia,’ he said, and gave me the identification number, F-108-AR-89-74/R#1. Promptly when I returned home I had two photo copies of the two long-missing reports. Danielsson’s memory was incorrect on one significant point: he did not find my original material on either Bora Bora or Tonga; that had long been destroyed. But what he did find was what Owen Laster’s men had been seeking earlier: a careful redaction of what I had written—in the Bora Bora report my material was cited repeatedly with my name attached, and I could remember well the phrases I’d written so long ago. I also recalled dramatic events I’d forgotten, but there the verification was, my report in abbreviated form. For Tonga the situation was quite different. The naval officer who had compiled the history of that island had obliterated my name. At first I was out-raged, but as I read his report, the good parts of which were ascribed to an unnamed ‘ComSoPac historical officer,’ I was pleased to discover that he had quoted almost verbatim those very parts of the Tongan history that I had been most eager to recover and most incapable of remembering. But there they were, the names, the events, the entire history of how a determined medical doctor had snatched command of an island from a totally incompetent island line officer. I was ashamed when I compared my first two truncated versions with my on-the-spot account of what had actually happened. I had forgotten the nub of the story, the relationship between the ineffective commander and the aggressive doctor. As you can see if you return to my first version, I had lumped the two together as Commander Simmons and had saddled him with many of the misbehaviors of the doctor. How this could have happened I cannot explain, but I trust that even had the missing history not reappeared I would in time have resuscitated the doctor. I think that the gunnery and my accompanying him when he went bat shooting might have reminded me. The Tongan history, as I retrieved it, is a voluminous affair, 228 pages plus 15 pages of footnotes; I quote below only the passages based on material I wrote and which are essential to my story. In it the names of the two antagonists are given in full, but I have elected to mask them as Commander and Doctor. I wrote none of the material regarding the unwitting Tongan who had the bad luck to repaint his rusty truck red. It would be poetic justice if this had been written by the man who worked with my material. He borrowed from me and now I borrow from him. * * * Editing the Lost Data --------------------- * * * The task in fitting the recovered story into the structure as already set—imperfectly by me since I had not been willing to trust my memory—was threefold: to bring the gun-happy doctor into the action; to strengthen the behavior of Tipi; and to introduce, if possible, the high comedy of the second little red truck. I succeeded in the first two but failed in the third because space was not available. I’m glad to see the story revived in the preceding notes. * * * The Printout of the Enriched Version ------------------------------------ * * * After many efforts and much travail my various efforts were merged into what became a rounded portrait of two naval officers running wild, each in his own way, and of an entire barracks ‘going ape,’ as the current phrase was. There was, however, a saving touch of harmless comedy to the affair, and this was intentional—indeed, had been worked upon, and for good reason. As I was struggling with Tonga I always kept in the back of my mind the far more serious affair on the imaginary island of Matareva, a name invented to mask a real-life military tragedy. On Tonga the nonsense involved a warehouse, a little red truck and a gang of essentially lovable natives mixing it up with a group of essentially decent young Americans far from home and forgotten in the war that had passed them by. On Matareva about the same number of young Americans, Marines this time, were also led by a fanatic who had usurped command, this time an enlisted man wresting it away from an incompetent officer. It happened that the usurper was a homosexual in those far-off days when the military shuddered at the word and adopted terrible measures to stamp out sexual behavior that it found unacceptable. On isolated Matareva the same rebellious principles that had made Tonga a comedy conspired to make it a tragedy, ending in mass court-martial and possible murder. So if I wrote and rewrote to try to catch the hilarity of Tonga it was for a purpose: to play its comic history against the tragic one of Matareva. I believe the segments shown below capture that lighter spirit. Words screened indicate where the original copy survived the various cuts. * * * Corrections in Galleys ---------------------- * * * One would think that with the amount of work done on the manuscript there could be nothing left that required correction in the galleys. That is never the case, and often a book is saved from grievous error by a sharp-eyed proofreader, or sometimes by the author herself or himself, who catches something at the last possible moment. As before, the copy editor, in this case a learned veteran who has attended to the final stages of several hundred manuscripts, finds at the last minute many small errors she wishes to correct or spots at which the flow of words could be improved. She can also, as shown here, give an exact quotation rather than a colloquial approximation. The cryptic circled letters _ea_ stand for editor’s alteration, which means that this correction was made by the editor and will not be charged against the royalty of the author. * * * The Published Version --------------------- * * * * * * A Horrendous Error ------------------ * * * During my years in the South Pacific I was privileged to know two gifted Americans, each a writer of distinction. James Norman Hall, of Iowa, was world-famous not only for his coauthorship of the _Bounty_ Trilogy and the motion pictures made from his novels but also for his gallantry in World War I, when, as an American citizen, he volunteered to serve as a fighter pilot in France’s Escadrille Lafayette. In Tahiti he was a formidable figure, idolized by both American tourists and the local French government, for he had truly been a hero. Robert Dean Frisbie, of Cleveland and California, was a writer with a talent equal to Hall’s but without the benefit of the latter’s consistent good fortune. He too lived on islands more or less associated with Tahiti, and I was a great admirer of his writing, which appeared regularly in the prestigious _Atlantic Monthly_, as did Hall’s. The men knew each other and between them developed a bond of affection and respect, for they were figures of some importance in the South Pacific, but there the similarity ended. Hall, keeping always to the established society of Tahiti, married Sarah Winchester, the radiant daughter of an English sea captain and his Polynesian wife. Lala, as Sarah was called, was a kind of queen of the islands, beautiful, lively, humorous, and the mother of two fine children—a boy, Conrad, who would win an Oscar as a Hollywood cameraman, and Nancy, a charmer who would marry the heir to the Rutgers (of New Jersey) fortunes. James Norman and Sarah Winchester Hall lived in splendor on the royalties he earned on his famous books and the fees paid him by the movies. They proved that white men—her English father and her American husband—could find stability and happiness in the tropics. Frisbie sampled Tahitian society but found its heavy socializing and settled culture oppressive. He was a man of the lonely islands, the atolls whose highest elevation above sea level might be a mere dozen feet, making them prey to any hurricane that stormed in. He married a beautiful island girl with whom he had five children. Incredibly, he took his family from one isolated island to another, always stopping long enough to write some exquisite essay about his day-to-day experiences in the lagoons, the storms, the ever-present allure. At intervals he would find employment as an island storekeeper for the famous South Pacific merchant chain, Burns Philp, whose storm-beaten trading ships would periodically bring fresh stores to the islands and haul away the copra that the natives collected from their palm trees. But most of the time he was strapped for money, borrowing here and there, waiting nervously for one more check from the _Atlantic Monthly_. How he survived remains a mystery, but he did, and always he kept his children with him. In summary, Hall had money and land; Frisbie had neither. Hall wrote books that sold enormously; Frisbie wrote essays that brought him little. Hall stayed put in Tahiti; Frisbie roamed the low atolls. And what struck me most significantly was that Hall wrote a fine book about an imaginary hurricane and watched it made into a stunning movie, while Frisbie lived through a real hurricane and survived only by tying himself and his children high in trees. When my wartime duties took me into the Tahiti area I was delighted that I would be meeting Hall but was stunned when directed to fly far to the north to rescue Robert Dean Frisbie, who seemed to be dying on Penrhyn, one of his remote islands. It would be a journey of bittersweet associations about which I would report in _The World Is My Home_, which would appear in 1991, forty-seven years later. In the book I focused more on Frisbie than on Hall, explaining how I helped the crew of a navy C-47 rescue Frisbie from an isolated island, leaving his children behind as we took off with their father, and delivered him at last to a Navy hospital in Pago Pago, capital of tiny American Samoa. I painted a portrait of the archetypal beachcomber, a man who had come to the end of his rope in the remote atolls, and told not only of his death but also of the rescue of his children and their introduction into American life. It was a heroic yarn, and I found pleasure in reviving interest in Robert Dean and in watching his children miraculously finding a vibrant new life. I had paid Frisbie the respect he deserved. But in Tahiti, prior to rescuing Robert Dean, I had also established contact with his alter ego, James Norman Hall, and the respect I felt for him appears in the passage reproduced below. * * * Hall’s Daughter Corrects My Error --------------------------------- * * * Pleased with what I had accomplished in saluting these two remarkable Americans, I flew off to Hawaii, where, as I was lolling in a Venetian gondola at one of the new hotels, I heard a joyous shout from the prow of a passing gondola: ‘Michener! What are you doing here?’ It was Nancy Rutgers, Hall’s daughter, and I shouted back: ‘Call me at this hotel,’ and when she did, she and her husband, Nick, arranged a meeting with my wife and me. How fortunate it was that we met! For when I told Nancy about my report of meeting her father in Tahiti in 1944, she astounded me: ‘But Jim, Father was in Iowa all during the war!’ ‘But I talked with him—at the beach house east of Papeete. I met Lala, I met you—don’t you remember?’ ‘Sure, I remember. Dad liked you because you knew all his movies. But that was when you came back after the war. No way you could have seen him during the war, because he simply was not there,’ and Nick confirmed this. There was nothing to do but rewrite the Tahiti scene in which I learned of Frisbie’s travail on his little islands. It must have been Lew Hirshorn, the wealthy expatriate from Long Island and owner of the interisland steamer _Hiro_, who had told me. As a lad out of college sometime in the thirties he had stepped off a tramp steamer and remained in Tahiti the rest of his life. A major citizen of the island, he was an invaluable guide. I was astounded to learn that Hall had not been in Tahiti during the war, but I could not refute the evidence. The pages that follow show how a writer reacts to a devastating blow. He kills the erroneous text and substitutes a better. But if you were to ask me today who told me about Frisbie in Tahiti in 1944, I would still say: ‘James Norman Hall. I can see him sitting by the lagoon when he told me.’ Of course, the lagoon was still there when I visited Hall in 1950, but I’m still convinced I saw him there in 1944. * * * Editing at Its Best ------------------- * * * When I was searching through this part of the manuscript for an example of constructive editing, I found no page with enough comment to justify inclusion, but at the very end when I was leaving Hall and Frisbie I found a page containing eight examples of problems met and solved by good editors. I have numbered the passages: 1\. It is helpful for editors or copy editors to identify places in the text where further elaboration might be needed to clarify. 2\. I do not handle pronouns effectively in the first draft and welcome suggestions as to clarifying antecedents. But here it seems fruitless to repeat Ratchett. 3\. Every writer can profit from having someone with a good eye suggest deletion of short phrases, which, though they might add a little color, take too much space or sidetrack the forward movement. I surrendered the phrase, but not happily. 4\. Three years into my writing career I dropped any attempt to differentiate between _that_ and _which_. As a former teacher of grammar I had once known the rules, but I have now forgotten them and to keep in mind the multiple ramifications and niggling niceties is beyond me. I therefore appreciate the help of copy editors who have strong opinions on the matter and encourage them to enforce their rules. For myself, I am guided mostly by the sound of the sentence, and so are many other writers. 5\. Editors are helpful in spotting places where authors or their typists have dropped a word. More important at this point is the clarification asked for regarding who was in love with whom and when. 6\. This is the most interesting query, in that it deals with clarity of expression, and in this instance there was in the original a confusion as to which situation the word _interesting_ applied. The confusion could be clarified only by the insertion of the two words _an_ and _title_. 7\. This is one of the more instructive queries on this page. When I wrote that south of Pago Pago there was nothing but the South Pole, I relied on two implied conditions: _South_ meant directly south, _South Pole_ covered the entire polar region. Given those two reasonable suppositions, what I wrote is accurate, and I believe that most mariners would interpret my statement that way. But an editor must suspect everything and anticipate the reactions of the ordinary reader, who may take words literally. Strictly speaking, a huge percentage of the Southern Hemisphere is south of American Samoa, but that’s carrying ordinary reasoning a bit far. I appreciate such minute examination of what I write. Additionally, I have been especially grateful to sharp-eyed editors who detect the most egregious sexual readings in ordinary prose. I once wrote and printed: ‘This is the story of an attractive young girl from Wyoming laid in Greenwich Village.’ My woman editor noted: ‘You’re probably right both ways.’ 8\. And last, the most difficult annotation of all. Here my editor says clearly: ‘This passage could be cut because it impedes the flow of the story.’ To few current writers could this criticism be more frequently applied than to me. I love the rich embellishment of a statement, the marshaling of arcane data, the retelling of illustrative incident, and the hammering down of the point I seek to make. Readers have constantly thanked me for that approach to storytelling; editors have properly warned me against redundancy. I have tried to follow a rule of reason and have profited from editorial advice. In this instance I wanted to refer to that delightful actor Gene Lockhart because I had recently acted on an informal stage in Belgium with his daughter, June. The passage could be cut. Sorry, June. * * * Planning a Summary Chapter -------------------------- * * * I do not outline in traditional ways, in notebooks or on filing cards, the data for either an entire book or a chapter. But as the facing page from my working notebooks shows, when I tackle an individual chapter I do keep at my elbow for constant reference a blank page headed with only one word—in this case, _Meaning_, the title of the last chapter in _The World Is My Home_. On it I write down notes as they occur to me, reminders of important facts, lists of things to be done, and proposed developments of topics. Such chapter pages for nonfiction and fiction cannot be differentiated. The process is the same: untidy, arbitrary, provisional, and extremely useful. If I did not jot down my thoughts as they evolve I would be hopelessly lost or, what would be worse, confused. I don’t recommend this process for others, but for me it works. In studying the various entries so long after they were made and used, I cannot always decipher what problems they pretended to solve, but in its day each was significant. The boldly printed name in the dead center of the page, Hugh McNair Kahler, is there because he was a man who played an important role in my education as a professional writer, and I have trouble remembering his name. When needed, it does not come; when I’m thinking of something else, up it pops—on one such occasion I hurried to my page and wrote it large. The page is relevant in that it faithfully represents the hesitancy, the stumbling along of a writer who is attempting to compose a summary of his experience in which concepts, fugitive ideas, and facts are the heart of what he wants to say. Each little block of ideas was of salient importance, but they did not reach me in orderly fashion like European military men who parade in dazzling lockstep, arms swinging in rhythm, eyes straight ahead. My ideas have never been so precise, but they have been remarkably persistent, like a gang of Daniel Boones probing through the wilderness. Special attention should be paid to the list of subjects in the lower-right corner. This was compiled bit by bit as I worked on the chapter and represents those ideas that I knew I would have to come back to, either to insert new material or to improve what had already been touched upon. Later, when I edited the rough first version, I would check off each reminder as it was dealt with. What seems significant about this page of scrambled notes is that each entry deals with some aspect of an intellectual life, some turning point that made the difference. This page should be studied in conjunction with the nine short excerpts of editorial work illustrated shortly. Taken together, they show how difficult it sometimes is to express an idea accurately, and how it has to be slaved over until it is expressed in acceptable language. And again, I would stress that if this page dealt with fiction, the laboriousness shown to hone a passage properly would be the same. As I typed this page in April 1991 my wife called from the television room: ‘Cookie! President Bush is about to quote you!’ and as I listened he ended the celebration of victory in the Gulf War by reciting a crucial line from my short novel _The Bridges at Toko-Ri_. The elderly admiral, who has just lost a treasured pilot over Korea, asks: ‘Where did we get such men?’ The words seem so appropriate as a comment on war and bravery that President Reagan quoted them frequently. Admirals and generals have done the same, and that fine actor Fredric March, who played the admiral in the motion picture, told my wife shortly before he died: ‘Of all the speeches I had to memorize during a long life in the theater, that’s the one that comes back to me most often.’ And without hesitating, he recited the entire passage. Now President Bush was quoting the key line again in an emotional moment. I wrote that ending eight times before I got it right. If I’d been satisfied with the first version, neither Reagan nor March or Bush would have paid attention, nor any reader, either. * * * Rough Draft of Concluding Pages ------------------------------- * * * Below is the start of a verbatim retyping of the carbon copy of my first attempt at summarizing the final chapter in the book. My ideas stand just as they came from my typewriter and illustrate precisely the tentative way in which I attack a passage that I recognize as important to the whole. If you study even a few of these pages carefully, you will see that a slight impediment in my left hand, the result of an extremely minor stroke, makes me type poorly when I’m in a hurry, but this does not hold me back, for my errors can be easily corrected by pen. I also strike out passages and insert afterthoughts. Look at the third paragraph from the end, where I say ‘two examples of misguided comment come to mind.’ I then give the first, which deals with my device of introducing the narrator in a three-step plan. But in my zeal to finish that day’s work I had forgotten my second example, the one dealing with the absent Afghanistan navy. This oversight will be corrected later. This rough draft comprises 7.5 manuscript pages; the next version, 24.5; the final, 21 pages. Thus a manuscript experiences neap and spring tides, then neap again. * * * Nine Segments Edited -------------------- * * * When it came time to end the manuscript I found myself in a curious position. I was writing the last pages of the final chapter and striving to finish it off properly without being mindful that it would also be the conclusion of the entire book. Thus, what I was working on with only a limited aim in mind required a much broader vision: whether I wanted it to or not it would summarize an entire life. On 27 February 1988 I completed the rough draft of the conclusion as shown in the preceding reproduction of that version. It consisted only of the basic materials expressed in pedestrian fashion, and even as I was writing it I realized that this was at best no more than an aide-mémoire and that the real work remained to be tackled. But I had come up with one happy phrase that did epitomize my life’s work: ‘For with my pen I have earned a warrant of citizenship in all corners of the earth.’ You will see that in later versions I improved on the rhythm of the statement, but through all changes it would persist as the effective summary. A few days later, 3 March 1988, as Item I shows, I was back at my typewriter for another try. The chopped-up result contains some phrases of significance, but they seem tacked on and do not lead properly to the conclusion, which is in no way improved over its first version. So as I ended this attempt I realized that I had much more work to do. After working to make the concluding passages appropriate, I recalled an incident from the previous year that seemed to tie wandering bits into a neat package. As Item 2 shows, it dealt with a tradition about which few are informed: the gathering in the White House of certain citizens who have served the nation in various capacities. There they are greeted by the president and handed an award testifying to their worthy citizenship. The next five items, 3 through 7, provide brief glimpses of what a rewriting job consists of but the exact wording has not yet been achieved. However, work of this type helps bind the manuscript together and is of considerable value, even though not much of it can be used in the final version. Since each of the five excerpts deals with a topic of some importance to my work, the question naturally arises: ‘Why didn’t he get it right the first time?’ Fair question, for if I were a noted stylist one might expect the golden words to flow forth in perfect order, weight, and harmony. That dream may be realized by certain fortunate writers, but not by me, for I can affirm that I am unable even to write an important one-page business letter composed of three or four different ideas without first drafting it, then correcting it, and then polishing it before I pass it along to my skilled secretary, who may suggest her own corrections if she detects a gaffe. It is not uncommon for me to hand her a short three-paragraph letter on a single sheet of paper with my second try at the top but crossed out to make way for my third effort at the bottom. The examples that follow show rather effectively the sort of rewriting and revising I do, for almost nothing that leaves my desk for hers is without its eight or ten emendations in heavy black ink. For me writing is a cruelly difficult task. Item 8 shows how I will often rewrite an entire paragraph immediately after finishing a first draft. Halfway through the first time, I realize that I’m not saying what I wanted or how I wanted to say it, so I junk it instantly. More often, however, I go back later. Item 9 illustrates my attempts to give the reader maximum information and assurance. Anyone attempting a book like this is concerned about the veracity of what he is reporting, and often the only verification he can provide is: ‘This is how I remember it.’ Substantiating papers have been lost. Witnesses have died. Official reports are buried under mountains of more important documents, and memory itself plays one false, as demonstrated in my insistence that I had met James Norman Hall during the war and not on later trips to Tahiti. One longs for substantial verification. This item demonstrates the point, but it did not survive into the final version. * * * Fumbling Efforts at a Summation ------------------------------- * * * If a would-be writer or a layman interested in books and their authors sought the heart of this workbook, he or she could do no better than to compare a few of these next provisional pages with the final entry where part of the finished essay is printed. The first two explain how I see myself, the next three show how I have responded to criticism, and the last one summarizes the entire self-evaluation. They demonstrate the balance between original composition and later emendations. They show also the exploration and the groping for meaning that characterize the final stages of a manuscript. This improvement did not come easily. Highlighted with a benday screen are words and passages that survived from the first version, and how few they were. * * * Editorial Work on Revised Pages ------------------------------- * * * These pages illustrate the careful work done on the closing pages of the book. The first, ‘Granting a Prize,’ deals with a literary problem which I thought fascinating but which the editors considered a distraction, and since I try to maintain the forward thrust of any manuscript, I had to agree. Good story lost, but space was too valuable to waste on problematic material. Since I have shown numerous instances in which I agreed with editorial suggestions for cutting or changing parts of the manuscript, I should point out that perhaps 10 percent of the time I reject such suggestions. Editors submit a recommendation in pencil on the manuscript, and when I cannot accept it I quietly erase it and the matter is forgotten. The editors didn’t like the segment and sent their carefully weighed opinion: ‘While the story of the movement to reward you with a prize is a good idea, it and the story of the traitor Hamsun go on too long, sidetrack us too much in a chapter that we believe should stick to essentials.’ When I studied the matter I had to agree, but an interesting story was lost. XIII-75 deals with a most difficult problem, money, and I tried various approaches. Editors suggested another, and a compromise was reached. XIV-83 shows how good editors are not afraid to suggest drastic cuts. The first cut was no problem, the second kills a fine story, which I’ll use somewhere later. XIV-84 at bottom left, shows the number of different times my secretary had to type out this page, and it still wasn’t right. I wanted to state the summary with precision and failed repeatedly. But the last two lines, dated from the earliest effort, did survive and they’re what count. * * * Valued Advice from a Libel Lawyer --------------------------------- * * * When the manuscript has been edited, especially if it is a nonfiction book dealing with real people, the publisher will often send it to a lawyer who specializes in libel. Sometimes this lawyer is not a member of the company publishing the book but an expert who serves many publishers. His or her counsel is invaluable, especially since in recent years the law of libel seems to be swinging sharply against the writer. Publishers must protect themselves against costly suits. In the chapters dealing with my experiences in World War II, my publisher used an in-house expert, Mallory Rintoul, who raised the following points, among others. My responses follow. * * * Corrections on Galleys ---------------------- * * * I appreciate it when an editor cuts the superfluous last words of one of my sentences, as in the case of _as I did_. I add them automatically when I write, in order to complete sentences or thoughts, but quite often they are not needed. The insert at the top of the second page is an admirable one, for adding the name _Laurence_ improves the parallelism of the three names. I did not like the lower-casing of _Sir_ and _Earl_, but that was house policy, and I did not complain. As for _glasnost_, I never know when a foreign word requiring italic has become an English word requiring none. Editors do. * * * The Published Version --------------------- * * * * * * Discovered in 1616, became a monarchy in 1845 and a British protectorate in 1900; a fully independent monarchy since 1968 and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. _Questions Most Frequently Asked by Would-be Writers_ =============================================================== * * * ### SOME BASIC QUESTIONS Since this workbook may fall into the hands of young people aspiring to be writers—to belong to one of the world’s noble professions—it might prove helpful if I share the answers I give to the questions I am most often asked about writing. These queries have come from three sources: letters I receive; the question-and-answer sessions I often conduct; and the seminars in which I assist younger professors of writing in Florida and Texas. Unfortunately, the first questions deal with publishing, not writing. **Will a publisher read my manuscript if I mail it in unannounced?** Probably not. Many publishers have found that they waste their time plowing through mountains of unsolicited manuscripts, ‘over-the-transom junk’ it used to be called. One publisher said: ‘We found that only one manuscript in nine hundred proved worth the search, and the cost of identifying it was excessive.’ Today publishers want their manuscripts weeded out by agents, by teachers of writing, by established writers, or by trusted acquaintances. However, my publisher still inspects all submissions, and so do a few others. **If a publisher will not read my unsolicited manuscript, how can I attract his attention?** It is considerably more difficult today than when I started in the 1940s. Then it was simple. If you published three good short stories, several book publishers would invite you to write a novel. And if you wrote a good novel, all the magazines invited you to write short stories, which paid the rent. And when you had written a handful of good stories and two or three successful novels, Hollywood beckoned with its golden enticements. Today the commercial magazines that once published short stories no longer exist, and Hollywood no longer uses novels as its main source for stories to film. Gifted film people write their own scripts. So today’s beginning writer has it far more difficult than I did. However, there is still a royal road to finding a publisher. Remember that you have two tremendous advantages. First, the great publishing houses do not have the option of sitting out a publishing season. They have up to a hundred salesmen on the road who must be given something to sell. They have commitments with printing houses and paper manufacturers and warehouses. A major house must find scores of manuscripts every year, and if their established writers fail to produce them they must look elsewhere. Every publisher is desperately seeking good manuscripts; it’s just that the rules of the search have changed. The second advantage the beginner has is that every day the established writers grow older. John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Saul Bellow cannot go on writing forever, and their places must be taken by someone. Each year another golden opportunity, or maybe a dozen, opens up and someone has to fill it. So the pathways to acceptance should be recognized and followed. My rules, culled from years of watching publishing, first as an editor myself and then as a writer, are these. 1\. Assuming that you have no third party to intercede for you (agent, professor, writer, or friend), you must write to a publisher or a group of publishers to say that you have a manuscript well under way: ‘It deals with the interesting subject of ——, and may I have permission to send you a copy of the outline and three sample chapters?’ You should then add one or two paragraphs in which you establish your credentials as a serious writer: education, courses taken in writing, and, especially, a fairly complete list of writings actually published—anything, that is, that will lift you out of the ordinary and encourage the publisher (the editor, of course) to think that it may be worth the trouble of looking at your material. In a surprising number of cases, if you are a real writer, you will make your letter so enticing that the editor will write back: ‘Yes, please send it along and we’ll take a look.’ I must stress that this letter of inquiry could be one of the most important letters you will ever write, so spend time drafting it to make your manuscript and yourself sound solid and worth the trouble. **Excuse the interruption, if my letter of inquiry is so important, what should it say?** ### SAMPLE LETTER OF INQUIRY If there is any way possible to address your letter to a specific editor, the opening sentence might read: ‘Professor Tim Doherty, of Columbia’s advanced course on writing, suggested that I send you this letter, with his endorsement.’ You can dig deep to find a possible reference, but be scrupulously honest. The recipient of your letter will probably call Doherty: ‘Can this kid really write, or is he just whistling Dixie?’ Your effort is wasted if you do not enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope and, as is shown in my sample, you should also include your address in your letter because papers do get lost. **Now back to your other rules.** 2. I have known several beginning writers who have gone to New York with no preliminary arrangements and pounded the pavement from one publishing house to the next trying to peddle a finished manuscript or one partly completed. When I was an editor at Macmillan I used to have the job of interviewing such aspirants, and it made all the difference if the young person could place before me a portfolio containing eight or ten articles that had actually been published in various magazines or newspapers. Such displays cried aloud: ‘Look! I’m a writer who knows the language and the rules.’ Such a practical approach was much more effective than saying: ‘I went to Smith College and got an A in English.’ Anyone ought to be able to get an A in English. To have learned what to do with that A is a different matter. The portfolio is obviously the same as the letter of inquiry, except that it’s delivered in person. I advise the letter, but I have known young people whose portfolio gained attention and a contract. 3\. The most effective approach is one in which the publishers come to you rather than you to them. This is accomplished by your publishing first-rate stories in the little magazines that pay nothing but do confer reputation. I can assure you that if you do achieve publication in these journals, New York will hear about it, because every publisher has some editor or scout whose job it is to know what’s happening in the prestigious journals. I know of a score of young writers who have followed this route with such success that publishers have written to them, asking them to stop by when in the city or to submit a manuscript or even a plan for a manuscript. Of all the routes I am suggesting, I believe this is the one I would follow if I were in my twenties and had the skill to break into the world of the literary magazines. 4\. The approach that seems to produce the maximum number of published books, especially those of merit, is for the graduate of a college that takes writing seriously to move on to a two- or three-year graduate writing course at one of the highly regarded universities. There the young writer meets dedicated professionals familiar with the problems of establishing a foothold in the serious business of writing. Older writers not on the academic faculty may also be in residence and serving as part-time consultants or even participants in one-term seminars. In addition, publishing experts from the big houses and the big agencies will be stopping by to share their experiences. But the most rewarding aspect of the course might be the daily contact with the two dozen or so other young aspirants, some with an obviously superior writing skill. Out of this creative mix surprising things can happen. A professor can spot a student of exceptional talent and arrange for a publisher to take a look. An agent visiting the school learns of a young woman with a powerful novel half completed and accepts the writer as a client. Or the course inspires a young person to take writing more seriously than before, and a book results. I am impressed by what the good writing schools can accomplish and consider the two or three years spent there a worthwhile investment. Even the mediocre schools occasionally produce miracles. 5\. I am always surprised when I hear that one of the many summer writing festivals has helped a writer bring his or her talents to the fore, because the ones with which I was acquainted produced little of consequence. But the imposing record is there and cannot be refuted: people in their thirties do attend these seminars, they do become dedicated writers, and they become professionals—not many, but it does happen. In recent years the faculties at some of these summer seminars have been of such high quality that learning can take place and professional friendships can be cultivated. If you cannot afford either time or money for a two-year course at a university, a two-week seminar with good teachers could prove a rewarding substitute. Barnaby Conrad out in Santa Barbara operates one of the best. 6\. Recently I have watched the development of a new way for writers outside New York to gain the attention of New York publishers. The writer, often a young woman, lands a job as columnist for a regional newspaper or one of the big-city magazines; she or he writes such exceptional columns about social and political subjects and her fame spreads so widely that she comes to the attention of national publishers. Then a New York editor telephones: ‘We’ve been reading your work. We’d like you to do a book for us.’ This route is open to any young person with writing skills and an intuitive sense of what subjects interest readers. 7\. When all else fails, one can follow what might be called the rogue-elephant approach. This involves dragooning a personal friend who happens by chance to know a publisher, an editor, an agent, or an established writer—anyone who functions in the writing profession—who will look at your manuscript and perhaps sponsor it. I hesitate to suggest this publicly because I already receive a plethora of manuscripts, the majority of them dreadful, but I have heard of so many instances in which older writers have helped younger ones that I know it can happen. But without exception, so far as I know, the relationship has been a long-standing personal one and not an acquaintanceship launched by the mailing of an unsolicited manuscript to a writer one does not know. However, the frustration of trying in vain to get a publisher to at least read one’s manuscript can be so oppressive that almost any intrusive behavior can be excused, even the trumpeting of a rogue elephant. Those are the approaches I recommend to my students, but I have been disarmed by one would-be writer who said that my last one sounded like the Hungarian recipe for a ham omelet: ‘If your neighbor will give you an end of ham, steal three large eggs,’ and I agree that there is a similarity. **How many good publishers are there in America?** I looked into this some years back and concluded that while it would be reassuring to be published by Random House, Knopf, Simon and Schuster, Little, Brown, or Doubleday, there are another sixty that would know what to do with a good manuscript if one fell into their hands. They would know how to edit it, design it, print it, and merchandise it, and every year three or four of those lesser-known houses come up with blockbusters. The young writer is not restricted to the famous houses. There are five dozen out there begging for good manuscripts. The big houses seem to attract more of the big books, but some of those little houses are on their way to bigness, and I’d be honored to be published by any of them. **Are there reputable publishers outside New York?** Houghton Mifflin and Little, Brown did spectacularly well in Boston, and Lippincott did the same in Philadelphia, although all three houses maintained editorial branches in New York. Regional presses in California and Texas prosper and Henry Regnery does well in Chicago. Also, smaller presses that specialize in regional publishing like Caxton Press for Western themes, and Gulf Publishing in Houston for Southern topics. Many writers launch their careers by writing first for the regional presses and then branching out into the national arena. I would be content to start that way, or even end with the smaller presses. **Would you consider publishing with a vanity press?** No. The traditional vanity press charges too much to publish your book, usually does a poor job, sells almost no copies, and in the end asks you to buy back the unsold copies at your expense, even though you’ve already paid for publishing them. However, if I were determined to see my manuscript in print and had the money to spare, I might pay the $6,000 to satisfy my vanity (hence the name of the system). And every year some professor publishes his own book, sees it catch on with students in other universities and ends up transferring the publishing rights to an established publisher. That is truly entering the profession through the back door, and it is an honorable path to pursue. I have helped pay for the publication of three of my books that were subsequently translated into various foreign languages with considerable success. But that was not vanity publishing: I worked with a reliable house; I knew there would be a market among scholars; I understood the gamble I was taking. **Should I consider one of the university presses?** If you’re lucky enough to have your manuscript accepted by one of the good university presses, you’re fortunate indeed. In recent decades some of these presses have made spectacular advances in publishing major books with major successes. It is true that they generally limit themselves to nonfiction titles, but in that field they often rival the best work done by the bigger commercial houses. And in specialized fields they often excel. I could not have written my Western stories without the great books published by the University of Nebraska Press, whose original books on the West and reprints of older classics proved invaluable. I’ve had two of my books published by the University of Texas Press, and in editorial assistance, design, printing quality, and skill in distribution, their people equaled the best work done elsewhere. And one of the books was sold to several foreign publishers, and at home became a book club selection. One of my graduate assistants had his first book published by Yale University, his second by Nebraska, and his academic career was launched. Today a gifted writer who specializes in nonfiction books of high quality can build a solid career with university presses. **Do I need an agent?** Street wisdom in the profession used to say: ‘You don’t need an agent until you reach the point in your career at which you don’t need an agent.’ In the past, very few beginning writers sold their first novels through an agent, but after they proved they could write and sell their novel, four or five agents would offer to take them on as clients. I had none until my third book; today I find my agent invaluable because he takes care of many business matters: he may send me three or four letters a week concerning foreign editions, sudden interest in a book written half a century ago, crazy propositions, and appeals for forewords to other people’s books. Without his help I would be completely inundated. I am told that today quite a few first novels are circulated to publishers by agents. **How do I find an agent?** When I started, it was easier to find a publisher than an agent. And if you’d published nothing, it was almost impossible. Agents could not afford to invest their time and office expenses in young people who only vaguely ‘wanted to write.’ They had to conserve their energy for young people with proven talent. The sovereign way to get yourself an agent was to write a good book. The other basic rule was that not even a good agent could help you much on your first book, but on your third he or she could perform miracles. In recent years, however, agents have been helping young writers earn substantial advances for first novels, so the talented beginner now has opportunities that I did not have when I started. A good place to look for names of agents is the _Literary Market Place_, which is available in most libraries. **Can my agent get me an advance on royalties?** Yes, but even without an agent most publishers upon issuing a contract to a writer, especially to one who has already published a book, will pay a modest advance to lend encouragement. It is generally not recoverable even if the contract turns sour and no publishable manuscript results, but the publisher accepts that risk in order to cultivate new talent. It might be in the five- to ten-thousand-dollar range. An established writer with a growing reputation might receive a sum in the fifties, but any announced advance beyond that should be greeted with the skepticism one accords the announcement of the latest lottery winner: ‘Jane Doe wins ten million.’ What she really wins is the interest on ten million spread over many years. The lottery management retains the ten million and doles out only some of the interest that investment earns. The writer who is announced as having received a million-dollar advance is sometimes in a similar situation: he gets the money if each of seven or eight conditions are met, such as bestsellerdom, book club sales, paperback sales, sale of foreign rights, etc., etc. The catch is that by the time all the conditions have been fulfilled, he has earned the million, and if the conditions are not met, and quite often they aren’t, he receives only the portion that he has rightfully earned. And even so, if payment is deferred, as it may be for tax reasons, the writer is in exactly the same position as the lottery winner: what he receives is the interest on money that is already his or hers. I have tried to steer away from advances, because they place more pressure on the writer than is wise, and when my contract has contained numerous caveats I have rarely satisfied all of them. The prudent advice to beginners is: ‘Accept only the advance you need to live on till the manuscript is finished. You’ll sleep more easily.’ Cynics preach: ‘Grab the maximum advance possible, for if the publisher has a lot of money tied up, he’ll have to make an extra effort to sell your book when it comes out.’ I would be mortified if my publisher lost money on one of my books, and so would most sensible writers. **If I am lucky enough to find a publisher, should I work on the royalty system or sell my manuscript outright?** Go wash your mouth with soap for asking such a question! The history of literature is replete with tragic stories of men and women who sold their manuscripts for pennies only to watch the buyers reap fortunes, and in music such theft has been common. It seems to me there are only two honorable procedures for a writer: you can spend your own hard-earned money with a vanity publisher, who will see that your book is published in hardcover, or you can give your manuscript to an established publisher—if you can find one who will take it—retain the copyright yourself, and take a royalty on each copy sold. Any arrangement in between seems immoral to me and often pathetically unfair. Never sell all rights to your manuscript; writing is an honorable gamble of your talent against the world, and if you’re afraid to risk everything on sales to the public, you’re not ready to become a professional. I advocate this tremendous gamble without hesitation or qualification. Because my long novels were so expensive to research in far places, and required so much secretarial help, I often had more than a hundred thousand dollars spent before a single page of manuscript was mailed to the editors. If the finished manuscript proved a bust and did not become a published book, the loss was mine, but this did not deter me. I would rather surrender two fingers on my left hand than sell all my rights to a manuscript prior to publication. My right hand, with fingers intact, would refuse to sign the contract. Of course, when one sells a short story to a magazine, there is no arrangement by which a royalty can be paid; that is an outright sale, but you retain the copyright with permission to reprint the story later in a collection of your stories. Or you are free to sell rights to radio, television, or the movies. You also retain rights to sell abroad, for a book that has been well received in the United States could be picked up by four or five foreign-language publishers. Permanent rights are like spare buckets of blood plasma for the writer; they have the capacity to suddenly infuse life into a long-dead manuscript, and if you allow anyone to steal them, you are out of your mind and not ready to be a professional. **Do editors like Maxwell Perkins who aided Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe still exist?** Yes. I had two at Random House and I’ve heard of others like Alex Campbell and Hiram Hayden. But with American publishing falling increasingly into the hands of business conglomerates, editors are becoming acquisition specialists rather than manuscript editors, and writers are the losers, for a sensitive editor can accomplish wonders with even top-flight writers and an occasional miracle with the basically untalented. I would not want to publish without the guidance of a skilled editor, and I listen to what she or he says. **Should a writer cooperate in the publicizing of her or his book?** I have found this distasteful, and at my age can determine how much I will do and where, for the traditional tour in which I used to hit five media stations in a single city—five minutes’ maximum at each stop with the interviewer not having read the book—was murderous duty, which I now avoid. But if I were a beginning writer you could get me to your store with a postcard. Let me illustrate my high standards. Bob Bernstein, then president of Random House, called me in Maryland: ‘Jim? Can you drop over to Washington and hold an autographing session for a bookseller who likes your books?’ I replied: ‘Bob, you know our deal. One city, three days, and that’s it,’ and he said: ‘You fulfilled every promise and we thank you.’ But the next day he called again: ‘Jim, it would mean a great deal to me if you’d do the Washington bit,’ and again I said I’d completed my obligation and again he agreed. But the next day during his third call he said: ‘Jim, I’m afraid I haven’t explained the Washington thing. This man, if he likes your performance, has the authority to order thirty-five thousand copies of your book at one shot,’ and I said: ‘I’ll be there.’ The beginning writer should do everything within the rules of decency and his or her physical limits to cooperate with the publisher’s publicity department in hopes of establishing an identity as a proven writer who intends to be around for a long time. **Does it help if the would-be author is a stunning young woman or a handsome man who looks great in a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe?** Yes. One of the principal detriments to my life as a writer has been the regrettable fact that I don’t look like one. ### NOW THE REAL QUESTIONS So much for the mechanical questions. It has not been illogical to deal with them first, because in every session I conduct—often with mature people who should know better—the first query will be ‘How do I find an agent?’ as if the manuscript has mysteriously written itself. This has caused me to think: He doesn’t want to write a book, he just wants the excitement of having published it. I recall the Arkansas boy, thirteen years old, who unsolicited, sent me his novel of twenty-three pages with the following neatly typed on the cover: Warning! This Novel Has Been Copyrighted First North American Serial Rights Only Like most beginners, he had placed the cart of gratification before the horse of hard work. Let us real writers now concentrate on the writing. **What is the essence of being a writer?** It’s an act of incredible arrogance for a young girl of sixteen to proclaim: ‘I’m going to be an actress.’ Consider the odds against her: the competition, the dreary chase after roles, the disappointments, the constant threat of failure. And yet every year some young women succeed in that dream and become glowing stars, bright as any in the heavens. Think how arrogant it is for a young fellow of sixteen to say: ‘I’m going to be a sculptor.’ How in the world does one become a sculptor? How can he afford the materials? How can he find a teacher? How does he locate a spot at which to exhibit his work if he does succeed in finishing a piece? It seems absolutely impossible for a young man to become a sculptor, yet each year some do. And how about writing an opera and getting it produced? The odds against that are monumental, and yet operas are written and staged and enjoyed. To write and publish a book is infinitely easier than any of the three comparisons I’ve made, but even so, the young man or woman who aspires will fail unless he or she has what I’ve come to think of as divine arrogance, an I-can-do-it conviction; that despite all the negatives, it can be done. I advise every young person who aspires to be a writer to cultivate that divine arrogance, because without it I doubt you will succeed. I do not mean bravado or exhibitionism or fatuous display of dress or manner. I mean that assurance I’ve had even when a manuscript was not going well and doubt assailed me (and with the amount of work I’ve done I’ve had those doubts more than most), but as I’ve risen from bed and gone back to the typewriter I’ve taken comfort in the thought Well, there’s nobody on this block better qualified to lick this problem than me. I’m not sure I believe it, but I’m willing to act on that faith in myself. I recommend that you cultivate such an attitude, but keep it to yourself, and keep it low-key. Think what an arrogant act it is to sit down at a typewriter some morning to start a job that will require three years, and six hundred thousand words typed out three times, and the expenditure of most of your savings. I’ve done it ten or fifteen times and it would have been impossible had I not been fortified with the divine arrogance of the sixteen-year-old girl who says: ‘I can be an actress,’ or the boy who tells himself: ‘I can write an opera.’ **Can writing be taught?** No, not unless there is a basic verbal skill to begin with. But if a young person does have the minimal skills required, such as an appreciation of words, a delight in storytelling, a curiosity about human behavior, and a sense of the dramatic, an inspired teacher can accomplish wonders. I believe that almost everything a human being does can be done better with the help of skilled instruction. We have seen that young people with dramatic talent have learned to perfect it at Yale. Young would-be filmmakers have profited from their work at U.C.L.A. And would-be writers have become professionals at Iowa. I could cite at least a dozen similar examples, but I can also point to other schools in which attendance has been largely a waste of time. If you have reasonable cause to think you have the basic skills, take the chance, and enroll in a reputable school. **Suppose I have the arrogance to be a writer, what specific skills do I need?** If you answer a lusty affirmative to each of these ten questions, you may be qualified to make the effort. Do I love to tell stories to my friends? Do I see what motivates them in various situations? Am I beginning to understand why men react so differently to certain situations than women—and vice versa? Can I imagine myself a member of the opposite sex? Do I have a sense of the changes that overtake a man or woman during each decade of a life that lasts seventy years? Can I imagine how a baby girl of three sees the seven other children in her kindergarten class? Can I place myself on death row in my last six hours? Can I imagine what it would be like to be a United States senator being reprimanded by the entire Senate for my misconduct? Can I make-believe that I am a female pelican weaving a complicated nest with sticks that my mate brings me? Can I describe five o’clock in the morning on a July day on a Nebraska prairie? There are your first nine questions, and now the most important of all: Do you _want_ to do such things? That longing to put dreams into words is the beginning of writing. **When I said ‘skills,’ I meant things like spelling and typing. What about them?** If a young person wants to find the kind of job that writers my age used to seek as an entry to writing, they simply must learn word processing, and the basic skill for that is the ability to type on the keyboard of the ordinary Qwerty typewriter. If you do not already have this skill, learn it immediately, for you will need it in college, in a writing course, or in any job you might take relating to publishing. You will also require it if you want to be a writer. For a reasonable price you can buy for your word processor a program that will correct your spelling, provide six or seven alternatives to any word you’re using, give you a wealth of commonly needed data like the size and population of all the nations of the world, and will also warn you if your sentences are running too long, if you’ve already used that word, and if you always use clauses in the same dull sequence. By the time you read this, some new genius will have produced a machine that will be able to do not only all that but a great deal more. With a good word processor, a printer, and a set of those new programs, you will have infinitely more aids than I ever had, and you will escape much of the drudgery. But to enjoy this bonanza you must master Qwerty (the first six letters on the next-to-the-top-line on the typewriter). **What college courses should I take to enhance my prospects as a writer?** I assume that you have already acquired a broad vocabulary, that you have a feel for language, and that in high school and college you’ve learned what sentences and paragraphs are, and I further assume that throughout the rest of your life you will occasionally read books dealing with current theories of language and contemporary rules of usage. What should you do to lift yourself to higher levels of understanding? If I had a daughter or son who truly aspired to be a writer in the most serious sense of that word, I would advise two courses that would jolt her or him out of complacency and reveal whole new compartments of comprehension. First, I would advocate a course in rhythmic dancing to encourage the body and the mind to break loose and glory in the freedom of movement to encourage the sensation of being a free spirit moving in bold new directions. Second, I would strongly advise a course in ceramics, in which the young practitioner at the potter’s wheel can feel the mass of inanimate clay mysteriously take form. I believe an inherent sense of form, especially emergent form, is essential to a writer, but I suppose one could also attain this through a well-taught course in introductory architecture, where the sense of great forms uniting and interacting to create a pleasing whole would be nurtured. I acquired much of my sense of form through self-administered courses in geography. You might attain yours through the analysis of the sonata form in classical symphonies and string quartets, or the best popular music of the past thirty years. As to specific subject matter, courses at the college level would be useful: psychology, world history to feel the great movements of people and nations, analyses of contemporary social patterns, and perhaps the study of one other national literature, such as the French, German, or Japanese. Of course one must, in one’s spare time, read widely in contemporary literature so as to know what the good writers of one’s own day are accomplishing and thus avoid doing what they’re already doing. I have long had the suspicion that no young person can become a writer who does not wear glasses by the age of twenty-three; failure to do so would mean that you hadn’t done enough reading, and without ample reading I cannot see how one can ever become a writer. **What reading would help me be a better writer of fiction?** My mind was blown wide open by Erich Auerbach’s _Mimesis_, the study of mimetic writing, storytelling, through the centuries. It taught me what a novel was, although I must admit I did not understand the last two chapters. On the art of the novel I profited from various standard texts, especially Janet Burroway’s _Writing Fiction: A Guide to_ _Narrative Craft_. I used Fowler’s _Modern English Usage_ to remind me of what our language really was, but I found many of his strictures overly pedantic and have ignored them in my own writing. I have gained usable insights from my constant reading of literary biographies, always the latest available to check changes in evaluations: Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Hugo, Hardy, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Gaskell, De Maupassant, and Goethe—more or less in the order in which I read them. Note that my early education was only in European material and I would have profited from a university writing-school course on the American novelists, for I missed Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. **What do you consider the main components of a novel?** Since I favor storytelling, I stress character, setting theme and plot, plus another factor well exemplified in this story which I have told before, about Alexandre Dumas, _Père_. A brash young man came to him saying: ‘Monsieur Dumas, I’ve studied your novels and know how you do it. I’m going to take your design and write a novel that will surpass anything you’ve done.’ ‘Fine,’ Dumas said, ‘we thrive on competition. But tell me, have you a set of good characters?’ The young man was ecstatic about his beautiful princess, his gallant prince, his evil baron, and his helpful priest. ‘Great start, but have you an attractive setting?’ Indeed yes! The chateaux along the Loire Valley and the back streets of Paris. ‘A good plot?’ Oh, yes! Twists and turns to delight the mind. And surprises too. ‘And have you an overriding theme to hold attention?’ Good versus evil, innocence versus corruption. ‘Young man,’ said Dumas, ‘you are in excellent shape. Now all you need are two hundred thousand words, and they had better be the right ones.’ In the end it does come down to words, and if you cannot find the right ones, the novel fails. **What is your attitude toward the point of view from which the tale is told?** I used to think this did not matter much and was happy with various solutions: the all-wise, uninvolved and unidentified narrator; the shifting point of view as the narration unfolded; the story told from the restricted viewpoint of a principal character; and four different points of view derived from four characters intimately involved in the story. As a result of this experimentation, I have concluded that Henry James may have had the best solution: a sensitive observer informed, and concerned, and familiar with the main characters but not overly intrusive in their lives. Some splendid novels have resulted from this sophisticated approach, but ones just as good have resulted from the first approach, the all-wise, unidentified narrator who has the power to look into the lives of all his or her characters as each takes center stage. **How can I learn to write better dialogue?** While working as an editor I was taught that a novel consisted of two almost distinct types of writing: _carry_, in which the forward movement of the novel is revealed in bold strokes, and _scene_, which reveals the character involved in a specific action at a specific site. ‘So, as the armies began to gather in the early summer of 1939, Henri and Karl each faced perplexing problems’ would be a beginning for an extended passage that set the stage for the action that was to follow. It carries the body of the novel forward. A representative opening sentence for a scene could be: ‘When Paula entered the room clutching the paper, he could see that she had read the damaging report and was prepared to defend her husband.’ A sentence like that demands that we be allowed to hear what she is about to say and by what steps she proposes to protect her husband. The art of narrative, it seems to me, is the judicious balancing of carry and scene, while the art of the novel as a whole is the revelation of character. But to achieve either, the writer must learn to write good dialogue. How to do this? Study John O’Hara to learn the devices of a master of American spoken language. Read Jane Austen to see how low-keyed, nonhysterical conversation can rivet attention. Reading the printed version of plays from all periods is also instructive, and listening carefully to good motion pictures can teach one how to use minimum words to maximum effect. Heavy dependence on regional dialect is enticing but, I fear, almost always self-defeating, because it drags the book away from the mainstream. Marvelously effective in the short tales of Hardy and Dickens, it can become tedious in larger doses. Yes, a writer can learn to use dialogue effectively, and when she or he does, it can become a scintillating technique. One learns to write carry almost automatically as one masters the rhythms of cultivated language; one has to work to master good scene, since it depends so inescapably on effective dialogue. **You seem to stress fiction at the expense of nonfiction.** If true, I’ve been sadly misguided, because in today’s market it seems easier and more profitable to break into the nonfiction field. What may prove to be the best book I’ve written was nonfiction, _Iberia_, a philosophical travel book on Spain, and I know that often a fine nonfiction book will outsell all the novels. Almost everything I’ve said about the effective writing of fiction also applies to nonfiction. Remember that nonfiction has one immense advantage: clever editors, their fingers on the pulse of the nation, often suggest titles to their nonfiction writers; this means that when the manuscript arrives, the editor is predisposed to like it and rush it into print. I heard one estimate that 60 percent of the best nonfiction books start in the mind of an editor, not a writer. But I have heard of no major fiction success that was first conceived by an editor and then farmed out to a novelist. (The sequel to _Gone With the Wind_ may prove the exception.) Finally, more than half my published books were nonfiction, a fact that few realize. **What role should theme play in a book?** Very differently in fiction and nonfiction. The received wisdom is: ‘Any novel about a subject is sure to be a bad novel.’ Stressing theme too obviously produces mechanical plotting, stereotypical characters, and tedious reading, so the thematic novel is to be avoided. On the other hand, a compelling theme is the lifeblood of the nonfiction book, and none can be so bizarre as to be ineligible for publication; self-help books, diet books, cat books, perceptive analyses of educational problems, acid-etched biographies, tracts for and against warfare, all have been used as the bases for highly successful books. And I would suppose that a high proportion of proposals submitted through the mail to publishers deal with such nonfiction brainstorms, for it is easier to describe effectively the sharply focused theme for a nonfiction book than the outline of a nebulous novel. Theme has been of extreme importance to me, for I have contradicted the advice just given about novelists avoiding thematic approaches. Early in my career I elected to write about far places in turmoil, men at war, new nations emerging, and that decision has served me well—even though I realize that there may have been a better approach that relied less on setting and more on character. If I were a beginning writer today, I would choose as my basic theme for fiction the revolutionized relationships between women and men, especially the difficult new patterns of courtship, marriage, and family life. If I were writing nonfiction I’m sure I would concentrate on recombinant DNA technology, in which the secrets of the forty-six chromosomes are being revealed with such astounding possibilities for the management of our heredity. Any young writer with imagination will be able to identify similar themes that ought to be addressed. **Should I take a job on a newspaper while trying to get started as a writer of books?** If I were struggling to establish myself, I would accept almost any writing job that was available, save only the writing of pornography, (it tarnishes a reputation and doesn’t even pay well). But handling public relations for a corporation, writing manuals to accompany a manufacturer’s machines, managing publicity for a government agency, being staffer on a magazine—I would grab at any of them while I strove to hone my skills. But I would avoid, if I could, the newspaper, for it is an insidious master; since you see yourself in print every day, especially if you have a signed column, the danger is that you come to think of yourself as already being a writer, and the inner fire that is required to drive writers of books is dissipated. The years pass and you do not write your books. But you can console yourself reciting the names of newspaper people who have become fine writers: the Nobel Prize winners for literature Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Henryk Sienkiewicz. The sportswriters Ring Lardner and Paul Gallico also made the jump, so it can be done. But I think the best collateral job for a would-be writer is working in the token clerk’s booth of a New York City subway. You leave work after eight hours with your unused mind eager to tackle something of importance. **Are correspondence courses that promise to teach you how to write any good?** None that I have heard of. And some were so rapacious without teaching anything that the law closed them down, to protect foolish subscribers from their own folly. **How about free-lance editors and agents who advertise that they’ll help you get your manuscript in shape for submission to publishers?** I am instinctively suspicious of such offers. I have never heard of an instance in which such supposed helpers have assisted anyone, but I have heard numerous complaints from would-be writers who were defrauded. Publishers pay their editors good salaries to help writers; agents do take 10 percent of your royalties, but only if they sell the manuscript, and reputable agents take nothing in advance. The prudent rule seems to be: ‘Pay nothing to anyone in advance.’ Of course, tuition fees to responsible colleges and universities that conduct organized seminars could be an honorable exception to this rule, but only if you pick one that teaches something. **What handbooks have been helpful?** I use three dictionaries almost every day: a small book that gives only the spelling of 25,000 words; any one of the fine college dictionaries defining at least 200,000 words; and as big a master dictionary as I can afford, but one providing at least 315,000 entries. At two different desks I use one speller with 25,000 words, another with 35,000, and obviously the latter is some three times more helpful than the first, because most of the difficult words I need are in that additional 10,000. When I locate a speller with 40,000, I’ll use it. When selecting either the collegiate-size dictionary (and that is adequate for most writers) or the unabridged, be sure it contains one invaluable feature: the date when the word came into the language, either into English generally or into American usage. For example, _graft_ meaning the act of inserting a scion from one plant into the trunk of another was known in A.D. 1350, but _graft_ meaning the American habit of collecting money dishonestly, dates only from 1855. Such help is invaluable to a writer of historical material, and by historical I mean dating back even twenty years. The amount of knowledge assembled in one of the big dictionaries is formidable, and writers should occasionally read one of the pages to remind themselves of the rich snippets of information that are available. Every writer needs a thesaurus, and the premier one is Rodale’s _The Synonym Finder_, 1,361 pages of no-nonsense listing of words in alphabetical order, each with its four or six or a dozen different meanings, and each of them accompanied by several synonyms. I use my Rodale constantly, but never do I use any of the fancy synonyms that it provides in abundance, such as _nim, defalcate_ or _deerjack_, for the word _steal_, but Rodale does remind me of words I already know but could not remember, such as _purloin, filch, mulct, commandeer_, or _plagiarize_. If you expect to spend your life writing, get a Rodale now. _Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary_ is a treasure for a writer like me; you may not need it as frequently as I do, but its amazing thirty thousand succinct biographies from all over the world is a rich resource, and Bartlett’s _Familiar Quotations_ has been in print so long and been reedited so many times by brilliant scholars that its plethora of footnotes indicating who first uttered an idea made famous by some who repeated it later are refreshing. For example, the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus (1707–1778) said: ‘Mingle your joys sometimes with your earnest occupation.’ But roughly the same had been said by Menander (342–292 B.C.), Horace (65–8 B.C.) and Montaigne (1533–1592) but none better than Horace: ‘It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion.’ Because of my constant reference to geography I must have a big atlas, and the one published by the London _Times_, with those wonderful maps by the Scottish cartographer Bartholomew, is superb, but I have also used with satisfaction the _National Geographic Atlas of the World_. I want to recommend a specialized publication that has traveled with me for half a century, the 1915 version of the German scholar Karl Ploetz’s _Epitome of History_. Quickly it went through twenty editions, but I came to know it only in 1940 in the American edition edited by William Langer assisted by a body of mainly Harvard scholars. It summarizes world history, and if a revised edition appears, buy it. I also carry with me a King James Bible containing the most complete concordance that space will permit. I need it weekly. I love these books, none more than the twenty-nine massive volumes of the eleventh edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (1911), which I carry from place to place in a truck. The experience I enjoyed most came when I served as usage adviser to Houghton Mifflin’s excellent dictionary and read in the material I was vetting: ‘An adult English speaker knows that _tlip_ is not an English word, and he does not have to go to the dictionary to discover that fact; no English word can begin with _tl_\-.’ Interestingly, I had just finished writing a book about the Tlingit Indians, among whom I had been living for three years. The word originated in Alaska and appears in dictionaries as a legitimate English word. **What is your final word to aspiring writers?** Remember that most successful writers compose their first three manuscripts at four o’clock in the morning prior to a full day’s work in some office. If you can’t discipline yourself to do that, you’ll never be a writer. Of course, it could just as effectively be after eleven o’clock at night. * * * In the seminars at which I assist, we professional writers will not accept any student paper unless it is typed—or word-processed—with the spacing, margins, and neatness one would have if submitting it to a magazine. And it has to be in a dozen or so copies, one for each professor and fellow student. A word processor is almost obligatory.   A local computer store assures me: ‘We can provide a student with a complete machine—processor, advanced software for writers, and a good printer—for a little over fifteen hundred dollars.’