Once I made the decision to become a writer, I went after it with everything I had. There would be no going back, no surrender. In this I found myself feeling like one of my writing heroes, Jack London.

London was a self-taught writer who achieved success through an iron will and disciplined production. He also wrote one of the best novels about a writer, the largely autobiographical Martin Eden. There are long sections that get inside the writer’s mind and heart, and also chronicle London’s own efforts as a young man struggling to teach himself to write fiction. I thought I’d share a few of those with you today.

Study, Don’t Just Read, Successful Authors

[Martin] went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who had arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by which they had been achieved—the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these he made lists for study. He did not ape. He sought principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly. 

When I started my writing journey I went to a local used bookstore and picked up an armload of thrillers by King, Koontz, Grisham and others. As I read these books I marked them up, wrote in the margins, talked to myself about what I was discovering, made notes about the techniques—sometimes on napkins or other scraps of paper. I still have all these, by the way.

Collect Examples of Style

In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it for himself. He was not content with the fair face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.

I have a notebook full of examples of great flights of style. I’ve copied, by hand, passages I’ve admired. The object was to get the sound of sentences in my head and expand my stylistic range.

You ought to do the same. Re-read and even speak out loud examples of what John D. MacDonald called “unobtrusive poetry” in the narrative.

You Can’t Learn to Write Just By Writing

He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects.

This resonates with me, because I’ve often heard the advice that you should shun craft study and just write. Like you should shun medical school and just perform surgery. I did a whole post on this, and refer you there.

Beware the Perils of Pure Pantsing

He wanted to know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.

Jack London knew what he wanted before he started to write. He had plot before beginning and developed the tools to pull it off. Now, I love all you pantsers out there. I want you to succeed. Just beware the perils and trust that your left brain is actually part of your head, too. Give it a listen every once in awhile.

But Don’t Choke Off Inspired Moments

On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable connotations. Before such he bowed down and marveled, knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated.

There are time that something may “work” even if you don’t know why. So go with it, try it, let that character or section of prose fly off your fingertips. Just be ready to “kill the darling” if enough people tell you it ain’t working. I’ve reached for many a metaphor that my lovely wife has told me is more confusing than enlightening. She is almost always right about this.

Embrace the Wonder

He knew full well … that the mystery of beauty was no less than that of life—nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and wonder.

The story of Martin Eden proceeds from this point to a tragic ending. I think it’s because Martin failed to follow his sense of beauty to a Source, and instead succumbed to a meaningless Nietzschean void. That matter is best discussed in a classroom.

For our purposes, keep the magic alive in your writing. Don’t you love being a writer? Doesn’t it feel sometimes that you are made up of sunshine, star-dust and wonder? Yes, there are also times you feel like the tar on the bottom of a dockworker’s boot, but you accept that as the price for feeling the other, don’t you?

How are you teaching yourself to write?

How are you embracing the wonder?

[Note, I’m traveling home from ThrillerFest today, so may not be able to comment much. Talk amongst yourselves!]