You Ask, Secret Dead Blog Answers!

In the previous post on John D. MacDonald, Ryan K. Lindsay asks:

Duane, did you go through a period of "learning" to write, and if so, what sort of stuff did you write that didn't see publication?

Yes. In fact, I'm still going through it now.

I don't believe a writer should ever think he/she is finishing "learning" how to write. I hope I'm still pushing myself right up until the moment I stop, clutch at my chest, and face-plant into my keyboard. (Or whatever writing device I'm using decades from now. Maybe it'll be an Apple iBrain Implant, and I'll face-plant through a holographic screen. Which would be quite funny to watch, were I not dying.)

That said, I certainly went through a long period of learning how to be a professional writer—that is to say, good enough to have editors pay me for my writing.

With nonfiction, I went pro in the summer of 1991, when I was paid for my first short (250 word) piece in Philadelphia Magazine. I was 19 years old, and I'd been working at my college newspaper for about two years. I'm not saying I was hot shit back then—far from it—but by that point I knew how to write a lede and follow it up with a bunch of readable sentences. A short while later I wrote my first department (about 2,500 words), and away I went. I graduated in 1993, and worked as an editor and/or writer for magazines and newspapers until 2008.

My years in journalism were excellent training. There's nothing better than having an editor slash away at your work with a red pen. You learn how easy it is to waste words. You're able to spot your own cliches. And you really think hard about word choice, especially when an editor circles a line and writes, in angry red letters: SOMETHING BETTER. (Many of my fiction writing heroes are former journalists, including James M. Cain, Michael Connelly, and Laura Lippman.)

The road to professional fiction writer was another story. If I had to pin it down, I'd say my training period lasted from about 1984 (when I started writing short horror stories in eighth grade) until the summer of 2004, when St. Martin's bought The Wheelman. I had published short stories before that (in small press mags and webzines), but I wasn't paid much, if at all.

What did I write over those 20 years?

I wrote a lot of horror stories with twist endings. I wrote a series of novellas about undead teenagers that almost became a novel... but spiralled out of control. I wrote a novella called Caroline about ghosts and automobile crashes and monsters. I started a novel about shapeshifters; started another one about a pryomaniac. I wrote 20,000 words of a novel about a vigilante journalist that just sputtered and died. I wrote about 30,000 words of a private eye novel that sputtered and died; later I salvaged the first few chapters which became "Hilly Palmer's Last Case" (published at Plots With Guns, and later, the Year's Best Crime and Mystery Stories). I wrote 10,000 words of a novel about a flooded graveyard. I wrote another 10,000 words of a novel about an exorcist for hire. Both sputtered and died.

My big problem, of course, was that I didn't know how to fucking finish anything longer than a novella or short story. I'd come up with another idea, some bright new shiny toy, and off I'd go, chasing that. If fiction had such a thing as deadbeat dad laws, I would have been on the Ten Most Wanted list.

Then in the summer of 1998 I sat down to write what would become Secret Dead Men. I told myself: You're going to finish this no matter what. Even if it sucks. Even if it falls apart. If it starts to sputter, slap the defib paddles on its chest and shock it back to life. If a new idea comes prancing along, IGNORE IT. Finish. Finish no matter what.

So I gave myself a nightly goal of 1,000 words, and I finished it. And while the first draft needed a lot of work, it was nowhere near as bad as I thought it might be.

That was a huge breakthrough. Since then, I have let another stories and novels die, but not because I didn't know how to finish them. I finished a novel once, and I knew I could do it again. No, instead, I let them die because I thought they deserved to die.

That's what I'm trying to learn now—spotting those viable ideas. I'm blessed with a fevered imagination; I have more ideas than I can possibly write. (I labor under the delusion that I'll get around to all of them someday.) But now I have to be careful about how I spent my writing time—it's what I do for a living now. I can't afford to spent three or four months pursuing something that will lead me straight into a brick wall. (Screenwriter John August has a great post about choosing projects over at his blog.)

I think I'm getting better at this, but like I said at the top of this post—I'm still learning.