I don't know how to write. I just do it. This has been clear to me for years. Over the last dozen years, I've read numerous pieces on how to write, and seen many videos by authors talking about how they go about thinking and writing their stories. They all talk about things like story structures and character arcs and such. Stuff I never think about when writing, and stuff I have never bothered to adopt, because it seems so deliberately artificial. And to me, so wrong.
Blame it on my youth.
I spent my youth in the dark ages before all the world's knowledge and disinformation could be carried around and consulted via a device in your pocket. Before the age of the internet. Before the age of the personal computer. Back then knowledge would be found in paper books, and those could be found on libraries and bookstore shelves. However, the amount and breath of knowledge was limited by the size of the local libraries and books stories. Plus your awareness of such knowledge. I really don't think I knew that how-to-write novels books existed, back then.
They must have existed. Right? Well, yet maybe not. I haven't bothered to research that question on the internet Wait, I just did... 1884 The Art of Fiction by Walter Besant and 1925 The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton, so say Gemini. It's that easy today. But back then... who would know?
In any event, it never occurred to me to read a book on how to write a book.
I did do some research and discovered that the first master of fine arts programs was established at the University of Iowa in 1940. A workshop, The Iowa Writers' Workshop had been started there four years before. MFA programs in colleges only began to proliferate in the 1960's & 70's. Which is to say, about the time I started writing. It was almost three decades after I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, that it started their MFA program in 2002. In 1968, as a freshman, I wanted to write science fiction novels, not read, study, and discuss moldy old classic books. I wanted to learn how to write, so I listed my major as journalism rather than English, which even then was considered a mostly useless major. I changed my major to International Relations (another largely useless major) the following year when I realized I was too shy to be a journalist and interview people.
I just decided then, and still believe today, that if you had the talent to write, you could develop it all on your own and write. That talent ruled all creative endeavors. Sure, you could study any of the arts, and learn the mechanics of them, but to be really good, you needed to have been born with a talent for them. I felt that if I had the talent to write, I would learn how to write over time, with practice, and by absorbing the art and craft of telling stories through reading stories. A long road, but one that leads to an authentically personal style.
My first published piece was a review of the war game Vietnam which appeared Vol 1 No. 8 of Strategy & Tactics magazine, "A Journal of American Wargaming." in the 1967. The magazine is still being published today. I did a few spot art illustrations for it as well. I doubt I was paid for the piece or the art. My first paid piece was a review, in some magazine, some time in the 1980's I believe, for the Franklin Spelling Ace, one of those stand alone spell checkers they had around before the personal computer became affordable and widely available. My latest published piece is upcoming next month in the local writer's group yearly literary journal, Barstol & Grand. I have a short story in Vol 10, though I waived the modest payment for a few extra copies of journal. And, well, except for the a small collection of rejection slips for my fantasy novel and science fiction novella and short story in 1980, that is the sum of my lifetime achievement in writing, save for writing and self-publishing sixteen novels, six novellas and a short story all of which I wrote after the age of 60, the product of all those long years on the road to a dream and a lot of free time.
Not the most impressive resume, for a lifetime of writing when viewed through a conventional lens. Nor a particularly compelling argument for talent, as opposed to being formally taught the techniques of writing as a craft. And yet I still, perhaps foolishly, believe in talent over training. And I still find something unsettlingly wrong in thinking of stories in three acts, plot points, and character arcs. I think writing fiction is a process of breathing a ghost of life to a life in words as it is felt. Not constructing some sort of facsimile of it according to a blueprint.
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