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Pat’s Blog
How To Write And Stuff Like
That
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McManus Principle
#1:
The reason I never
get anything done is that I always have to do
something else first. But before I do that, I have to do
something else. And so on. All my life I have been
working backwards. Now I can't even remember what I
first set out to do.
Patrick F. McManus
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Photo
of Pat in their library taken by
Darlene "Bun" McManus
February
2008
With the economy sinking like a rock, I’ve started
thinking about the Great Depression, which started with the market
crash of 1929. I had nothing to do with the Crash, because I wasn’t
born yet. So don’t try to blame me. I made my entrance at the
“bottom” of the depression, in 1933, when, as I understand it, life
had gotten really tough in this country. As far as I could tell,
though, my folks hadn’t even noticed we were having a depression.
They had been on the bottom all along.
We had no washing machine, dryer, radio, refrigerator, running
water, indoor plumbing or anything else that required electricity,
because power lines would not reach our little farm until I was
about eight years old, at which time we still couldn’t afford all
that stuff anyway. You might think this was an extremely insecure
form of existence, but it wasn’t. We could get our fuel for heating
and cooking out of our own woodlot or even out of the national
forests that surrounded us on almost all sides. My mother canned
like crazy all during August and into the fall and my father killed
more-or-less-edible wild creatures, so we almost always had
something to eat. Some of our neighbors shot and ate what they
called “gophers,” but which, I know now, were actually Columbian
ground squirrels. Had we known they were squirrels , we might have
eaten them, too.
I remember there would be some point each fall when Mom would say
something to the effect,
“Well,
there, we can survive until next summer.” Then we would settle back
and read books and pop corn and make fudge, while the winter winds
piled drifts up to our eves and other places. When summer arrived
again, my folks would start preparing for the next winter. It was
nice, unless, of course, you were, say, five years old and had to
make a trip to the outhouse by yourself on a dark and snowy night,
with wolves howling in the mountains.
Actually, I hadn’t paid much attention to the economy, maybe
because I didn’t have any money vanishing in The Market. You have to
have money in the markets in order to worry about it vanishing. No,
what really caught my attention was that a banker friend of mine
bought a chainsaw.
That
was scary. Even worse, his wife was complicit in the purchase. I
could almost see their minds working: “No matter what happens now,
at least we’ll be warm!” My friend is a person who knows how to add
and subtract and probably even do fractions and long division, so it
startled me when he bought a chainsaw. He no doubt has money in the
market, and he’s the kind of guy who knows stuff about the economy.
“Maybe we should buy a chainsaw,” I said to my wife, Bun.
“Are you crazy!” she said, thoughtfully. “No!”
“But if we have a depression, at least we’d be warm.”
“Who cares if you’re warm if you’ve cut off some major body part
with a chainsaw? Or even a minor one!”
“Yeah but…” I argued.
“No!” she said. “I don’t want to hear anything more about
chainsaws!”
“But we could sit around the fireplace in the evening and read
books and pop corn and make fudge. At least we’d be warm.”
So far I haven’t been able to get Bun to budge on the chainsaw
issue. It did occur to me that I could buy a chainsaw for one of my
sons-in-law, and he could cut wood in the national forest for both
us and his family.
“What’s a chainsaw?” he said.
So I guess that’s out.
November 23, 2007
It’s
Thanksgiving again and time I paid my annual tribute to Beaky.
Beaky was my pet turkey the summer I was ten.
There was at that time a comic-book character, a turkey, by
the name of Beaky, and I think that is where I got the name for my
own pet turkey.
Beaky
was the only surviving member of half a dozen turkeys we somehow
hatched out that year.
His brothers and sisters had each found one of the innumerable ways
turkeys have to commit suicide—befriending coyotes, weasels, skunks
and dogs, choking on small bugs, jumping off high places and
forgetting to open their wings, that sort of thing.
Benjamin Franklin once suggested that the turkey become our
national bird, but he was referring to the wild turkey, a completely
different animal from the tame turkey.
My old friend Charlie Elliott, famed as both author and
hunter, referred to wild turkeys as “the ultimate game.”
The domestic turkey, by contrast, is a dull fellow, who would
not survive a day without human care and feeding.
I
suspect Beaky was no different from other domestic turkey’s—not to
mention any names—but I took a liking to him.
At age ten, I lived a lonely existence on our tiny farm, and
human friends my age were few and far between.
There was a teenager who lived across the creek from me and
had sworn to kill me if he ever caught got his hands on me.
Someone had once borrowed the canoe he had built during a
mere thousand hours in high-school wood shop.
For some reason, I became his number one suspect.
Still, it was nice to receive a bit of attention from
someone.
Beaky truly liked me, however.
He would follow me around like a dog and I would throw him
sticks to retrieve and he would stand there and look at me, a
quizzical expression on his face.
Everybody needs a friend, and that summer I had Beaky.
He was my only source of enjoyment, he and canoeing.
Then Thanksgiving Day arrived.
My sister (the Troll), my mother and grandmother, my
Stepfather Hank and I were all seated around the dining-room table,
which was reserved for special occasions.
In the middle of the table was a large golden-brown turkey.
I had no affection for turkeys in general, and I would not be
surprised to learn they were my favourite food at that time of my
life. My plate was
heaped with sweet-potatoes-and-marshmallows , mashed potatoes and
gravy, ambrosia salad, turkey dressing, and of course, slices of
turkey.
The Troll smiled as she watched me devour
my meal. Then she
nonchalantly said, “Beaky tastes pretty good, doesn’t he?”
I cannot tell you the sense of horror that came over me.
I shoved back from the table and glared at Hank and Mom.
Never before had I realized that I lived in a family of
cannibals! Whoever heard
of eating a person’s pet!
Mom and Hank looked embarrassed, as well they should have.
I knew that the two of them had conspired in the crime.
I fled the dining room and the house, retreating to one of
the hideouts I had once shared with Beaky.
There I reflected on this sad
state of affairs. How
could I ever come to grips with the fact that I lived in a family of
cannibals, that Beaky would no longer be around to comfort me with
his companionship, and that he did in fact
taste pretty good.
I returned to Thanksgiving dinner.
Anyway, here’s to Beaky!
May he never be forgotten!
October 20,
2007
Herbie Getts was a couple of years older than Norm Nelson,
Vern Schulze and I. Our little group was about ten on the Halloween
night of which I am thinking. The major difference between us and
Herbie was that we considered Halloween to be a single night. Herbie
regarded it as a season.
Long before our little Halloween outing for treats,
Herbie started raiding the homes along our stretch of the highway.
He didn't bother with treats be went directly to tricks. He was a
purely destructive force. Outhouses were toppled, car windows waxed
over, mailboxes torn off their posts, gates sabotaged. As the three
of us set out on our Halloween night of trick-or-treating, Norm,
Vern and I had no inkling of the rage Herbie had aroused among the
neighbors.
In the unlikelihood homeowners would fail to give us a
treat, we planned to play a mean trick on them, putting a little
squiggle of soap on one of their windows. We laughed uproarously
over this brazen fiendishness. At the McWilliams, the home of a
gruff, burly logger, we trooped up onto the porch and bravely
knocked. No response. We waited, then knocked again. Already
starting to draw our bars of soap, we suddenly heard the backdoor of
the house open and close quietly. Someone was trying to sneak up on
us! Norm and I cleared a picket fence like two gazelles and streaked
off into the darkness. Vern, for some unknown reason, crouched down
to hide behind a tree no more than three-feet tall.
McWilliams caught him, of course. The sound of a gruff, angry
voice, no doubt yelling at some quivering object crouched down
behind a tree, drifted out to us. Norm and I were still picking up
speed, so it was difficult to know what was being said. Both of us
figured that was the end of Vern. Since he was our leader, we were
momentarily confused as how to proceed with our trick-or-treating.
Presently, Vern caught up with us. He had managed to persuade
Mr. McWilliams, that he was innocent of all previous mischief, part
of which had consisted of toppling the McWilliams' outhouse. The
toppling of the privy apparently required considerable strength, it
being occupied by Mr. McWilliams at the time. Herbie said later hat
he understood it had been accomplished by means of a pry pole and a
block of firewood used as a fulcrum, but he couldn't be positive
about the facts, because he had only heard them second hand.
Herbie had been extremely clever in covering his tracks. For
one thing, someone had slipped into the Getts' garage and waxed Mr.
Getts' car windows so thoroughly he was unable to drive to work the
next morning. We heard about this from Herbie himself. He had seemed
pleased at our amazement over the viciousness of the deed. Mr. Getts,
being no fool, suspected Herbie, as we found out later, but he had
no proof. As it turned out, Mr. Getts wasn't the kind of person who
needed proof, and Herbie ultimately paid a penalty of some sort.
On the night of our Halloween, however, the folks living
along the highway were on the alert for any tricksters that might
come their way. At one place, a big dog began to bark and tug at his
chain as we approached along the driveway. The door of the house
opened. We dived into a field of weeds. A man came out on the porch
carrying a shotgun. His wife emerged and stood next to him. She
played the beam of a flashlight over the weeds as we flattened our
bodies into the earth.
"You see anything, Pa?" the wife said.
"Nope. There's something out there all right. If it's them
Halloweeners, they's probably smart enough not to fool around here."
He was right about that.
Vern, Norm, and I headed home, without a single treat in our
little treat bags, at least none that I can recall.
We did one trick that night. On our way home, we decided to
play a joke on a farmer who was notorious for being lazy. We thought
we would cause him some work. So we hauled a number of large rocks
and placed them in his driveway in such a fashion that he would have
to get out of his car and move them. As were were going by on the
school bus the next morning, we saw him steer in and out around the
rocks without touching a single one! It was a major disappointment.
Those rocks, in fact, remained in his driveway for years afterwards.
Every Halloween I think back to that night so many years ago,
the night we put the rocks in the farmer's driveway. One Halloween
during a book tour I was staying at a hotel in a large American
City. As I recall, the local citizens referred to Halloween as
Devils Night or some such thing. I couldn't get dinner in the
restaurant on the top floor of the hotel, because all the tables had
been reserved. The restaurant provided the diners with a wonderful
vantage point to watch the firework-namely, the local pranksters
setting fire to buildings! "Ooooo! Look at that one!"
I watched the fireworks display on TV in my hotel room.
(Mostly, I wanted to make sure I didn't see my hotel featured.) Here
all these years I had felt bad about putting those rocks in the
farmer's driveway, even though they hadn't seemed to bother him all
that much. After watching Devil's Night, I didn't feel bad anymore.
October 7,
2007
People are always
asking me if Rancid Crabtree was a real person. Yes, he was. Did I
exaggerate him? No. I did not. The Russell family lived in close
proximity to Rancid--maybe too close of a proximity. Mae, the mother
of the Russell clan and one of my most favorite people in the whole
world, once admonished me in regard to Rancid. "Pat," she said, "you
cleaned him up way too much!"
I have to plead guilty. Normally, I try to avoid stretching a
fact even slightly, or varnishing up a truth, or allowing any
exaggerations to creep in accidentally. There are some people,
however, of such extreme personalities they require some
modification, if the story is to be published in a family magazine
like Outdoor Life. Also, in Rancid's case, I tried to tone him down
a bit, because otherwise readers might think I invented him.
I think it was Mae who told me that whenever she saw Rancid
coming down the drive toward the Russell house, she would shout,
"Quick, throw open the windows!" Mae was too kind a person to throw
open the windows once Rancid arrived, because that might embarrass
him. Rancid was pretty hard to embarrass, though.
Once my friend Norm Nelson and I were going fishing with
Rancid. He told us if we weren't at his place by the crack of dawn,
he would leave without us. When we arrived, we found Rancid still in
bed. Norm yelled at him. "Rancid, you told us to be here at the
crack of dawn and here you're not even dressed yet."
"Ah shore am," he said. When he got out of bed, we saw he was
dressed right down to his boots. He grabbed his fishing pole and
walked out the door. Norm and I followed. That's when it occurred to
us that it was actually foolish to take your clothes off at night
and then just put them back on again in the morning. We learned all
kinds of good things like that from Rancid, even though our mothers
wouldn't let us put them into practice.
Norm told me recently that any time his family had fried
chicken for dinner, Rancid showed up. Fried chicken was Rancid's
favorite food, and he apparently could smell it all the way to his
place. Norm is still upset about this half a century later. Because
Rancid was a guest, the plate of chicken was always passed to him
first. The old woodsman would hold his fork like a dagger and go
stab stab stab and take every choice piece of chicken, lined up on
his fork like shish kebab. Using his other grubby hand, he would
slide the chicken pieces onto his plate. Even now the irritation
rises in Norm's voice, as he remembers all the times he was left
gnawing on a chicken back.
Norm reminded me a few minutes ago of the time Rancid
strangled a skunk with his bare hands. He had tried to shoot the
skunk with his rifle and missed, so then he grabbed the rifle by the
barrel and swung it at the skunk. He missed and hit a log, breaking
the stock off the rifle. Furious, he then grabbed the skunk and
tried to strangle it. The skunk fought back with its entire arsenal.
The lesson all the neighbors learned from this episode is you never
want to strangle a skunk with your bare hands. Furthermore, you
never want to invite to dinner anyone who has done so.
Presently on this web site I am going to post some of the
pictures of many of the people I've written about over the years.
One of the pictures will be of a man without any identification.
Readers can guess as to what character this person represents. Does
this look like a man who would strange a skunk with his bare hands?
I'm not giving any clues.
October 1,
2007
Vernon
Allan Schulze passed away August 22, 2007, at age 75 years old.
I have written at
least 100 stories about Vern Schulze. Sometimes he was Crazy Eddie
Muldoon, sometimes Retch Sweeney, but usually Vern himself.
Vern was the calmest person
I've ever known. You could not ask for a better camping companion
when you are far back in the mountains with night closing in on you.
He was almost always rock-solid calm. Whenever Vern got excited, you
knew it was time to panic.
I can't recall many times that
Vern panicked. Once we came upon a fresh grizzly track up by Lake
Darling. The mud was still caving in on the sides of the track,
that's how fresh it was. While we were staring at the track, a
grouse exploded out of the brush right next to us. When I finally
caught up to Vern, I said, "It was just a grouse!" He said, "I know
it was just a grouse, but I couldn't stop anyway."
My first experience with Vern
in a panic situation occurred when we were about ten. We were
somewhere out in the Schulze's woods when we came upon a bunch of
mounds covered with wild roses. It was a very spooky situation. Then
Vern said, "I think it's an Indian graveyard." At that moment we
heard a hideous noise off in the brush. The next moment I became
aware of, I was out in the middle of our hayfield and still picking
up speed. It occurred to me that I had crossed a barbwire fence, a
ditch, a highway, another ditch, and another barbwire fence, and I
hadn't noticed any of them. Vern beat me home by ten minutes. The
strange thing was, we were never again able to find those mounds
with the wild roses growing on top of them.
I would like to make a clarification
here about the incident Vern and Gisela always referred to as "the
time Pat got lost." I wasn't lost! I knew exactly where I was. On
one side was a large rock and the other, a hard place.
Eventually Vern and Gisela's boys
got old enough to go on outings with us. By then the trails had
gotten a lot steeper and longer and the air a lot thinner. Wayne and
Jim never seemed to notice, though, because they were ignorant of
such things. They would rush ahead and start fishing the lake and
every so often run back down the trail and report to Vern and me how
the fish were biting. It was disgusting.
A while back I told my wife that I
would like to make one more trip into Pyramid Lake. She said, "Not
unless you take someone with you who knows CPR." Vern knew CPR but
would never use it on me. So I haven't been able to get back to
Pyramid Lake. I would still like to go, though, because I'm pretty
sure Vern is hanging around up there somewhere.
September 1, 2007
The reason I never
get anything done is that I always have to do something else first.
And before I can do that, I have to do another thing first.
And so on.
For example, the other day I decided to
build a shelf in my garage.
Not being a person of any carpenteresque talents or knowledge
or skills, I decided that the shelf would take me a whole day.
It took me four days.
I would not enter it in a woodworking contest but it is
serviceable. There’s no
point of putting a work of art in your garage, I always say.
What puzzled me the most, however, was that this simple shelf
took me four days to build.
I mentioned the mystery to my friend
Fenton Quagmire. Fenton carries around with him a vast fount of
useful knowledge.
"Every one-day job takes four days," he
said. "Don’t you know
that?"
Actually, I didn’t know that.
All this time I thought a one-day job took one day.
Right away, though, I realized that Fenton had provided me
with a wonderful insight to the problems that confront most people
and especially politicians.
Suppose I wanted to start a war.
(Don’t worry, I can’t even start an argument.)
I might think that this will be a fairly simple,
straight-forward war. At
the outside, it shouldn’t take me more than a couple of years to win
it. Wrong!
According to Fenton’s formula, it will take eight years.
But then I have to apply the principle that before you do
anything, you always have to do something else first, and before you
do that, you have to do something else, etc.
By the time you work all the way back to the war, you will
have forgotten why you wanted to hold it in the first place.
If my war turned out to be anything like
my shelf, it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble anyway.
July 1, 2007
Let me say right off that I am happy the Fourth of July has
been made safe for my grandchildren. I would hate to see them
out exploding things, by which I mean fingers, toes, noses and eyes
and assorted other body parts.
Still, the Fourth of Julys I am remembering now, with the help of
certain scars, were wonderful. Mostly what we exploded in those days
were firecrackers. No doubt we had sparklers and various other
sparkly things, but they are not worth remembering. Firecrackers
were the thing. I think they must have been ridiculously cheap
because even the poorest of the poor kids had them in major
quantities. I’m thinking something like a package of 20 for a
nickel. Don’t scoff, a nickel was major money back in the
1940’s, with WWII going full blast. Perhaps it was all the daily
risks and dangers and precariousness of lives during the war that
parents could not be concerned about one-inch long explosives, not
with 16-inch guns blasting away in the Pacific and the Normandy
coast. It was a matter of proportion.
The standard procedure for igniting a firecracker, at least when I
had reached the adventurous age of ten, was to hold the firecracker
between two fingers of one hand and light it with the fingers of the
other hand, usually employing a glowing "punk" for the task.
As soon as the firecracker was lit, you threw it. If your reflexes
were good, the cracker exploded in midair. My first and only attempt
at throwing a lighted firecracker taught me that I did not have the
reflexes for this particular kind of entertainment. I touched the
glowing punk to the fuse and—BANG!
In case you had a coddled childhood and therefore never had a
firecracker explode between two of your fingers, I will describe the
sensation. I remember it quite well, even though the experience
occurred more than half a century ago. First, the blast, which comes
as a major surprise, drives all the blood out of our fingers, and
leaves them numb. This is good. You look at them. They are
spoon-shaped and flat and black. You know instinctively that as soon
as the numbness goes away, your fingers are going to provide you
with a major load of HURT!
I ran in the house and showed my mother. She looked at my fingers,
shook her head, and then walked away, no doubt saying something
like, "Now where did I leave that cup of coffee." The typical
mother, or so I believe, never having had one, might at least have
said, "Are you stupid or what? Don’t throw firecrackers!" My own
mother, who was actually quite brilliant, and who regarded her only
son as "slow," would have seen no point in exclaiming the obvious.
She knew that even though I was slow, I would at least now have
learned never ever to throw firecrackers again.
I must say, though, that if one of my young grandsons ran up to me
this Fourth of July and showed me two flat, spoon-shaped, blackened
fingers, I would feel a certain sense of nostalgia, before I walked
away, saying, "Now where did I leave that cup of coffee?"
March 15, 2007
Time for me to get ready for another book tour, this one for my
second Bo Tully mystery novel, Avalanche. I think this novel
is pretty good. I thought the first one, The Blight Way, was
pretty good, too, especially considering that it was my first. I
learned a lot about writing mystery novels from doing that first
one, and I hope that learning shows up in this second one.
One of the things I learned is that, even
when the characters aren’t on deck at the moment, they have to be
somewhere, doing something. They don’t just disappear and show up
later when you need them. They possess lives. They have past lives,
too, so you have to take care of that. Characters can be practically
a full-time job. They’re running all over the place constantly, and
it drives you almost crazy keeping track of them.
As you can see, I’m easily distracted. I
meant to tell you about my book tour for Avalanche. You can
find the tour schedule somewhere else on this website—at least I
hope you can. My daughter Peggy runs the site and she’s pretty
responsible. Pretty anyway.
I have been doing
book tours for about thirty years. My first book tour was from my
home in Spokane, Washington to a bookstore in Libby, Montana. That
was the only bookstore to indicate they wanted me for a signing. I
recall the signing vividly. I had forgotten the hour difference
between Spokane and Libby, so I showed up an hour late. The line
stretched out of the store and those persons outside had been
standing in the rain for about an hour. Montanans are tough. Any
time I have a new book out, I make sure I get over to Libby for a
signing. The town is filled up with very special people. The book,
by the way, was A Fine And Pleasant Misery. It has now been
in print for 30 years. One day in a New York elevator I met a
publisher I knew, and he said, “I wish you had let us see A Fine
And Pleasant Misery.” I said, “I did. You rejected
it.” Revenge has this tart but rather sweet taste.
On this tour for
Avalanche (remember that title) I’ll be going to Texas. I’ve
been to Texas many times, and it will be good to get back. There was
a Texas lady who was very upset that I didn’t get down her way on my
tour for The Blight Way. She’s one of the reasons I’m happy
to be headed to Texas this time. The other reason is that I just
like the place. I have a lot of friends in and from Texas.
Then I’m going to
Michigan. Back in my early days of book touring, I used to rent a
car in Detroit, and then drive all over the state, usually ending up
in Kalamazoo. People in Michigan have this thing they do with their
hand when you ask directions. They hold the hand palm up with the
thumb sticking out, so that it presumably represents a map of
Michigan. Then with a finger from their other hand they point to a
place on their palm and say, “This is where you want to be.” I can’t
tell you all the times I’ve been hopelessly lost in Michigan,
usually somewhere along the life line. Nowadays, the publisher
wisely furnishes me with a driver.
My Avalanche
tour will also take me to Washington, Idaho, Colorado and
Arizona. Years ago my wife and I drove all over the United States on
a book tour. That was for The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw. The
tour helped keep the book on the New York Times Bestseller List for
14 weeks. Or maybe it was 12 weeks but let’s say 14.
I remember we walked all over Boston and were
lost so often it seemed as if a sizable portion of the residents
there had to help us find our way to wherever we were going. I, of
course, was used to finding my way by determining on which side of
the trees the moss was growing. The problem with that is, moss
doesn’t care one iota whether you live or die out there. So I have
great affection for the kindness of Bostonians.
One day the Italian doorman at our hotel was
helping us load our luggage in the car and noticed a pile of The
Night the Bear Ate Goombaw there. He said, “Did you write
that?” I said, “Yep.” He said, “Do you know what a goombaw is?” I
said, “It’s just a name I made up.” He said, “No, a goombaw is what
an Italian man calls his best friend, his goombaw.” And that is how
I learned what a goombaw is. Book tours can be very educational, at
least if you grew up in Idaho.
Also on that tour, I had received a letter from a
young Amish fellow, saying if we would stop by his place he would
give us a horse-carriage ride around the Amish community. So we did.
We met a great many Amish and I found out that they possess a
wonderful sense of humor, a trait I believe to be a rather common
among them. Our host made brooms for a living, and he made one for
my wife while we watched. She still keeps it in perfect condition. I
think she’s never figured out how to turn it on.
February
15, 2007
My wife, Bun, has
suggested that I start writing a blog. I think this is because I
have opinions about everything, and she is the sole recipient.
I should admit right off
that I have never even read a blog, so I’m not sure what it is that
bloggers do. I will start off by giving some advice to persons
interested in a career in writing. The late Dr. Johnson once said
something to the effect, “Only a blockhead writes for any reason
other than money.” Or maybe it was my old friend Rancid Crabtree who
said that. In any case, I am in general agreement with that opinion.
Some years ago I gave a
series of workshops on writing, and people were charged a great deal
of money to attend. I cancelled the workshops because I got tired of
them, and also because I was afraid the fraud might be
discovered. What the workshop boiled down was this bit of advice:
Set up a schedule in which you do nothing but write two hours a day,
seven days a week, and within four to six months you will know if
you are a writer.
What happens in that four
to six months is that your mind will undergo a peculiar change—or
maybe not. If not, you will know you weren’t intended to be a writer
and then can direct your attention to some useful endeavor. People
can go through their whole lives thinking they might have become a
writer if they had only put their minds to it. This little exercise
will do away with all speculation in that regard.
I set up my own schedule
when I was about 30, writing every night between 7 and 9, so as not
to interfere with my favorite TV programs. Up to that time, I had
written sporadically, occasionally selling a factual feature to a
local or regional publication, along with photos to illustrate
it. My rate of pay was about ten cents an hour, although probably
not that exorbitant. Once I got my schedule going, I stuck to it
tenaciously. After awhile, as the time approached for me to go to
the typewriter, I would begin to feel an almost magnetic pull in
that direction. But here is an important secret. If your writing
time is between 7 and 9, write only between those two hours. Start
at exactly 7:00 o’clock and end at exactly 9:00 o’clock, even if you
must stop halfway through a sentence.
I was still writing
factual pieces in those days. I would do research as I had time
during the day, never during my writing time. It was during that
period that I sold my first factual piece to a national magazine,
Sports Illustrated. (In a later blog, I will tell how that
article came about, because I think the same techniques can be
applied by any writer interested in doing factual pieces.) One
evening I was writing a factual piece on the uses of telemetry in
the study of wildlife, and finished the piece about 8:00 o’clock. I
still had another hour of writing time left, but no material
available for another article. So I decided simply to write some
nonsense for the next hour. The basic idea, following up on the
telemetry article, was that eventually all wildlife would be hooked
up with transmitters so that they could be located any time of day
or night. This would simplify hunting a great deal. You’d just go to
the nearest telemetry center and ask the whereabouts of a deer,
grouse or whatever. I didn’t think the piece was particularly good,
but I had a rule, and that was that anything I wrote, no matter how
bad I thought it might be, I sent it out to a magazine. (Critics
have picked up on this comment and said they surmised as much!) A
rejection came from Sports Afield. I sent the ms out again. A
rejection came from Outdoor Life. I sent it out again. This
time a small envelope arrived in the mail from Field & Stream. I
tore it open. Inside was a check for $300 and a small brass band
that burst into a rendition of “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here,” or
something like it. It was a wonderful experience. The piece was
called “I’ll Never Forget Old 5789-A” and is collected in my first
book, A FINE AND PLEASANT MISERY. Suddenly I had become a humor
writer. Although my wife claims I am exaggerating, I believe I sold
50 humor pieces the following year, all products of my two-hour
sessions.
Messages to Pat can be
sent to probideaux@aol.com.
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