Because I had invested so much time and effort in learning to write, I decided I might just as well keep going and become a writer. Besides, the life of the writer seemed the perfect one for me. You could get into it for practically nothing, which was what I had at the time: a typewriter, paper, envelopes and postage stamps, the ultimate in low overhead. As with any sophomoric writer, my goal was to become rich and famous, but I would have been well satisfied to earn a modest living in obscurity, if I could do so by writing. To my fresh, uncluttered mind, writing seemed to offer an escape from actual work, for which I had shown little aptitude and even less enthusiasm, as various of my former employers would vigorously attest.
   Throughout my undergraduate years, I worked feverishly at becoming a writer, the horrifying prospect of an actual job looming ever closer. I took every writing course offered at WSU, wrote for the campus newspaper and occasionally for the school literary magazine, in which was published my first piece of fiction, "The Lady Who Kept Things."
   Written in a creative writing class, the story is about a daffy housewife who can't bear to discard anything: string, foil, newspapers, table scraps, etc. She teeters on the brink of insanity, and for some reason I've forgotten, her husband decides to nudge her over the edge. He first poisons her little dog, thinking the loss of the pet will do the dastardly deed. But she has the dog stuffed and keeps it posed rigidly in front of the fireplace. The husband poisons her cat. Same result. He poisons her goldfish, which as I recall, she has pickled in their own bowl, probably with lead shot in their bellies to keep them upright. And so on. Finally, when the husband has exhausted his wife's supply of pets, he decides as a last resort that the loss of her husband will tip the wretched woman over the brink. Oddly, she takes the news of his departure rather well. She even offers him a last serving of his favorite soup. Stupidly, the husband accepts. As the dose of arsenic begins to take effect on him, he notices through blurring vision that his wife is emptying out the freezer. The final line of the story is, "It was a very large freezer."
   Academically, I wasn't doing all that well as a college sophomore, except for English. Nevertheless, it came as a bit of a shock to receive a note from the dean of the College of Arts and Letters saying he wished to see me. The dean, a former Rhodes Scholar, clearly was a person possessed of a serious attitude toward academic pursuits. His note could only mean bad news for me. I wasn't sure whether to gather up my meager belongings before I went to see him, or afterwards, when I might not be allowed on campus long enough to pack. When I entered his office, the dean glanced up at me sternly, a faculty countenance with which I was not unfamiliar.
   "Oh, it's you, McManus," he said, brightening. "I just wanted to tell you I enjoyed very much that little story of yours in the literary magazine about the lady who kept things. Quite good! Excellent, in fact!"
   I'm unsure what field of scholarship the dean pursued, but probably not literary criticism. Nevertheless, the dean's nugget of praise has remained in my psychic poke for forty years and more, and from time to time I take it out and bask in its healing glow. Never ignore or forget any bit of praise for your writing, deserved or not. Praise possesses excellent restorative properties, particularly for the writer of humor.
   As a final project for the term, the creative writing prof assigned us a paper in which we were to reveal our thought processes, if any, employed in the creation of one of our stories, the paper to be read aloud to the class. I reported on "The Lady Who Kept Things." The report, my first venture into humor, sent the class into a paroxysm of mirth, a response my fellow creative writers usually reserved for somber and serious works by their classmates. It was wonderful! The professor laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses to wipe away tears. Surely, I thought, I will finally get an A on a paper for this class. The paper came back with a B on it. I stormed into the prof's office and complained about the B. "That paper had everybody in stitches, including yourself," I told him.
   "Yes, McManus," he replied, "it was a very funny paper, very funny indeed. But this is a class in the writing of serious literature. And you have to admit, that paper of yours wasn't serious." What could I say.
   So there is was, the cruel reality with which nearly all writers of humor must come to grips: the doors of literature are closed to them. My creative writing professor taught me that lesson early on. I didn't write another humor piece for fifteen years, and then, only on a whim.
   While still in college, I developed an interest in journalism and was hired as a stringer, or correspondent, for the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune. There I had the good fortune to receive occasional tutelage from one of the finest newspaper editors in the country, Bill Johnston, whose editorials in his small newspaper had won him a national reputation. In occasional coffee sessions at a Lewiston Cafe, Bill imparted to me a greater sense of journalism than any book I'd ever read or class I'd ever taken.
   I'm quite sure it was a recommendation from Bill Johnston that landed me my first job after college, as a reporter on the Daily Olympian in the state capital, Olympia, Washington. The paper was small but the staff good, and the editor quickly honed my writing style down to a sharp edge, or at least an edge. Perhaps more important, the number of stories he assigned me, to be pounded out by deadline or else, soon gave me a detachment in regard to my writing that has served me well ever since.
   To write for publication is to expose yourself on the printed page. You alone are out there, psychically naked for all to see and comment on, often unkindly. I believe it is the inability of beginning writers to achieve at least a certain degree of detachment from their writing that defeats so many of them before they even get started. Without this distancing, any criticism of your writing will seem devastating, even incapacitating, whereas with the proper amount of detachment it will seem merely cruel and unusual punishment.
   A long time ago, I gave up reading reviews of my books, even though most were favorable and some were glowing. There is always the bad one, written by some insipid idiot who wouldn't know sheer brilliance if he fell on it. Reading reviews, no matter how wonderful, is always a downer. You can read sentence after sentence of the most wonderful praise, but the reviewer, perhaps to indicate his objectivity, feels he must, near the very end of the review, insert at least one negative comment: "Even though this work is one of the three greatest novels ever written, I did feel the author made excessive use of the comma." In response, the enraged author screams, "What! How dare that fool criticize my commas?" One negative comment will burn holes in the author's psyche for years afterwards. Take my word, it's best not to read reviews.
   After my brief stint at newspapering, I was next hired to edit and write for the publications department back at Washington State University, a job which gave me the opportunity to complete my master's degree in English. This in turn allowed me to land a job teaching English and Journalism at Eastern Washington University (then a state college). Teaching, much to my surprise, turned out to top the scale of hard work. Bad choice! Bad choice! But what could I do? Because I lacked a Ph.D., my future in the groves of academe promised very thin pickings. So I decided to get serious about writing. I set up a writing schedule of two hours a day, 7:00 pm–9:00 PM, seven evenings a week, and tried never to miss a single day.
   The writing schedule required that I write for two hours each day-not do research, not read about writing, not think about writing, not make notes about what I intended to write, but actually to pound the keys for a full two hours, whether or not I had anything to write about. I hated it! But after a couple of months of sticking ruthlessly to this schedule, I experienced a peculiar psychological adjustment. Like Pavlov's dog anticipating the supper bell, but with less drooling, I began to feel a compulsive pull toward the typewriter as seven o'clock approached each night. I could barely wait to get back to whatever story or article I had been working on. Also, I noticed that my writing had become, if not easier, substantially better. Rather good phrases appeared on the page, seemingly before I had even thought of them. Sometimes it seemed as if the typewriter, my old manual Royal Standard, was doing the writing by itself. I don't believe you can succeed as a writer, at least professionally, unless writing becomes virtually compulsive for you. Otherwise, you must fall back on self-discipline, and we all know what a bore that is.
   Set up a daily writing schedule. That is the best advice I can offer any aspiring writer. If nothing else, the schedule will make you think of yourself as a writer. I also have a theory that daily writing raises the subconscious to a level where it accesses the conscious and slips into it the words, phrases and ideas that appear magically on paper, seemingly before you have even though of them. In any case, after a few months of sticking to your schedule, you should be rewarded with an astonishing improvement in your writing. If not, there's always computer programming.
   After setting up my writing schedule, I suddenly began selling articles and stories to a wide variety of national magazines, something that had never occurred with my irregular bursts of writing. Checks large and small and minuscule began arriving in the mail, but no matter the size, each conveyed to me the sense that at last I had become a professional writer, namely one who gets paid for his or her writing.
   I wrote my first humor piece one evening in 1968. I had not intended to write a humor piece, but after completing an article on the use of telemetry in the study of wildlife, that is, hooking up wild creatures to radio transmitters in order to spy on their nocturnal affairs, I still had an hour left to go in my writing period. Not wishing to start another factual article that evening, I decided to use up the remaining hour simply by writing some nonsense. My head still filled with the telemetry piece, it occurred to me to extend that topic into absurdity-namely that sometime in the future all wildlife would be hooked up with radio transmitters.
   The completed piece didn't strike me as particularly funny, but my writing program had yet another rule: anything I wrote during my writing session had to be mailed out to market. So I dutifully mailed off the manuscript. One day several weeks later, an envelope arrive from Field & Stream magazine. It contained a check for $300, along with a small brass band, which immediately struck up a happy tune in celebration of my first sale of a humor piece.
   I made some quick calculations. Recently, I'd received $750 for a factual article that required months of research. The $300 humor piece required no research and only an hour of writing time. Hmmm, I mused. Let's see now, I write two hours a day, which means I can produce two $300-humor pieces every night, and I write seven days a week. That works out to $600 a day, $4,200 a week! I'll be rich! Rich!
   Okay, so it didn't quite work out that way. But that is how I became a writer of humor.