Words I Wish I Wrote

by Kerry Blair

I’m stealing words from another LDS author today, so I thought it only appropriate to filch a title too. The full title of Robert Fulghum’s book is Words I Wish I Wrote: A Collection of Writing that Inspired My Ideas. The full title of my blog is Words I Wish I Wrote: A Collection of Ideas that Inspired My Writing. There's a difference.

Several years ago, in preparing to teach a writers’ workshop, I wrote to authors whose work I admire and asked them what difficulties they’d faced on the road to fame and fortune. I received excellent responses which I’ll share in the coming weeks. (I have one from you, Jeff. Remember?) But I’ve saved my favorite for first.

David G. Woolley, author of the bestselling and breathtaking Promised Land series is one of my heroes, personally and professionally. Goodness but that man can write! I was stunned to learn he wasn’t born with a silver pen in his mouth, but he swears he had to work hard to achieve excellence. (I’d really hoped he knew a magic spell or something.) This is what he sent me then. He’s given me permission to use it again today. (Okay, so I didn’t steal it, exactly.)

“My biggest obstacle was a simple one,” DGW wrote. “I couldn’t write and everyone was willing to tell me about it except, of course, those closest to me. My sister stared at my lips for more than an hour one afternoon while I read my manuscript aloud. When I finished she said, “Gee, Dave, are you hungry?” That’s when I began to understand that I didn’t know the first thing about plotting, foreshadowing, creating a voice for a character, or any of the other basic principles of good fiction.

“There are, by the way, principles of good fiction. They are time-honored “rules” developed over the centuries by people like you and me who fumble over their paragraphs, bumble over their word choices and trip on their syntax, all in an effort to find just the right way to get across the stories that rise and roll on the waves of our souls. Writing fiction is storytelling, but we must become more than storytellers. Ours is an art of communicating emotions, creating suspense, describing the grit and grime and smell of a place and if we do it well we transport the reader to a place just beyond eternity without leaving the Lazy-Boy. It sure ain’t easy, but it’s doable.

“You may need inborn talent to be a great writer, but all I had was determination, a computer and story to tell. I got me some books and I read what other writers – other gritty writers without inborn talent – had to say about writing. I wasn’t the brightest writer around. I had to practice the advice I read about until I knew in my bones what they were telling me on the page. I practiced until what they wrote about became the way I thought about writing fiction. And then I set out to write a novel.

“I didn’t let the size of the project scare me away. Writing a novel is like building a house all by yourself. You spend a day nailing boards to the floor. (You learn to name your viewpoint character in the first few lines of a scene.) You frame a wall. (You learn to narrate dialogue.) You lay some brick. (You learn to foreshadow.) You lay some tile. (You write an action scene.) You place some windows. (You write a dialogue.) After twelve or more hours of hard work, you turn around on you way home and look back and it doesn’t look much more complete than when you showed up that morning. But you keep at it, day after day, and slowly the novel you dreamed about begins to take shape. The walls rise from the foundation, the roof angles against the sky, and one day you understand what can be accomplished because you have one very important thing: your first novel.”

I wish I’d written that.