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Welcome I said, “What on earth am I going to put here?” and someone said, “Put down why you write.” So... I first began to write, badly, in high school, where I created characters that my high school English teacher, J. B. Close, of blessed memory, told me were shallow. He was, alas, right, and the rightness of his assessment was knocked into my head in creative writing workshops at Hollins College (now Hollins University) a school which had, and has, a wonderful writing program with the goal of teaching students to write like themselves, and not like the creative writing professor. (This is rarer than you would think.) I have written a lot, some of which I am not going to tell you about. I have written radio commercials for Custer’s Last Sandwich Stand in Fresno, California, featuring the Singing Pickles. (“Oh, you must be a lover of your landlady’s daughter, or you don’t get a second piece of pie!”) I have written ads for panty girdles. I have written the text for a book of very bad paintings of California missions. I have written local history, book reviews, obituaries, wedding stories, and a paperback plantation saga under a name that will forevermore be secret. If you want to write, none of this will do you any harm, and will actually make you some money, probably more money than you will make writing novels. But writing novels is more fun. People who write novels get to slip on other people’s skin and look through their eyes (or their windows) for a while. Nothing can beat that. So that’s why I write novels. |
