Eating An Elephant

When I used to give my workshop on ‘How to get Started Writing’ I always had a cute opening. Perhaps not cute but truthful and to the point. I told the class: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Then I added: “How do you write a book?  One page at a time.” That has been the story of my life; one plodding step followed by a pause then another step in (hopefully) the right direction. Steven King I am not but I can still produce stories….and have for some time now.

My first novel was written in 1973 over a period of one year. Five days a week after a long day at the office (marketing and selling television programs) I retreated to my office (second bedroom) and pounded away on my trusty old L.C. Smith typewriter.

Most evenings produced roughly ten pages over the duration of many hours. Then the next night, each of those ten pages were edited and rewritten all over again. On and on it went until the story was completed. A second western was written a year later. Both languished in two binders until 2005 when the first novel was scanned onto floppy discs (remember those?), rewritten on a Mac then transferred to a word document and finally rewritten on a PC. It lay dormant for another year or two and was finally resurrected then as my first serious attempt at novel writing.

After that first novel became ‘Apache Death Wind’, another storyline captured my imagination. ‘Love in the A Shau’ was a semi-autobiographical story of my time in the service and my first love. It first germinated as a 56-page treatment and finally wound up as my second published novel. After ‘Apache Death Wind’ and ‘A Shau,’ another novel entitled ‘Debris’ began to fester in my brain.

After Sharon and I had been wintering in the Coachella Valley for several years, I’d become a native in mind and spirit. The mountains had become background to my early morning runs and afternoon bike rides. Our cache of friends has grown to include folks from around the country. Our neighbors became real people who watched our house and we watched theirs. Downtown was seldom frequented unless company was in town.

L.A. became a two-hour Sunday morning ride to the Pantages Theater in Hollywood and Laguna Beach became a weekend destination for long beach walks and ocean side fantasies. Other times, Joshua Tree and the high desert beckoned us with its vast expanse of nothingness.

Somehow, I knew there was a story there but couldn’t quite grasp it yet. Old Palm Springs had long since faded into a vapid memory to the oldsters still around town and the new Palm Springs hadn’t yet shaken itself out of the recession.

Palm Springs wasn’t the small village as some natives liked to imagine it nor was it a mecca for the rich and famous like down valley. Palm Springs was a storied history book of Hollywood lore, scandal and glamor. But that was its past. Its future was still being debated in the Desert Sun, Chamber of Commerce meetings and during the cocktail hour in many backyards. I wanted to tell the story of old Palm Springs but in the context of a new Palm Springs arising from its ashes. But where and how?

The title came to me several years ago as I was walking by the Greyhound bus depot in down-town Palm Springs. The depot has since been moved to another location but at that time it was a gathering spot for those folks one wouldn’t normally see in Palm Springs. Those were the homeless folks and vagrants as well as sundry folks whose only means of transportation was the bus. A thought jumped into my mind: “They were all just debris from the West Coast.”

Fair or not, the label stuck and I began to wonder about those folks who have ended up in Palm Springs because that was as far as the bus would take them. Or perhaps they came here in hopes of a new career or a new start on life. I began to imagine what kind of folks end up here because there is nowhere else for them to go.

The tall striking blond who claimed to have just flown in from India where she was doing charity work. She kept reappearing day after day at a local coffee shop, always dressed in the same clothes and asking about jobs in town. She was beautiful, mysterious, and probably diseased.

I can’t count the number of older men who came into the place, digging into their torn pockets for change for a cup of coffee. Their odors linger long after they’ve left. Some of them have dogs that smelled better than they do.

The tourists, often foreigners, also looking for their morning fix and a taste of the other side of

Palm Springs. I began to build a cast of characters who would populate my novel. Each would bring a different story to those pages. It would be stories of love, betrayal, ambition, lust, and death.

It would be another side of Palm Springs. The everyday lives of people not associated with the green golf courses, the shimmering blue pools, the magnificent mountains, the glamor of Hollywood and the hedonistic sub-culture of some folks who come to visit.

It would be about real (in my imagination) folks who live in paradise but fight hell in their lives more often than not. But it would also be about the longing for love, the fight for survival, the quest for sanity in an insane world, driving ambition and painful betrayal. It would be the flip side of the Palm Springs that the tourists never see. And I hope it would make for one heck of a storyline. ‘Debris; the trilogy’ was the result.

That then was the beginning. It seems like an eternity ago. ‘Apache Death Wind’ turned into a trilogy as did the ‘Debris’ series. More plays, screenplays and blogs kept piling up. A skinny little hippo named Waleed nudged his way into my writing as did a comic strip featuring the grandchildren.

Each carried the same DNA. Small tentative steps followed by a rough outline that slowly morphed into something more tangible and interesting. Now several novels have their own accompanying mini web sites. ChatGPT is a ready reference to the increasingly complex and challenging craft of story-telling and writing.

It all began many years ago during those long winter nights, huddled over a typewriter and trying to tell a story that captured my imagination and hopefully that of future readers. One step at a time like eating an elephant.

Learning to be a Writer

“Have Gun – Will Travel.”

Paladin was the first to grab hold of my fertile imagination and inspire me to go out West and face those bandits just like he did. Every Saturday night, in stark black and white, the old man dressed in black faced down his opponents and always won the gunfight. If I couldn’t be him, I could at least tell his story. Or so I thought.

It didn’t work out quite that way.

Writing long hand on that yellow legal pad wasn’t the same as my trusty LC Smith typewriter that came years later. So, after toiling for weeks, I ended up with a great story (or so I thought in my 7^th grade imagination) but no idea what to do with it. Paladin ended up with a stack of other disjointed attempts at storytelling and was forgotten by the challenges of 8^th grade math.

After Paladin grew stale and went nowhere, I turned to the jungle and tales of Tarzan. He then morphed into Conan, the Barbarian. Unfortunately, none of these super heroes (before there were real super heroes) ever came to fruition. They all withered away on the vine called distraction, lack of patience and total ignorance of this thing called the craft of writing.

After youthful efforts at cartoon drawings, poetry scribbles, comic book rough cuts and very short stories, there came a long period of nothingness. Then, after entering the real world of work, I ever so slowly began adding writing projects to my side hustles. Most of them were educational television scripts. They proved useful fodder for conversation when I met my future bride who was an education major in college. Gradually more writing projects became a standard part of my own video production business.

Fast forward many years and I found myself giving workshops on ‘How to Become a Writer.’ After years of stumbling around the world of writing, I was finally getting a grasp on the task ahead if I wanted to cross the Styx and add the handle of ‘writer’ to my mantle of achievements.

Statistically, something like eighty-one percent of the population would like to write a novel. In reality, only six percent ever finish the task. There are many and varied reasons why so many people fail. I try to emphasize in my class that it’s really just a series of simple steps to climb that Everest called writing.

First and foremost, remember that writing is a craft, an art form, a learned skill, and a discipline. Like anything else worth pursuing, it takes time and effort. There are no shortcuts or magic pills to take. You need three things to become a writer:

            Desire…you won’t know if you have it unless you try.

            Perseverance…you won’t know if you have it unless you try.

            Talent…you won’t know if you have it unless you try.

Believe it or not, writing is one of the easiest things to learn to do no matter if it is a novel, a play, a screenplay or anything else. You just need a process / a routine / steps-to-take to do it. Too often, beginning writers focus on the end result and are intimidated by the thought of completing a novel, an essay, a blog or even a short story. As the old Chinese proverb goes, a long journey begins with one small step.

Where can you get your ideas if you have no idea what to write about? The caveat here should be: what is your passion? what drives you? what topic would make you want to get up each morning and write? Remember, you are not writing for anyone else but yourself.

The source of ideas is endless: newspaper and magazine articles, books, movies, television, conversations, people you know, your past experiences, other people’s experiences, things you have witnessed, etc.

So then, how do you organize your ideas?

First step, find a place to write and only write. It will become your magic place and will set a mindset for you. If you can set up a time schedule, a routine, that’s great. But just having a place (only for writing) will help adjust your mind to the task of writing.

When I began writing a long time ago, I had an office in the basement of my home. At the time, I was working fulltime for public television, running my own business, managing two apartment buildings and trying to be an involved father. That office was where I conducted my business. But right around the corner in the laundry room was a countertop and that was my writing area and I only wrote there…nothing else.

Everyone has their own body clock. Only YOU know when the best time for YOU is to write. This has to be the best time for you (and not someone else). My most creative time is early in the morning or at least by 9:00am after my quiet time and breakfast. When I was still working fulltime it was whenever I could find the time.

Organizing your ideas is the next step.  Begin by just putting ideas, phrases, dialogue, facts, etc. on paper or the computer screen. Two things will happen:

1.      First, you will have captured your thoughts and ideas. Do whatever research is necessary.

2.      Secondly, they will organize themselves.

Then build a Treatment / Outline. Once you have enough information then begin to organize it with a beginning, middle and end or by chapters, or chronologically, sequential order.

Take that treatment to final written form.

1. Once you have an outline you are ready to begin.

2. Begin by filling in each scene with your notes already written.

3. Once that’s done, let it cool off. Walk away for a period of time then go back to it.

4.  ALL writing takes place in rewriting, not the initial first pass at writing.

Surrounding the art of writing are universal standards and truisms:

It’s all about story-telling

The essence of good drama is conflict

Focus on the story itself and character development verses sets, casts, scenes

Don’t preach (be very careful with your message or you’ll turn off your audience.

So far, over a period of roughly eighteen years, I have written: 14 novels, 2 novellas, 18 plays, 8 movie scripts, 2 children’s books (each in four languages), a comic strip, a book of poetry, 700 blogs and 9 original songs (for one of my plays.) Now comes the hard part. How do I get my product out into the ‘real world?’

Writing is step one, sharing it with the world is step two. Yet, even if I am not able to produce more plays (eighteen so far) or expand my reach of novel readers, I still have to soul-soothing satisfaction of knowing that while Paladin got away, I’ve corralled a whole lot of other stories and they’re pretty darn good, if I say so myself.

Good luck on your journey of becoming ‘a writer.’