Serialize

  So, as I’m bound down by nonfiction—one down, two to go—I’m still working on fiction.  My current project, beyond about a dozen stories ready to submit, is converting one of my published stories into a novel.

I’m a self-taught writer.  I’ve never taken a composition class.  I don’t know the conventions of plotting out a story other than by having read many, many books.  I also know that many classic writers of the western canon weren’t trained writers either.  Our society seems to think you have to have a degree to be able to do anything.

While I don’t doubt that degrees help, what is missing is the awareness that sometimes writing skill is a gift.

Gifts benefit from development, sure.  Today, however, if you majored in something else and you never prospered enough to afford to get that MFA, you’ll find the establishment a struggle.  All of which is to say, I hope I’m doing this right.

I’ve written seven novels so far.  A famous writer I know never took a writing course and he tells me that’s how he does it.  He just writes.  His early novels got attention and he shifted to what he does now after that.  He found an agent and the rest is history.

I began writing fiction in about fourth or fifth grade.  I suppose that means I’ve been doing this nearly half a century.  Other things have intervened—jobs, mostly—but you’ve got to wonder if any of that counts.

So I’m trying to plot out my eighth novel.  I watch a few videos and talk to a few friends about how to do it, but it seems to me that the way is to just keep writing.  The story ideas come to me as I do that.  Is that the wrong way to do it?  I wouldn’t know.

Many of the writers I admire were self-taught.  They started, however, before publishing became big business.  Now breaking in without a degree is, well, largely fiction.