How to Fail as an Author

So, there I was, a few chapters into Book 4 of The Travels of Jacob Wolf, and an idea I’d been kicking around for a while came roaring to the front of my mind, suddenly fully formed and demanding to be heard, and next thing I know, I’m writing two books, one a continuation of my Old West tale of a bounty hunter and the other a non-fiction piece where I recount the myriad mistakes I’ve made in 40 years of trying to become a rich and famous author.

How to Fail as an Author isn’t my first non-fiction book. A few years back I published my memoir on my first 13 years as a teacher, You Want to do What? For that one, I posted the whole book, chapter by chapter, in my e-mail newsletter. When it was published, the e-book went to #1 on Amazon’s short humorous non-fiction reads, which must be a really small category, but hey, I was number one!

This time, I only plan to post one chapter for free public consumption, although later I may post a table of contents once I settle on final chapter names. That opening chapter — unedited for the most part — is here in this post. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to leave comments about what you like and dislike about it and I’ll consider those as I continue writing the book.

Chapter One

The Building Blocks

I have always loved to read. My mom, who never progressed past eighth grade, gave me that gift from the very beginning with books like The Teddy Bear Twins and A Pickle for a Nickel, which we read over and over when I was very young. We were regulars at the Public Library of Enid and Garfield County in northern Oklahoma, and later, she would jump through a lot of hoops to buy me birthday and Christmas gifts of books in a city without a bookstore decades before Amazon.com became a thing.

More recently, I retired from a 17-year career as an English teacher, mostly at the high school level. Before that, I spent 10 years as a newspaper reporter or corporate writer or public relations hack.

Words and language and stories have always been important to me.

Good grades in school weren’t that kind of priority, though. School was just something I had to do because my parents made me go. I didn’t like it. I wasn’t popular. The teachers were usually boring. We were inside most of the day. And, later, there were bullies. I passed because I had to, and it was shameful to fail a class. This included my English classes. I did enough to get by with a C, or maybe a B, and that was good enough.

Things were different in the early 1980s. In Enid, Oklahoma, at least, you didn’t go to high school until 10th grade, at which point you had to take Composition I and II. Kids who did well were invited to take Composition III. I was not invited. There were literature classes. American Literature was required. I took more because, you know, I had to be there, had to take classes, so I took classes where I could read; Short Fiction and Non-Fiction with Mrs. Falls and The Novel with Mrs. Walker were my favorites.

Today, kids enter high school in the ninth grade and take English I. As sophomores they take English II (World Literature), and as juniors they take English III (American Literature), finishing as seniors with English IV (British Literature). Despite having parenthetical names involving literature, this is also where students do the bulk of their academic writing.

At Longfellow Junior High School, I remember having a couple of old battle axes for English teachers. Mrs. LaCroix was the eighth grade teacher who made us memorize and recite every preposition. I’m not good at memorizing and it took me forever to get all of them. Mrs. Roberson in ninth grade was probably the scariest and strictest teacher I ever had. There was no forgiveness in that woman. We had to do note card book reviews and she had a page requirement for the grade. Anything we read and reviewed after that was one point extra credit for every page we read. The first card had to be done in pencil. She would edit it, then we had to redo it in pen. I read Ivanhoe for 700 points of extra credit, but because I was a day late with my inked card I lost those points. Junior high was brutal in so many ways.

My high school teachers were, to use today’s slang, more chill. I learned from them, but they let me slide by with some stuff that would come back to haunt me later. Here are a couple of anecdotes about my high school writing.

In Composition I, Mrs. Dragoon made us write a short story. I was just turned on to horror movies at that time thanks to seeing Halloween II at the downtown theater. So I wrote my first-ever horror story about a teenage boy who was bullied and humiliated at a party, which led to him going on a gleefully and graphically described murderous rampage of revenge. Mrs. Dragoon was shocked that such a quiet boy would write such a violent story. She gave me an A on the assignment. She liked horror and rock music and really wasn’t “The Dragon Lady” that people called her.

Sadly, my story “Insanity” has been lost and the world is deprived of that masterpiece. I’m sure if I had it and looked at it today, the biggest horror would be the grammatical and punctuation errors throughout it.

My junior year, I met Mrs. Walker when I took her Creative Writing class. Wilda Walker was a poet, and she loved teaching poetry. She did make us write a short story, and I produced some drivel about a guy going to prison and his girlfriend not waiting for him and he was all sad. I don’t remember the details or the title, but I remember even I knew it wasn’t very good, but was still hurt that I only got a B on it.

My first writing accolades came because of Mrs. Walker. She held an annual poetry contest open to any student in the school. She bought the prizes herself. That year, I took second place with my poem about a shipwreck survivor in a lifeboat who was thrilled to find land only to be killed when the boat hit some rocks. You see, I’ve never been a fan of happy endings. Later, Mrs. Walker announced that I and a girl I can’t remember were the best poets she had that year.

I thought I was pretty hot stuff, at least in writing.

I was a fool.

That Ain’t Good Grammar

I graduated from high school in 1984 and got married in 1985. I think it was 1987 when I got my first typewriter, a Smith-Corona Electra XT with the miraculous correction tape under the ink of the ribbon. My grade in high school typing class was bad because I kept erasing holes in my paper, so that correction tape was a wonder. Typewriter perched on my cheap particleboard desk, I set about typing the stories I’d been writing by hand, and making up new ones.

I’ll talk more about some of this stuff later, but at the time the hot magazines for horror short stories were Twilight Zone and Night Cry, with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction taking some crossover stories. Stephen King ruled the roost and everything he did to become the king was studied, so there were the men’s magazines to consider. And then there were the 1980s’ equivalent of the 1930s’ pulps, most notably David B. Silva’s The Horror Show. After that were other good magazines that didn’t pay authors, and then there were the digests made on the new-fangled photocopier machines.

Depending on my financial situation at the start of the year, or my mom’s willingness to supply it for Christmas, I’d use my own copy of the year’s Writer’s Market or go to the library to borrow theirs. I’d start with the top-paying markets, then work my way down to the photocopied ‘zines, sending my stories out in hopes somebody would publish them.

For years this went on. Money was tight and it was an expense we couldn’t really afford, but I talked my wife into letting me subscribe to a few of the magazines in hopes that would give me an edge over other writers who couldn’t show they were regular readers. It didn’t help.

I learned what the dreaded “form-letter rejection” was. “Dear Author, thank you for your recent submission to Boogity-Oogity magazine. Your writing shows great promise but our editors decided this story is not right for us at this time.” It was maddening! What was wrong with the story? How can I make it right for you?

No matter how heartbreaking they were, I kept every one of those rejection letters. But unfortunately, about 30 years after they started coming in, I got divorced and those files were destroyed. I’m not telling you that just to be bitter or cast shade, but to explain why I can no longer tell you the name of the editor who finally took a few minutes to write an actual letter telling me some of what I was doing wrong.

“You need to work on your grammar. For instance, you often use ‘seen’ where you should say ‘saw’.”

How humiliating is that?

I knew why I made that particular error, and if you don’t laugh at anything else in this book, I feel pretty certain you’ll laugh at the ridiculousness of this. I’ve lived in Oklahoma all my life and my voice has that kind of twang that only sounds right in country music. In my mind, writing something like, “Jimmy saw the monster rise like smoke from beneath his bed” sounded just as hick as, “I done saw that spotted dog swimmin’ in the crick out yonder.” So, I used “seen” instead because I felt like it sounded more sophisticated.

My junior high teachers should have hunted me down and put me out of everyone’s misery.

Teaching Myself the Basics

Since they didn’t, and I really, really, really wanted to be a rich and famous author, I figured I had to fix my grammar issues.

But how? I was several years removed from high school and college wasn’t an option. There was no YouTube. No Khan Academy. No internet, ya know.

Fortunately, my little city on the prairie had a mall that, back then, was still pretty new and wasn’t a nearly empty shell like it is today. So, off I went to either B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks in search of a grammar book. Good Lord, I was going to spend money on a textbook. What was the world coming to?

I returned home with a red paperback copy of A New Guide to Better Writing by Rudolf Fiesch, Ph.D., and A.H. Lass. A circle graphic on the cover promised it would be “Lively, Authoritative, Effective.” Professor Roscoe Ellard of Columbia University’s School of Journalism promised in his blurb that I had just secured, “The famous book that can teach anyone to write fluently and well … Fresh and practical.”

Well, most of the promises on the cover were true, but I can assure you that, like every other grammar textbook I’ve seen in my 58 years, it was not “lively.” Opening the book to write this book of my own, I found that I still have a bookmark between pages 206 and 207 where I finally learned about past participial verb tenses and the difference between see, saw, and seen. You better believe that I was an absolute grammar Nazi about those during my teaching career.

What I Learned

It isn’t enough to have a creative spark or vivid imagination, or even to understand things like beginning, middle, end, rising action, falling action, denouement, setting, etc. To make it as an author, you absolutely must know the absolute basics of the language.

My experiences with rejection letters, each one a testament to my shortcomings as a writer, served as a wake-up call after I was already a few years into what I hoped would be my career. I needed the technical skills to communicate my ideas with precision and clarity. I didn’t have it because I’d been lazy in school.

So, the first lesson in my book about writing: never underestimate the power of a strong foundation in the basics of language. Embrace the study of grammar and sentence structure not as a chore, but as a pathway to unlocking your full potential as a wordsmith. Whether you dream of penning bestselling novels or captivating essays, remember that every great literary masterpiece is built upon the sturdy framework of sound linguistic principles. As you embark on your own writing journey, let this lesson be your guiding light, illuminating the path to success one grammatically correct sentence at a time.

Seriously, with the tools available today, there are no good reasons for poor grammar. Most word processing programs will fix the mistakes for you if you left-click the words with colorful squiggly lines under them. Plus, there are other programs designed specifically to find and fix mistakes, and you can often use them for free.

Grammar, punctuation, spelling, and all those other things your English teachers bore you with really matter. If you didn’t learn them in school, learn them now.

Thank you for reading this early draft of the first chapter of How to Fail as an Author. I’m working to get the book finished and available to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you feel like supporting me, here’s a way to do so.