Learning to Write

When I first joined Western Writers of America over thirty years ago, I headed for each convention, determined to blot up as much as I could of the world of the western. In those days, the members loved to get together each evening in the hotel bar and share the lore of writing. We would crowd around tables, and exchange ideas. Usually there would be some old timers who had come up through the pulps and mass market paperbacks. There were New York editors on hand, enjoying the conversation, and getting to know the novelists crowded around them. And sometimes literary agents joined us.

We rarely talked about the West and its lore; we talked about writing, or about hooking readers into the story, and how to end a novel, or how to create memorable characters. In short, the lore that I blotted up during those conventions was writing lore. Surrounded by veteran novelists and writers, I couldn't help but learn my craft. The old guys generously shared their insights with neophytes like me, and often the editors picked up tips and ideas from the novelists. In fact, those hotel bar sessions were an education for the New York editors as well as the rest of us.

I loved those evenings, which often lasted well past midnight and made us all pretty foggy during the daily convention events. But the freely flowing talk in the evenings proved more important to me than the formal convention activities, and I considered those exchanges of ideas about the art and craft that go into a great story to be the key to my own success. I was an eager student. These guys had written amazing novels, wildly inventive stories, filled with memorable characters, and I was lucky enough to blot up everything they said about how they did it. They all approached the task in their own fashion. Some wrote character sketches or even biographies in advance. Some plotted everything. Others just sailed into a story without knowing where it would go. I learned that each novelist needs to evolve his own way of writing a story.

That was my education. I suppose some of that lore can be gotten from creative writing classes in universities these days, or Master of Fine Arts programs. But I got it in convention hotels, listening to the give and take of some of the best novelists I have ever known. That's all gone now. Members don't collect at conventions to exchange their lore, or their war stories, or their insights about fiction any more. I don't know why.