By William Walsh
For most people the idea of writing a book begins when they
are young . . . then they never think
about it again. If you are like me, the idea of writing a book never left that
deep place in your heart. What does it take to be a writer? Many years ago,
William Price Fox told me that if the choice were between a brilliant student
with no ambition and a poor student with drive, he would always bet on the
student with determination. Writing a book and being an author last entered my
mind a week after Mrs. Collier’s seventh grade language arts class. That’s when
I moved from Dallas to Chicago. Poof!
Fast-forward to after college. I had hundreds of ideas for
novels and non-fiction books and was working on short stories, poems, novels
about spies and gold miners in Alaska, all the places I’d never been and all things
I’d never done. It was all apprentice work that I needed to purge myself of,
all the terrible ideas and bad writing I had inside. Make no mistake, everyone has
plenty of bad ideas and excessive amounts terrible writing, but the more you write
the faster you move on toward the good stuff.
After about five years, I felt I had put in my time and
should have some success. But I wasn’t successful—not at all. I had a miniscule
amount of success, but I could barely get my name in the telephone book. Simply
put, I was not getting anywhere. I would write something I felt was exciting
and well-written only to hear back from an editor, “No. If you’re going to
spend such effort, write a letter to your grandmother.” Comments like that!
I knew they were wrong and I was going to prove it. However,
one day I realized that I learn differently than other people. I very much needed
to sit at the feet of Socrates and listen to him talk and speak directly to me,
and provide me with personal feedback, criticism, tough love, whatever you want
to call it. This is when I entered a low-residency graduate program to earn a
Master of Fine Arts degree. I worked 1-on-1 with award-winning writers who
critiqued my work and showed me the many errors of my ways and showed me writing
technics that immediately made me a better writer. They sped up the learning
curve, and before I knew it, I was a team of horses firing on all cylinders
(that’s a mixed metaphor, which I love doing because high school teachers hate
it). It wasn’t Socrates, but it was a close second. I worked with three
wonderful poets who individually helped me become a better poet and fiction
writer.
On Monday, I will continue with part two and provide my
secrets to writing that work for me.
Is there a part of your background driving your writing?
_____________________________________________________
William Walsh is the director
of the M.F.A. program at Reinhardt
University in Waleska, Georgia. He is also a southern narrative poet in the
tradition of James Dickey, David Bottoms, and Fred Chappell. He also attended Southaven High School in Mississippi.
His English teach, Frances McGuffey asked him to read Steinbeck’s Tortilla
Flat, who seven years earlier gave the same book to another student,
John Grisham. She deserves a lot of credit because it changed his reading life
and appreciation for fiction. In 2018, his new
collection of poems, Fly Fishing In Times Square, will be
published. Recently, his novels The Boomerang Mattress and Haircuts
for the Dead were Finalists and Semi-Finalists in the William Faulkner
Pirate Alley Prize. As well, his novel, The Pig Rider, was Finalist
in 2015. His most recent collection of poems is Lost In the White Ruins (2014).
His other books include: Speak So I Shall Know Thee: Interviews with Southern
Writers (McFarland, 1990); The Ordinary Life of a
Sculptor (Sandstone, 1993); The Conscience of My Other
Being (Cherokee Publishers, 2005); Under the Rock Umbrella:
Contemporary American Poets from 1951-1977 (Mercer, 2006); and David
Bottoms: Critical Essays and Interviews (McFarland, 2010). His
work has appeared in AWP Chronicle, Cimarron Review, Five
Points, Flannery O’Connor Review, The Georgia Review, James Dickey Review, The
Kenyon Review, Literary Matters, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American
Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Rattle, Shenandoah, Slant,
and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His literary interviews have been
published in over fifty journals, and include, among others, Czeslaw Milosz,
Joseph Brodsky, A.R. Ammons, Doris Betts, Pat Conroy, Harry Crews, James
Dickey, Ariel Dorfman, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Eamon Grennan, Mary
Hood, Edward Jones, Madison Jones, Donald Justice, Ursula Leguin, Andrew Lytle,
and Lee Smith. **Mr. Walsh, photo is the work of Karley Harmon
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