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Feb. 23, 2005 There’s a book in everyone. Is that a true statement? Maybe. Over the years, I have heard people tell my mother, now 89 years old, she should write a book about her life. I agree. She should have written a book. But, not everyone, including my mother, is prepared to write a book. You have to come to the writing table armed with some ideas and some equipment. My mother alone could not have written a book. Had she sought out a ghost- writer or an editor to guide her through the process, she might have been able to accomplish the task. In her younger years, typewriters, pencils, fountain pens, and paper were the equipment. They had dictionaries, Thesauri, and dreams. There were no computers, word processors, or spell-checks to catch an occasional misspelled word. They didn’t have grammar-checks to correct their bungling command of the English language. There were no search engines, no Writers’ Market Manuals, no Artists and Writers Yearbooks, or discussion forums. During the early 1900s, there were only imaginations and motivation. We are so much luckier today, aren’t we? We have photo-perfect printers, scanners, super-fast computers, spelling, and grammar checks. We use word processing programs, Adobe Print Shop, Microsoft Front Page, and we have our own websites if we so choose. We have a smaller world. We can communicate with people from everywhere and get great advice, but can we write a book? Writing a book about ones’ life or a fictional story about a pink elephant’s life require more than technology. Writing requires an idea, an idea that can be built upon. If you have no idea and no knowledge of how to build upon that idea, you have no story. My mother could not have written a book about her life. Even though she had an idea, she had no knowledge about how she was going to expand upon that idea. I have written four or five books and two of them are reasonably good (if I must say so myself), but the others were lousy, why? I had an idea, but no knowledge of how to support my idea. I had the basement built, but nothing to put on top of it. How do you build that second floor?
Many people do it in different ways.
Some writers make an outline (especially non-
fiction writers), others have the natural
ability to tell a story (man, I admire those
writers). Still, there are others, who take
notes as they write. Whatever your method, be
patient and do not shred your story. Reexamine
it and reexamine it again, search for a
different foundation or a different building
material.
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