So you think you can write. I did. I’d written for over thirty years in my business career so I knew I could write. I was good at it too. Right? Wrong. Riding a donkey sidesaddle and riding a good horse are two different things. They take a different level of skill. I had a great idea for my first book. Do the research and off you go. I finished a draft of the book and knew enough to rewrite it. In fact I rewrote it a couple of times until I was sure I was ready for an agent or publisher. While researching agents and publishers, I stumbled on a website for the Western Writers of America. I found contacts for a number of WWA members on the site. I reached out to a half dozen of them to see if any of them had any words of wisdom for me. Four of them asked me to send them sample chapters. I was thrilled. All four came back with politely worded versions of ‘Not ready for prime-time.’ That’s when I began to discover that writing is a craft I didn’t understand. I was riding sidesaddle.

One of those authors told me to rewrite the chapter he’d read. He gave me some pointers on what to change. His name is Dusty Richards. Today he’s a great friend and mentor to me. Back then we didn’t know each other from Adam. Dusty critiqued my stuff back and forth for most of a year. At some point he must have thought I was impossibly slow, but he stuck with me. Finally I had an Ah Ha moment. I rewrote the whole book and sent him the revised first chapter. I still have the email he sent me: “Done with authority. I bought it as history. I wouldn’t change a thing; and I never say that.” Dusty taught me a lot. He got me up on the horse and made a writer out of a story teller. Thanks to him I learned enough of the craft to get published and win a couple of awards. You may think you can write; but if you’re like me, you probably don’t know the craft.

In recent years I’ve tried to return Dusty’s favor to a couple of aspiring writers. I see myself in their work. You can’t teach the craft in a blog; but I will give you lesson one. Simple sentence, present tense, active voice. If you don’t remember those concepts, run don’t walk to the nearest grammar text and read up. Then practice. If you don’t, chances are you will turn out compound complex sentences that are hard to read. Your characters and stories get lost in past tense convolutions and passive voices that make readers struggle. That’s lesson one. There’s more of course and you have to learn it. You need somebody to critique your work. I mean really critique your work. Take the criticism and use it to get better. Do that, and you might get through the next gate.

Next week: Publish or Perish at the Gate.

https://www.amazon.com/author/paulcolt

Ride easy,
Paul