My Life as Writing Lessons

Writing Lessons Learned Over a Lifetime

1. Be willing to listen to your editor.

The first thing I remember writing was my name. When I was in first grade, I saved my allowance to buy a Mickey Mouse Club scrapbook. (I still have it!) In the front, in my childish writing, it reads Patty Wallace. Beneath it is the word "do" with arrows pointing in front of my name and one at the end. I was imitating the symbol my teacher used to indicate when work was not good enough. It meant, “Do the indicated part over”. Age six, and trying to please my first editor!

2. Know your audience.

A year later, I wrote my first book. It was a shopping guide. My grandmother was coming to see us at the Air Force base in Hawaii where my father was stationed. I overheard my mom say that my Missouri grandmother was not going to believe the prices. So, to help her out, I decided to make her a shopping guide. I tore 10 pages out of my Big Chief tablet and folded them in half. Then I studied the ads in the newspaper each evening, looking for things she might like, so she could believe the prices. Toilet paper, pack of 4 two-ply rolls and the price. Ham, bone-in, 10-15 pounds and the price.

3. Write well and people will pay.

We moved to Ohio the summer before I was in fourth grade. One of my stories was published in our little school newspaper. Rather than black ink on newsprint, our newspaper was duplicated on a Gestettner machine. The paper had a cool, chemical smell and my words were no longer lead pencil, but a sophisticated purple. The papers cost five cents each, and I was heady with the fact that people were paying to read my work.

4. Put your heart into your writing.

By high school we had moved from Ohio to Texas and were now living in Virginia. There I won a writing competition with my historical fiction about the Battle of Bull Run. In reading about the early Civil War, I discovered that people would watch from surrounding high ground as if they were at an athletic event. The bloody disaster of Bull Run cured them of that macabre practice. What would that have been like as a watcher? And so I wrote.

5. Repurpose your work for different markets.

I returned to Texas for college, and loved my new life. However, the workload and the new freedom sometimes conflicted. When pressed for a deadline for a realistic fiction piece for Freshman English, I was able to rewrite my high school story from a different character’s point of view with only minor research needed.

6. Respect what your reader brings to your work.

As a young mother, I couldn’t fathom why my children wanted the same books over and over and over yet again. The books that made me jiggly (not that one again!) resonated with them in ways I didn’t understand. But they knew what they liked.

7. Yes, you do have time for writing.

If you’ve been reading about writing, you’ve heard all the ways authors have found to write. They get up hours early, write on their lunch hours, talk into tape recorders as they drive, etc. Because we had three children in the space of 15 months, I found that time for myself seemed to evaporate. However, there is still bathroom time, which even the busiest people in history have made time for. Keep a writer’s magazine and a notebook with pen in your bathroom. Read on the john, write in the tub. Those minutes a day will add up!

8. Write what you know.

When the kids were little, one of my luxuries was to write to my parents about what they were up to. This was before cell phones and e-mail. We couldn’t afford long distance calls, so I wrote letters. No new mother can resist telling the grandmothers what wonderful things the grandkids are doing. My mother kept all those letters and put them in a scrapbook which she waited 25 years to share with me. My first adult book—My Journal of Motherhood.

9. Writers have to write.

Hairdressers tell me they look at strangers and imagine them with better cuts. Interior designers remodel mentally when they visit the homes of others. There was a stage when going to dinner with my highly-trained waiter son included his critique of the presentation and service. If you have specialized training or experience, which we all do if we have survived to adulthood, you can use your writing ability to share that with others. One way to find out how and where is online. Start with Writers’ Digest—both the magazine and the site. http://www.writersdigest.com

10. “The only failure in writing is when you stop doing it.”

This quote from Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg is taped to my computer monitor.* Despite the unkind mental critic that shares my brain or the deadline monster that lives grouchily beneath my desk, I keep writing, even if it’s just to add to my online bio. I write articles, books, workshop handouts, zillions of e-mails, scrapbook journaling, and lesson plans. The need to communicate is at the core of being human, and technology makes this easier in ways we didn’t imagine even 10 years ago. I’m still trying to figure how a cell phone call locates the instrument on my desk when it is placed across the country. Now a Blackberry phone can send e-mail to my computer in an even more amazing “magical” way. It has never been easier to put one’s thoughts into words. And so, until the letters are carved on my headstone, I will continue to write.

* Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg (Bantam Books, 1990)