This is number 135 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“DO YOU HAVE a restless urge to write? If you do, here is an opportunity for you to take the first important step to success in writing.” Bennett Cerf
That was the first invitation I got to be a famous writer back in the 1960s. The guiding faculty of the Famous Writers School included Faith Baldwin, John Caples, Bruce Catton, Bennett Cerf, Mignon G. Eberhart, Paul Engle, Bergen Evans, Clifton Fadiman, Rudolf Flesch, Phyllis McGinley, J.D. Ratcliff, Rod Serling, Max Shulman, Red Smith, and Mark Wiseman. Of course, there was no way I was ever going to be able to afford the $600-$900 tuition for the Famous Writers School. I was still fighting off debt for college.
By 1970, it was under fire for fraudulent advertising and business practices. It turned out that none of the twelve or fifteen famous authors who were going to ‘teach’ the course ever read anything a student wrote and apparently didn’t write any of the lessons. Jessica Mitford’s expose in The Atlantic spoofed the picture of the famous writers on the cover.
By placing twelve actual famous authors on the cover, The Atlantic cast shade at the basic qualifications of the School’s founders. Pictured in the caricature on the cover were Mark Twain, Tolstoi, Poe, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Ben Johnson, James Joyce, Hemingway, and Voltaire. Will these authors read and review your work?
Some of the ‘founders’ attempted to defend the school, under fire for refusing to refund the tuition, even before the course was begun. Mitford’s husband represented a woman in a lawsuit against the school claiming the famous authors really had nothing to do with the school.
Faith Baldwin said, “Oh, that’s just one of those things about advertising.... Anyone with common sense would know that the fifteen of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in.”
By the mid-70s, the school was pretty much defunct, though a company calling itself the Famous Writers School was still selling the coursework through 2015 according to Wikipedia.
Not to worry, though! Today there are dozens of writing instruction offers from ‘reputable’ companies rushing to fill the void.
In the Mastering Fiction course, Teng, ‘a professional novelist’ who might be any of several by that name listed in Wikipedia and elsewhere, proposes to teach Jack London’s method of learning to write in twelve days through copywork. He pretends that the twelve lessons are taught by Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Bret Easton Ellis, Suzanne Collins, Harper Lee, Cormac McCarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, JRR Tolkein, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Douglas Adams, Ken Liu, Shirley Jackson, Dan Brown, Stephen King, Jane Yolin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Kate Chopin. Definitely a picture that belongs on the cover of The Atlantic.
Of course, what he means is that there will be copying assignments for portions of those authors’ works (with or without their permission).
I’ve received dozens of offers over the past month—partly because of the reputation of November as being a month that thousands of people still attempt to write a novel in 30 days, and partly because I was curious about what was going on and clicked on one of the links. (Click-bait! AI algorithms!)
There is no limit to the number of offers from people who have written ‘best sellers,’ shown people how to sell their book without a mailing list or social media following, have the solution to how to plot your novel using ‘these simple steps,’ can tell you how to write your non-fiction eBook in three days, or most commonly now, how to use ‘ghost writer quality AI’ to write your book.
If you are tempted by an ad that says any equivalent of ‘write an eBook in three days,’ run! This is a problem that goes beyond whether or not you have the skills to write a book. It is a fundamental misunderstanding regarding what an eBook is. It is not some different thing to write. It doesn’t fall into the category of novel, short story, poem, manual, memoir. No. An eBook is a medium, just like paperback and audiobook. You have to understand that if you are ‘writing an eBook,’ you might as well be scribbling on a wall.
You are writing a story. You are writing a novel or a play or an instruction manual. When you publish that thing you have written, it might be published as an eBook or a paperback, or a web serial, etc. But don’t let anyone suggest to you that you can write an eBook as if it is somehow easier to write than a paperback. It’s not.
That rant being out of the way, let’s talk about whether you can write a book.
If I asked if you can play the violin, you would not consider responding that you don’t know because you haven’t tried. You can’t simply pick up a violin and ‘see if you can play it.’ There are steps involved. While some people can get by skipping steps, most would need to learn to read music, know what a key signature is, and how music translates to the violin. Then one would need to learn the notes on the violin, the fingering, the bowing, and the tuning of the instrument. Finally, the fingers need to be trained to respond to the instructions received when reading the music and holding the instrument. That only comes through practice. At some point in that process, you might be able to respond, ‘Yes, I can play the violin.’
I am a big proponent of people writing, even if it is just a journal or a grocery list. Why? Because it falls into the category of practicing. You will discover, if you are interested in learning, what a complete sentence is, what character is, how plot evolves.
You might even discover a course that will teach you the fundamentals of writing. But those courses will not turn you into an overnight best-selling author. They will be the equivalent of learning to read music—which, by the way, is still a long way from learning to compose music. We write every day to strengthen our talent of weaving a tapestry of experiences out of words.
So, if you decided to pony up the $60 bucks to learn how to copy the works of famous authors, fine. Or if you pony up $90 to subscribe to BBC Maestro and have Ken Follett provide the lessons, bravo. Or if you decided to purchase the outliner for your plot (about the same as following the “Save the Cat” method), good.
It is simply important to understand that these are steps that may be helpful. As the critic of my first book once said to me, “Wow! This is freeze-dried. If you added a little hot water, it would be a whole book!” Your first instruction course, while an accomplishment and a help along the way, is still just the powder from which you might develop as a writer.
Finally, as Dorothy Parker once famously put it, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
Next week, I’ll address the other elephant in the room, which I alluded to early in this post but never got around to addressing. “If It’s Artificial, It Ain’t Intelligent.”