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This Writin' Life
Chapter 1 by Mike Baron
I remember the exact moment I decided to become a writer. I was
thirteen years old, standing on Main Street in Mitchell, South Dakota,
outside Chappy's, a bar that had two racks of new paperbacks in the window.
I was holding John D. MacDonald's second Travis McGee novel. It wasn't
the first, because I remember looking for his name. I liked the way the
guy wrote. There was his name on the cover. Obviously he wasn't doing
this for free. MacDonald was writing for a living and I was buying his
stuff. That's what I wanted to do. It was years before I picked up a pen,
but the seed was planted early.
A couple of the Main Street pharmacies also had comic racks. It was
sixty-two, and not much was happening, except for Uncle Scrooge. Uncle
Scrooge's intelligence shone from the comic rack like a beacon in a storm.
Carl Barks' Scrooge stories dealing with the nature of supply and demand
are still relevant today, and probably more truthful and instructive than
what is actually being taught as "economics." Scrooge teaches that the
accumulation of wealth is the result of hard work, keen intelligence, self
initiative, and good ethics. All elected law makers should be required to
read the complete Scrooge, or at least spend some time in the private
sector before running for office.
My parents encouraged me to read. There were incidents, like the
time I was caught with a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn in
Study Hall. The principal told me, "Mike, I don't mind if you read this
stuff on your own time. But please don't bring it to school."
Between my junior and senior year we moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I
worked that summer as a dishwasher at Camp Indianola, and was in the old
bunkhouse the night a tornado took off one wing. This was the second time
in my life I had been in a building while a tornado turned the other half
into kindling. Surely I qualify for some kind of Guinness Award.
I began writing for the high school paper at West High, on Regent
Street in Madison. I began writing as a direct result of typing class.
Mr. Higgins was the instructor, and there never was a more dour individual.
He had a way of expressing disapproval by snapping his fingers at you
impatiently, and cutting off his words as if you had ceased to exist. Many
students wished him harm.
Not me. I took to typing like a porpoise to Persian waters. If you
want to write, you must learn to type. Even if you just want to sell stuff
on ebay, you must learn to type. What did I write? I wrote shite. What
else do you expect from a seventeen-year-old, which brings us to Mike's
Rules of Writing Number One: Each would-be writer has a million words of
shite clogging up his system, and it behooves him to get it out as soon as
possible, to get to the good stuff. In other words, if a writer you would
be, start writing.
There are exceptions to this rule, and I would like to wring their
necks. Neil Gaiman is one. If Neil ever wrote badly, it's well hidden.
I largely wasted my college education (if absorbing life can be
considered waste) studying political science. I also took some writing
courses, one with Joel Gersman, founder and director of Madison's Broom
Street Theater, and another with Jerry McNeely, head writer for
television's Marcus Welby, M.D. Professor McNeely said, "You make 'em
laugh a little bit, you make 'em cry a little bit, you SCARE THE HELL OUT
OF THEM, and that's entertainment."
On day I dropped in on the offices of TakeOver, our local left-wing,
anti-establishment counter culture rag. It was in a shotgun apartment down
by the rails, since torn down, inhabited by Mark Knopf, the editor and
publisher. He was awash in free record albums.
"Where'd you get all these records?" I asked.
"The record companies keep sending them. Want some? All you have to
do is write something about them."
I staggered out of there with as many as I could carry. One of them
was Edgar Winter's Entrance, which remains a favorite to this day. More
importantly, I learned a lesson. Free records if you write about them.
In spring of my senior year, I decided to write a paperback novel and
make some fast bucks. Thirty years later, I succeeded in publishing my
first novel, WITCHBLADE DEMONS, based on Top Cow's comic. Think about
that. Between the time I decided to become a novelist, and got my first
novel published, three decades. This doesn't mean the intervening thirty
years was a wash. Far from it. But it does attest to both my
determination, and the abysmal quality of my writing. I must have written
thirty novels over the years, or one a year. When I look back on that
material, I want to crawl into a hole and die.
However, when I look back on recent material, not so bad. So there
is hope. The English writer John Braine, author of Room At The Top,
advises would-be novelists in his book How To Write A Novel, not to attempt
the deed before the age of forty. You simply lack the life experience.
For the most part, Braine is correct, although there are again obnoxious
exceptions such as Richard Price, whose brilliant first novels, The
Wanderers and Ladies' Man were published while he was in his twenties.
On the other hand, anyone who has tried to read Clockers can see that
Price has written himself right out of the entertainment biz. I love his
film scripts, though, especially Mad Dog And Glory.
Mike Baron is the creator of the award winning comic book Nexus and
during his career has written an enormous variety of comics from The Flash to The Punisher. His first novel, Witchblade Demons has just been published and he is currently writing the Kiss comic for Dark Horse Comics.
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