July 17th, was the birthday of Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series of books. He was a self-taught attorney who filled his days with court and composition. Born in 1889, he was a man who bored easily. While he enjoyed courtroom law, he found the rest of the legal profession boring, so he began writing for pulp magazines. Detective novels followed.
He wrote this about his writing life:
"I still have vivid recollections of putting in day after day of trying a case in front of a jury, which is one of the most exhausting activities I know about, dashing up to the law library after court had adjourned to spend three or four hours looking up law points with which I could trap my adversary the next day, then going home, grabbing a glass of milk with an egg in it, dashing upstairs to my study, ripping the cover off my typewriter, noticing it was 11:30 p.m. and settling down with grim determination to get a plot for a story. Along about 3 in the morning I would have completed my daily stint of a 4,000-word minimum and would crawl into bed."
When I read this in Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac I was dumbfounded. I've produced a lot of words in my writing career but I have an advantage: a computer. Gardner was pounding out his work on a typewriter and doing it in the wee hours.
His dedication to writing inspired me. Most writers start out with day jobs. Many keep those jobs throughout their working lives. In a sense, they have two jobs: a vocation and an advocation. Why would people do that? (Why did I do that for so long?) Because writing is that important. Important enough to push us to make sacrifices. Gardner, at least in the early days, wrote when everyone else slept. It was the only time he could do it.
The amazing part of his quote is his commitment to 4000 words a day. That would be about 16 typed pages. I can imagine him setting aside 16 or 18 blank pieces of paper by his typewriter and then having at it.
Writing takes commitment, a determination that the work is going to be done even at a sacrifice. Isaac Assimov wrote over 500 books. He loved writng so much he often turned down interviews, which he saw as loss of writing time.
Writers become writers through craft, imagination, and commitment. The first two items are useless without the last. Countless are the times when someone has said to me, "I've always wanted to write a book. I think I would make a great writer." When I ask why they haven'tdone so, they reply, "Well, you know, I'm busy."
So was Erle Stanley Gardner
Alton Gansky
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