Grisham, Tolkien, and King

A little more background.

For about twenty years I hardly ever read any fiction. That’s something I wish I could change. For the last fifteen years I’ve read almost nothing but fiction. The first novel I read after the long drought was John Grisham’s “The Runaway Jury.” Grisham is still one of my favorite authors and I’m currently reading his book “The Street Lawyer.” My wider adventure into fiction continued with Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, also still on my favorites list.

As I started writing more, I always picked up Writers Digest as it hit the newsstands. One month they had an article by Stephen King, actually I think it was an excerpt, from his then-new book “On Writing.” I’d never ready anything by him since I didn’t read horror. You too? That’s okay. If you enjoyed the movies “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile,” or “Stand by Me,” you like King’s work. Anyway, the article/excerpt in Writers Digest made me sufficiently curious to get “On Writing.” Seems like my wife bought it for me. I won’t give a full review of it, but it showed me King wasn’t the boogie man, and he had a lot of great, simple thoughts about writing. Since then he’s been my favorite author and I’ve read many of his books. I recommend it for anyone who writes or thinks they might like to write.

A few years into writing and reading fiction, I saw (as everybody and his momma did) the first Lord of the Rings movie. As it drew to a close, I was thinking Frodo and Sam were going to have to get the ring to Mordor pretty quickly, then the movie ended. I didn’t know it was slated to be a trilogy of movies or that it was a trilogy of books. I asked around and started reading “The Hobbit” a few days later, then got “Lord of the Rings” and read it twice – once before the second movie, and once after. Some of my friends in high school read the books and discussed them a good bit, and as I read them for the first time I wished I would’ve picked up Tolkien as a teenager instead of waiting until I was in my forties.

My early stories were short. I think that’s the way most writers start their craft. As I wrote more, the stories got longer. I now have first drafts of five novels, ranging from 50,000 to 80,000 words, which would translate into maybe 225 to 375 pages. I’m in an online critique group that’s helped me tremendously and hope to have one of the novels ready to send to prospective agents and publishers by the end of this year (2014). This part of the process can be hard work, but it’s still fun.

Every writer has a different story of how they got where they are on their writing journey. This is just a few snippets of mine. What’s yours?