Tag Archives: writing

Thoughts on Writing

Leave a reply

I’ve been writing for a long time, and I love every second of the process. My first book came out in 1980; my 104th came out two months ago. All but seven of my books were released through traditional publishers; the others I self-published for a variety of good reasons that aren’t important. I also teach writing workshops, which I love.

I’ve gotten a passel of questions about writing over the last few weeks that I’ve decided to answer in this post, because the answers might be helpful to others. So, with your indulgence, I’m going to quickly cover two topics:

  • Why we write: Writing vs. publishing
  • The pleasant schizophrenia of writing across genres (fiction and non-fiction)

WHY WE WRITE

IN RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION, “Why do you write?” a serious writer responds, “Because I can’t NOT write,” or something to that effect. Writing isn’t something we do; it’s something we are, at least, that’s the case for me and most of the committed writers I know. If I miss a day of writing, I feel the same unease as when I miss a day of walking.

Anne Lamott, the author of Bird by Bird, makes a seminal point in that book. She observes that for many would-be writers, the goal is to get published, not to write a book. I know that sounds off, but it isn’t. Many writers want to have written a book so that they can fondly remember the process as they regale others about the experience and bask in the afterglow. In other words, they want to get published—BE published—more than they want to take the long writing journey. There’s a reason Ernest Hemingway’s description of writing, apocryphal though it may be, is so accurate: Writing a book is easy. All you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and stare at the paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. 

It’s very, very hard and disciplined work to write a book.

Self-evident though it may sound, though, it’s an inviolable rule of the universe that you must write the book (or article, white paper, essay, poem) before you can publish it. The one necessarily begets the other. 

Look: we all want to be published, because we see it as a third-party nod to our skill and prowess as a writer. It’s not enough for us to think our own work is good; we want the confirmation from others that we’re right. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But consider this. The long and storied (yes, that’s deliberate) journey from an idea percolating in your mind to opening the box of author copies when it arrives on the porch, delivered by your new favorite friend, the UPS driver, is one of the greatest experiences you’ll ever have. And why is that? Well, several reasons. First, the only map for the journey ahead is in your mind. In fact, the territory that the map describes and through which you will journey doesn’t even exist yet, and it won’t until you set out to explore it by creating it. Second, you are the only person on the entire planet who knows your story as you bring it to life. And third, writing a book imbues you with the absolute and incalculable power of creation and destruction. You are free to create worlds, civilizations, fantastical beasts, people; and just as easily, with a swipe of the pen (or keyboard), you can make them vanish. In fact, every fiction writer I have ever known has told me that at some point in their writing career, they had a breathtaking moment of indescribable terror. It happened when they realized that the fate of the people who had been living rent-free in their heads for years was entirely, ineluctably in their hands. With great power, as Peter Parker admonishes us, comes great responsibility. 

So, yes, think about getting published. It’s an important part of being a writer. But remember, that book sitting on the shelf is the end of the road, the finish line. When you get there, the journey ends, and trust me, even though there will be miles of rough gravel and strut-busting potholes along the way, more than a few times when you’ll lose control and careen into the ditch, and plenty of moments when you’ll feel that you’re hopelessly lost and will never get to the end of the journey, when all is said and done, two things will happen: you’ll feel a profound sense of letdown; and you’ll feel an enormous sense of accomplishment. Why? Because you did what Bilbo Baggins did in The Hobbit: you went there and back again.

A singular focus on ‘getting published’ denies you the exquisite joy of the journey required to get there.

WRITING ACROSS GENRES

Screenshot

I WRITE BECAUSE I AM A STORYTELLER. I write because it makes me feel good. I write because it pisses me off, forces me to struggle, is an enormously creative pursuit, and because the effort can yield magical things. 

My first book was called Commotion in the Ocean, and it was a SCUBA diving manual. My second book was called Managing Cross-Cultural Transition, and it spoke to the challenges that expatriates face when they return to their home country after an extended stay abroad. 

My next I-have-no-idea-how-many books (25? 30?) were all books about communications technologies, written for non-technologists. That’s the field where I spent my career. Two of those books became bestsellers.

Then, interspersed among the bit-weenie books, I wrote books about storytelling, photography, and history. Under contract, I wrote the biography of a renowned Canadian telecom executive. I wrote a handful of children’s books, and I wrote books about writing, leadership, wildlife sound recording, strategy, cybersecurity, and the natural world. And, I ghost-wrote quite a few books for other writers about topics that I can’t talk about. 

Then, fiction began to call to me, and over the course of ten years or so I wrote four novels, one of which briefly became a global bestseller, holding the number one position in political fiction at Amazon for a couple of weeks. 

All of these books are rectangular and they all have covers, but that’s where the similarity ends. Weird, right? And this is why I am often queried about my writing, because most writers work within a single genre. They write poetry. They write mysteries and thrillers. They write science fiction, or bodice rippers, or historical fiction, or crime procedurals, or children’s books, or any of a thousand thousand non-fiction topics. 

But me? When I’m asked what I write, I sometimes reply, “Well, words, mostly.” That’s snarky, but it’s accurate. I’m not in love with any particular genre, you see; I’m in love with writing. It’s like whittling a stick of wood with a pocket knife. The pleasure doesn’t lie with whatever I end up carving; the pleasure lies in the carving itself. That’s one of the two reasons I can and do write across diverse genres.

THE OTHER REASON, and it’s important, has to do with specific skills. Everybody has them; we all have one or more things that we do really well, as true for writing as it is for carpentry, photography, oil painting, car repair, or surgery.

I am, above all else, a storyteller. That’s my skill. It’s the way my mind works. It’s the technique I rely on to create context for whatever topic I’m writing about, and to create context for whatever I’m trying to understand. One of my technology books that became a bestseller, The Telecom Crash Course, explains how telecom technologies work, but it’s written for an audience of non-technical business decision-makers. The book’s Preface begins with me, standing at a dusty, bustling crossroads in a small African village, watching as life happens there. It ends with me standing amongst a surgical team in that same village who are removing a woman’s gall bladder in an operating room that has been set up inside an old shipping container. Outside, goats and chickens and local kids run around, laughing and playing. Inside, the medical team assists with the procedure—‘assists’ because the surgeons who are actually performing the cholecystectomy are at a hospital in the U.S., seven thousand miles away, operating on the patient using a robotic surgery machine connected to them via a blazingly fast optical cable that winds across the seafloor from North America to Africa. The procedure is done laparoscopically; the surgeons in Maryland precisely control the three arms of the machine, inserting pencil-thin probes and instruments and cameras into three small incisions in the woman’s belly. The procedure takes 40 minutes, open to close; the woman goes home an hour later with six stitches, three band-aids and a bottle of painkillers. 

Look: I could have told my readers that optical networking is important and really fast and deserves their attention and investment. Booooooooring…But, I decided to show them instead, by taking them on a storytelling journey, all true, by the way, and letting them see for themselves. 

A group of kids in Africa surround me, looking at their photo on the back of my camera.

I need to make something clear here. I’ve written dozens of books about extremely technical topics, but I’m not a computer scientist or electrical engineer. My undergraduate degree is in Spanish, to be honest. But as I said, I spent my career in and around the telecom industry, speaking about and teaching technology to people who had a need to understand its implications. I know the subject well, but much more to the point of this essay, I’ve worked hard to develop the ability to explain complex topics, complex themes, through storytelling, by using the story to create context. and that is true, regardless of what I’m writing about.

Storytelling is my specific skill. What’s yours? If you’ve never thought about this, you should. What is the one thing that makes your work stand out above the rest? What do you incorporate in your writing that allows your creative signal to rise above the competitive noise? I spent most of my career working with people who had forgotten more about technology than I would ever know. I’m proud to admit that. But I had something they didn’t: the crucial ability to make complicated, off-putting topics understandable and—dare I say it? Interesting and entertaining. After all, isn’t that what writing is all about in the first place? Creating a bridge between your story and the reader? I think so. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Who Authors Really Are

Leave a reply

Here’s a childhood question for you. And I should qualify that—for the most part I’m talking to people who were kids in the 60s, and who shared the books they read with their own children.  Here’s the question: What do Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon, Kenneth Robeson, Laura Lee Hope, and Victor Appleton have in common? Hopefully some of those names resonate with you. The answer is that they’re all well-known authors to anyone who read The Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Doc Savage, the Campfire Girls, The Happy Hollisters, and a few others. The other thing they have in common? None of them exist, and they never did. They’re all pseudonyms.

Authors have used pseudonyms for a long time, and for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they wrote  a new book that’s way outside of the genre they’re known for, and were afraid that it might dilute their main literary brand. Sometimes they wrote controversial content, and didn’t want it to be associated with their real name. Sometimes they had an important message that they wanted to share, but because the message was counter to prevailing opinion, or highly controversial, they chose to write under a pseudonym. For example, Silence Dogood,  Caelia Shortface, Martha Careful, Richard Saunders, Busy Body, Anthony Afterwit, Polly Baker, and Benevolus were all pseudonyms of none other than Benjamin Franklin, who was often at odds with prevailing politics. He was one of only a few early American authors who, as a man, wrote under a female pseudonym, and he usually did so to criticize the patriarchy. Another example is newspaper columnist Joe Klein, who wrote the very controversial book about Bill Clinton’s presidency called Primary Colors under the name Anonymous.

Other good examples are the authors Aaron Wolf, Anthony North, Brian Coffey, David Acton, Deanna Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Owen West, and Richard Page, all of which are pseudonyms used by none other than the blockbuster bestseller author of horror, Dean Koontz. He writes across many different genres, and his publishers were concerned early-on that having his name associated with books from different genres might dilute his main fan base, so they convinced him to write under different names. He’s written well over 100 novels, so I guess he can be forgiven. And it must be working, because he and his wife live in a 14,000 square foot home in Shady Canyon, the most exclusive gated community in Southern California. 

Other well-known writers have used pseudonyms as well. Stephen King, for example, wrote under the name of Richard Bachman. Others include Theodore Geisel, who we know as Dr. Seuss; Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain; Mary Westmacott, better known as Agatha Christie; Eric Blair, who wrote 1984 as George Orwell; Marguerite Annie Johnson, whose poetry graced us as the work of Maya Angelou; Robert Galbrath, whose alter-ego, JK Rowling, gave us Harry Potter; and the well-known Snowqueens Icedragon, better known as E. L. James, who wrote the Fifty Shades series. Her real name is Erika Leonard. We also have J. D. Robb, who is the same person as Nora Roberts; Mother Goose, whose real name was Jeannette Walworth; and for anyone who enjoyed such terrific espionage books as Shibumi, The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, The Main, and The Summer of Katya, all written by the mysterious author Trevanian, we now know him to be the late Rodney William Whitaker, a well-respected film critic and the chair of the Department of Radio, TV and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Interesting, right? But there’s more to the pseudonym story. Not only do individual writers use pseudonyms, but so do entire publishing houses. One of the best known for this practice was the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Founded in the late 1800s, the company published under its own name until 1984, when it was acquired by Simon & Schuster. From the beginning, Stratemeyer published mystery book series for children, including Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and quite a few others. 

But they weren’t published under the names of the actual authors; they were published under what are called house names, which are owned by the publisher, not by the author. This allowed them to use a stable of writers to create content under a single name, thus reducing their dependence on a single creative individual.

Here are some examples.

[Maxwell Grant was the name credited with writing the famous Shadow series, but he was actually five authors: Walter Gibson, Theodore Tinsley, Lester Dent, Bruce Elliott, and Dennis Lynds, who took turns writing the stories. Lester Dent had a successful career as the author behind the Doc Savage series, published by Street and Smith, although some of the titles in the series were written by Phillip Jose Farmer. The books were credited to house name Kenneth Robeson.

Jerry West was the author of the popular series, The Happy Hollisters; the actual author was Andrew Svenson, who wrote all the books in the series.

Victor Appleton was another house name used by Stratemeyer, under which they published the Tom Swift series, one of my favorites when I was a kid—in fact, I just bought a whole collection of them. In actuality, they were written by writer and broadcaster Howard Garis, who used several pen names including Laura Lee Hope for some of the Bobbsey Twins books, Clarence Young for the Motor Boys, Marion Davidson for the Camp Fire Girls series, and Lester Chadwick, under which he wrote a series called Baseball Joe. Interesting to me is that Garis also created a beloved character from my own childhood, Uncle Wiggly. During his long career, Garis wrote more than 15,000 Uncle Wiggly stories, which were published six times a week between 1910 and 1947.

So, there you have it—a peek behind the curtain at the seamy underbelly of the 20th century publishing industry. I had no idea.

Curiosity, Space Travel, and How to Write a Book

Leave a reply

I released a new novel a month or so ago, called Russet. It’s my fourth book of fiction; all my prior titles have been about technology, history, photography, writing, sound recording, biography, and a few other genres. Anyway, Russet’s doing well, especially given the fact that I haven’t done much since its release to market or promote it. It’s my first science fiction book, and I had a blast writing it.

For the last six weeks or so, pretty much since Russet hit the shelves, I’ve been getting an unusual number of emails and messages from people, asking me how to write a book. Actually, they’re asking more than that. Many feel like they have a book inside them begging to be written, and want to know how to let it out, how to get it from mind to paper. Or, they have an idea that they think would make a good book, but don’t know how to bridge the gap between their idea and a finished work. And others want to know how I manage to jump between genres in my writing. It’s true—I write about a lot of different things.

First, to the question of how to write a book. When people learn that I’m a writer, their first question is always, “What do you write?” And my response is, always, “Words, mostly.” I know—it’s snarky.  But it’s true. As a writer, my job is to assemble letters into words and then string the words into thoughts that become sentences, and then string the sentences into paragraphs that represent vignettes, and then string the paragraphs into chapters that represent movement, and then string the chapters into a book that tells a story. It’s the story that matters. When I hear people say that they have a book inside them wanting to get published, I believe that what they’re actually saying is that they have a story inside them that wants to be told. We’re wired, you see, to naturally conclude that the story we want to share should be in the form of a book. And while that MAY be the best way to present a particular story, it’s not the ONLY one. Here’s an example. 

In 1987 (yep, you heard right—almost 38 years ago!) I started writing a book called Whatever Happened to Mister Duncan, a collection of essays about childhood games that were mostly played outside and that didn’t require anything other than our imaginations to play—okay, some of them required a pocket knife or a Popsicle stick, but that was pretty much it. No batteries, no screens, no keyboard or joystick. I had a hard time finishing the book; along the way I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, asking them about their own memories of childhood, and what their favorite games and activities were. I then sat down and designed the book, laying out the logical sections and creating chapters. But every time I thought I’d finished it, I’d get a call from somebody who wanted to share a long-forgotten memory, or a toy, or an experience that was so rich that it had to be in the book. So, I’d go back and do yet another rewrite. Because they were right—it HAD to be in the book.

The manuscript at which I finally called a halt to the process was the 318th complete rewrite of the book. I ended it by adding a paragraph that acknowledges the fact that the book will never actually be finished, but that I’ll include new material in later editions. 

So: 319 versions, by the time I finally had a complete, polished, nine-chapter, fully illustrated, 300-some-odd page book manuscript.

Which I have now decided should not be a book at all—at least, not exclusively.

This is a book about childhood. It’s experiential. I want it to evoke poignant memories of the period in our lives that created who we all are, before we had to start the odious task of adulting. You see, during those 38 years between the time that I first got the idea to write the book and when it finally emerged from its literary chrysalis, I did, as I said, hundreds of interviews; collected at least that many sound effects; and watched dozens and dozens of adults revert to childhood for the briefest periods during our conversations to show me something, before reverting back to boring, well-behaved adults. In other words, Duncan (my shorthand title for Whatever Happened to Mister Duncan) is a multiple media experience of sounds and different voices, none of which can adequately be presented between the pages of a book. Sure, I can transcribe the interviews, and I probably will, eventually, but what’s more fun: me writing down a list of all the different kinds of marbles that are out there, or listening to people struggle to remember the names of marbles as they dredge the murky depths of their own childhood memories?

So: the decision was easy. This has to be an audio book.

But that brought me to another important point. I’ve already mentioned that most people who say that they have a book inside that needs to get published are actually saying that they have a story that needs telling. Truthfully, most would-be authors I speak with, whether during casual conversation or as participants in my writing workshops, are more interested in getting published than they are in writing a book. One of my favorite authors, Ann Lamott, who wrote the bestselling book about writing called Bird by Bird, says the same thing. People don’t typically buy books because they’re beautifully published. They buy them because they’re creatively written. The creativity is the hard part—and the author’s job. The publishing is the presentation part, a process that’s more mechanical than it is creative. 

So: do you want to write a book to tell a story, or to get published? Because here’s the thing: you can’t get published until you’ve written a book, and if you write a book, the goal is to tell the book’s story. Publishing comes after the fact. Without a good story, what is there to publish?

Which brings us back to Duncan. Not too long ago, I took stock of the activities that give me pleasure, beyond the obvious ones—family, chasing grandkids, recording nature. I love to write; I love to interview people so that I can learn about them and then tell their story on my Podcast; I love to teach; I love photography; and I love field recording. When I analyze all of those, I find that they all have one thing in common: they’re all different ways to tell stories. I’m a storyteller—plain and simple. I don’t write to publish a book; I write to tell a story. Here’s a little secret for you: I only publish about 30 percent of what I write. And what I mean by that is that I only TRY to publish about 30 percent.

So, Duncan: I’ve decided to give it away, because the material is too good, too precious, too human to sell. It belongs to everybody, which is why it will soon emerge as a nine-chapter audio book as a gift to my listeners on the Natural Curiosity Project. I think you’ll like it—I really do. And check it out: just like that, my creative project is published. Who cares if I published it myself? The joy comes from sharing it and engaging with those who choose to write or call me about it.

I think that takes care of the first two questions, which leaves the issue of genre-jumping. There, I invented a term.

It’s true. My very first book was called Commotion in the Ocean, and it was a professional SCUBA diving manual. I wrote it because there wasn’t a particularly good book on the market, and at the time, that was what I did for a living—I was a SCUBA instructor. I then wrote a book called Managing Cross-Cultural Transition, about my experiences living in different countries and therefore cultures and offering advice to expats about the challenges they would face, not when they moved overseas, but when they moved back to their home country.

Next, I wrote a series of well-received books about various telecom technologies, two of which became bestsellers. Isn’t that insane? But here’s the secret. The reason they were so well-received was because they weren’t boring. Instead of trying to impress my readers with how much I knew about telecom standards and protocols and the inner workings of things, I told stories. What a concept! I talked about being present when the Internet first became available in a small African country, and watching as the kids in a small village connected their little One-Laptop-Per-Child laptops to the Web and started downloading music. I explained optical networking, arguably a very complicated topic, by telling the story of getting the opportunity in Singapore to spend several days aboard a cable-laying ship and watching how they did that. I talked about getting to watch surgeons remove a woman’s gall bladder in a rural African clinic, using a robotic surgery machine—noting that the surgeons were controlling the robot from Maryland, 8,000 miles away. And I wrote about the power of technology and how its complexities were what made education accessible for a large swath of the world’s population.

Stories. Always, stories. It’s what people want to hear; it’s what gets them to focus; and it’s what has to be wrapped around facts if those facts are to be absorbed and retained. No story? No context. No context? No understanding. It’s that simple.

So, by now you’ve probably figured out how I do genre-jumping. I don’t! My genre, you see, is storytelling. The details, the settings, the protagonists, the main characters, are secondary. Sometimes I tell stories about technology, sometimes about history, sometimes I tell stories for children, sometimes I tell stories about childhood games or write political or adventure or science fiction novels. Sometimes my heroes and villains are people, but sometimes they’re devices, or networks, or companies. But it’s always about the story.

And how do the stories come to me? Well, at the risk of sounding self-serving, the answer is curiosity. I seek out people and I have conversations with them, because everybody—and I mean everybody—has a story inside them that will light a spark. I read a lot, and I read a wide variety of genres. If you’ve swapped emails with me, then you know that one of my email signature lines is, “Writing is my craft; reading is my gym.” I really mean that. Reading is what makes me a better writer. That, and writing.

I also spend a lot of time thinking about adverbs. Let me explain.

I used to run leadership programs at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. Some of them were multi-week programs, which meant that I’d often be in LA over a weekend. Well, one weekend I had nothing to do, so I walked over to a local science museum because it was only a couple of blocks away and I love museums. I’d never been to this one.

The place was pretty cool: outside, on stands, they had an F104 Starfighter and an SR-71, both amazing aircraft. Inside they had a whole collection of satellites, along with the usual kid-oriented science displays. Then I walked down a hall and as I passed a doorway, I looked into a dimly lit room, and there, lined up in front of me, were a Mercury, a Gemini, and an Apollo capsule. Well, I’m a space geek, so I spent the next hour just walking around these things, peering inside, marveling at how—primitive they were. I kid you not, the seat the Mercury astronauts had to sit in was basically a lawn chair, made of braided leather straps. And based on the space inside, the astronaut couldn’t have been more than four feet tall. Gemini was no better. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. And Apollo? Bigger, but they also stuffed three people in there for the trip to the Moon. Here are the facts, according to NASA. The average length of a Mercury flight was 15 minutes. Gemini flights ranged from a few hours to one extreme endurance mission that lasted 14 days, But the average was three days. Apollo missions lasted an average of just over eight days. 

Let me interrupt myself with another story before finishing this one. As I was standing there, admiring these early space capsules, I realized how dark it was in the room. So, I looked up at the ceiling to see the lights. Except I couldn’t see the lights. Why? Well, because just over my head, between me and the ceiling, was the gigantic wing of the Space Shuttle Endeavor. The one that they pulled down the streets of LA to get it there. It was so massive and took up so much space in the room that I didn’t notice it, I was so focused on those little capsules hiding in the shadows underneath it. 

Yep—tears. Geek tears.

Anyway, adverbs. You remember—who, what, when, where, which, how, why.

My curiosity kicked in. There I was, looking at those capsules, thinking about how brave or crazy a person had to be to be bolted into one of those things, and how crowded it was, and how the Apollo astronauts basically just sat there in a space about the size of a VW Beetle for four days, one way, before turning around and doing it again in reverse. There was no bathroom, no privacy, no way to really get up and move around. Just shoot me now. 

And that got me thinking—and here’s where the adverbs came in. A trip to Mars is somewhere between four-and-a-half and six months, depending on timing. How in the world could we possibly convince a crew to crawl into a ship for a journey that long? Well, I figured it out—at least, I figured out ONE way. And I must be pretty accurate, because I got a call from a friend who works at our vaunted space agency, asking me after reading my book whether I had hacked their firewall. Gotta love that. Anyway, that’s how Russet got its start. It was all about asking, ‘hey, what if…?’ The power of adverbs, especially how and why. Those two little words define curiosity. And when curiosity and storytelling are combined? Wow. 

It’s why I started The Natural Curiosity Project Podcast. Dorothy Parker once wrote that curiosity is the cure for boredom, but that there is no cure for curiosity. Thank goodness. Curiosity is what keeps the world moving forward. Want to see the Dark Ages again, the period that Bill Bryson describes in his book, “The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” as “a period when history blends with myth and proof grows scant”? It’s easy: stop being curious. Does Bryson’s description of the Dark Ages sound alarming, given current events? Does it strike a bit close to home? Good. So, get out there. Be curious. Share ideas, and don’t just blindly trust what you read or hear—question everything. It should be the law. Oh wait—it IS the law. My bad.

Blue Highways Revisited

Leave a reply

It was mid-1982. I had been married and working for the phone company in California for just about a year, the first phase of a 40+ year career in the telecom industry. I had left my commercial SCUBA diving business behind, but still wanted to be a professional travel photographer and writer even though I was now going corporate, becoming an Organization Man. It was different, and it was exciting, and I was grateful for the opportunity, not to mention the paycheck, given that I had a young family. But the writer and traveler in me still burned bright, as they do today, more than 40 years later.

One evening, Sabine handed me a book that had come out two weeks before, saying, “Read this. It has you written all over it.” The book was called, “Blue Highways: A Journey into America,” by previously unknown (and quirkily named) author William Least Heat-Moon. If you haven’t read the book, stop whatever you’re doing right now and go buy a copy. I can wait.

Here’s the story, and why even today, 42 years after its release, it’s one of the most important books that has appeared in the American publishing pantheon in the last century. I realize that that statement sounds bombastic, but it isn’t.

The cover of the original book.

Heat-Moon (his name comes from his Osage heritage; he was born William Trogdon) was an English professor at a small college in Columbia, Missouri when a sequence of events left him free of employment and personal attachments. He had a Ford Econoline van into which he tossed a sleeping bag, a camera, a typewriter and writing supplies, and a scattering of camping gear. Leaving Columbia, he drove east on what would become a three-month, 13,000-mile amble around the United States, during which he avoided freeways and interstates, choosing instead to drive only on secondary roads—which are blue on maps, hence the name of the book that grew out of the trip and that would stay on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 40 weeks. 

The Interstate Highway System that was built in the 60s and 70s bypasses the small towns of America, the backbone and soul of the country. Freeways, along with the soulless interchanges around which fast-food chains, hotels, discount stores, and gas stations cluster in a homogeneous nothingness, may create a fast and convenient way to drive across the country, but they don’t allow travelers to drive through the country. Traveling cross-country via interstates gets you there faster; traveling the Blue Highways, as Heat-Moon did, gets you there richer. 

As we enter yet another political election cycle characterized by vicious, puerile attacks between candidates, social media’s slimy degradation of whatever respect and reverence still exist between people of different viewpoints, and the reduction of thinking, caring people into meaningless labels because a label requires far less effort to hate than the complicated person behind it, it’s a very good time to read Blue Highways for either the first, second or in my case, 19th time (and yes, that’s a real number). Here’s why.

Heat-Moon’s journey took him from Missouri to the east coast, where he turned south to follow a slow, wandering route down the eastern seaboard, then westward across the southern tier of the country, up the eastern spine of California, back across the Great Plains states and around the Great Lakes, all the way up to Acadia, then back down and finally west to where the journey began in Missouri.

With William Least Heat-Moon in Vermont.

I had the good fortune to meet the author in the early 1990s, when he taught a week-long creative nonfiction writing workshop at the University of Vermont, and I managed to get accepted into the program after Sabine surreptitiously signed me up for it. In addition to the elements promised in the workshop syllabus, Bill also regaled us with stories about three months on the road in his van, Ghost Dancing, and what he learned during the journey.

Many of you have heard me quote Mark Twain in my own writings and audio programs. One of my favorites Twainisms is, “Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness, and most of our people need it sorely on all three counts.” Heat-Moon is anything BUT bigoted, prejudiced, or narrow-minded, and it shows, as does his adherence to Twain’s words. As he traveled the nation, he went out of his way to stop and talk with people in cafes and diners and bars, when he picked them up as hitchhikers, at their workplaces, occasionally joining in as part of the local labor force. These were not the travelers one meets at freeway exits, stopped only long enough to stretch, use the bathroom, grab a bite and fill the tank. These were the people who live in forgotten Blue Highway towns, the detritus of economies bypassed in pursuit of expediency, at the cost of rural relevance. 

But these were also the people Heat-Moon set out to find. They were, for the most part, genuine, welcoming, and interested. Of course, he met a few unlikeable people along the way, but most were kind and open in the stories they shared with him, and they came from across the spectrum of work and life. Every one of them had something important to say; every one of them had a lesson to share. Blue Highways is the collected teachings of those lessons. 

As it happened, as Heat-Moon listened to the stories of strangers and let them sink in, he realized that he was on a journey of self-discovery as much as he was a journey of national discovery. ‘Self-discovery’: an overused term from the realm of psychobabble, which makes me reluctant to use it here. In this case, though, it was William Least Heat-Moon charting a path to his own future through the stories of others. In the same way the First Nations people of Australia believe that the gods dreamed the world into existence, Bill dreamed his future into existence—who he was and who he wanted to be—by building a fabric from the weft and weave of collective story. In the process, he also painted a national vision, a picture of what could be, although he might deny it.

Blue Highways is not about a driving trip around the country in a van to see the nation’s oddities along the way—the world’s biggest ball of twine or frying pan, the Spam Museum, the biggest truck stop. It’s a vision quest, an attempt to see the future and all its elements in the context of a large, complicated, messy, ultimately good country that has, whether you choose to believe it or not, a very big heart. It’s who we are, and Heat-Moon’s trip in Ghost Dancing is the nation’s collective story writ large. To me, what Heat-Moon discovered as he traveled from place to place and story to story was that who we are as a nation is very different from what we are as a nation. ‘What’ defines a label; ‘who’ is something far deeper and richer and more important—and, very, very difficult to describe or quantify without seeing it firsthand. He proved that hegemony, the attempts of colonialism to overlay a new culture on a place when the existing culture works just fine, thank you very much, fails every time. And if you don’t believe that, then why is there so much discussion going on about ‘the culture wars’? Blue Highways chronicles a journey to discover the things that weave us together, not the things that tear at the fabric of national self. 

As we make our way through this latest election cycle, it’s important to remember who we are, not what we are. It says it all on the Statue of Liberty’s inscription:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Read the book. And for those of you who already have, it’s worth a second read. Or, in my case, a 19th. For me, it won’t be the last.