I’ve recently begun a book about writing. Now and then I’ll include a brief excerpt from this work in progress as a blog post.
These days, everybody is a writer. Several billion of us connect daily through a variety of social media platforms and email programs. For the first time in history, something you write today may, against all odds, go viral, filling your inbox with messages from faraway places such as Kazakhstan or Paraguay.
Once a respected profession, writing now seems more a hobby or pastime, with its own secret code of one-word sentences, flexible grammar, and cryptic abbreviations. As one who has made my living by writing for more than half a century, I’ve had to adapt. Applying for my first job, in 1971, I didn’t even know how to type, so I signed up for an Adult Education class at a local high school. Gradually I progressed from writing articles with a fountain pen on lined legal pads to clicking keys on a computer.
When personal computers first became available, I experimented on a book manuscript, writing odd-numbered chapters by hand and even-numbered chapters on a keyboard. At the end I couldn’t tell a noticeable difference, so I reluctantly surrendered to the more efficient method. I still worry over the words and phrases I’ve edited on a screen, now lost forever, and I miss seeing all the deletes and additions scrawled in the margins of my hand-written drafts.
“Did you always want to be a writer?” I get that question a lot, and the answer is No. I backed into the profession because I needed a part-time job to pay grad school bills. I went up and down the streets of Wheaton, Illinois, knocking on doors with no résumé to show apart from a few articles I wrote for a college newspaper. Miraculously, the publisher of a magazine for young adults, Campus Life, took a gamble on a skinny 21-year-old kid from Atlanta and gave me a chance.
“With a name like Campus Life, we could use a contributor who’s actually on a college campus,” said Harold Myra, the risk-taking publisher. I soon learned that I had been hired by a man with superb editing instincts, endless patience, and a fierce insistence on quality. Other staff members warned me: “He’ll call you into his office, begin by saying, ‘this article is about 80 percent of the way there. Let me just suggest a few minor changes.’ Then he’ll rip it to shreds.” Thin-skinned writers don’t last long.
Looking back, I cannot conceive of a better environment for a fledgling writer. Wheaton College had a proud literary history, and its students often won national awards for their articles, short stories, and poetry. Myra occasionally taught classes at Wheaton, but when he returned to the magazine office, he was all business. “The reader is the boss,” he would say. “You can produce the most stimulating, artful magazine in the world, but if the readers don’t like it, you’re out of work.”
Campus Life, you see, was a Christian magazine, and most of its subscriptions began as gifts from an adult to a kid. It worked like this: Aunt Gertrude heard that little Johnny had stopped going to church, so she signed him up for a Christian magazine. Surprised to get something in the mail with his name on it, he took it to his room and started reading. We had one word, one sentence, one page to win Johnny over. If something sounded like church talk, he might bail out at any moment.
I started working at Campus Life in the 1970s, just as the countercultural Sixties were having a belated impact on the church. Society was dividing over generational issues: “Don’t Trust Anybody Over Thirty,” read the t-shirts. School systems fought battles over facial hair and skirt lengths (tattoos had not yet arrived). Young revolutionaries disrupted political conventions and blew up university buildings in protest against the Vietnam war. Racism, global poverty, injustice—no youth magazine could ignore such dominant issues.
Our magazine walked a tightrope across the generational divide. We insisted that hair length was not a moral issue (right, Jesus?), and neither was rock music. I cringe now as I page through the archives from that era. For example, we ran a World War II photo of Nazis rounding up starving Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, with the headline, “Why are Jews so touchy?” We published a ten-page insert attempting to explain Dostoevsky to teenagers. And at a time when Playboy was the only porn most kids encountered, Harold Myra made the bold decision to commend masturbation as a way to deal with sexual frustration. Though we lost 3000 angry subscribers over that article, it led to Tim Stafford’s monthly column “Love, Sex, and the Whole Person,” which instantly became the most read part of the magazine.
We heeded Harold Myra’s mantra: in the world of magazines, the reader is the boss. Somehow we had to make our content rewarding enough to entice readers to keep reading and to renew their subscriptions. We hired survey companies to track how many people read each article, and we pored over these surveys. If we made a major blunder, oh well, there’s always next month. Magazines are forgiving, because after a few weeks or months of lying around the house, they end up in the recycle bin.
Under Harold Myra’s tutelage, I came to believe that good writing can be learned. “Start with sentences,” he advised, suggesting that I begin with Reader’s Digest, at the time the highest circulation magazine in the world. “They edit for readers at a fifth-grade level, but we can aim a little higher. After you master their simple sentences, you can move up to Time magazine, which is less formulaic. Read The New Yorker on the side and figure out what makes great writing, but don’t try to mimic them. Just absorb the way they structure an article and look for those rare phrases of startling beauty. Make a list: What makes words jump off the page?”
I dutifully followed his advice, filling notebooks with lists of words and phrases. I gave special attention to writers such as John McPhee, who could write about rocks, food trucks, or poisonous snakes with equal passion; Annie Dillard, an architect of the perfect sentence; and Frederick Buechner, who had a gentle, seamless way of writing about faith. Myra warned against relying on the static verb “to be,” urging me to find active verbs to enhance the flow of an article. For a solid year I tried to avoid any use of “is, am, are, will be,” even in letters to my friends or my mother.
On one of my visits to Myra’s office, he held up a draft I had written on a famine in Africa, based on my interviews with a teenage volunteer. “This is great,” Harold said, and my blood pressure dropped 30 points. “You’ve captured the teenager’s point of view, and the descriptions are excellent. Fine work.” I enjoyed five seconds of creative pride before he lowered the boom. “So, Philip, we’ll make this a cover story. Would you mind if I ask Hope [a staff writer] to run it through her typewriter? She’s a real writer, a wordsmith.”
As the newcomer on the team, I always tried to be accommodating. But this time, most uncharacteristically, I swallowed hard and replied, “I want to be a real writer too. Can you tell me what’s missing? I’ll do whatever it takes to fix it.” Harold stared at me for a second, then smiled. “OK, that’s fair. Then let’s go over it together. It’s 80 percent of the way there.”
“Campus Life” was my introduction to you and CT. I was on the AV Team in high school.
My job was to sit in the library and operate the ancient VHS machine by putting in a tape for a class. Some days had nothing to do for 55 minutes. I found stacks of Campus Life in that little room, read them all and subscribed for many years.
Thank you for a beautiful, funny, true, and (most of all) encouraging description of what it is to struggle with wordcraft and publishing dreams. And the insight of writing for teens on the heels of the 1960s “Jesus movement” is priceless. I think Campus Life was one of my first (of several) article rejections. Fond memories. 🙂 By the way, the first time I saw your name in print was within the pages of “The Way” Living Bible (‘72 edition), a gift from my small rural church upon my baptism at an Oregon teen camp in ‘74. As a new Christian from a non-churchgoing family, it was a treasure (still is). God bless you, dear brother.
Loved this story. As one who has read most of your books and thinks you are an amazing writer, this was so interesting! Thank you for sharing how you started.
Phillip
I was a pre-med at Wheaton and graduated in 63. Wes Craven was a good friend and I admired his writing as sort of my writing mentor. His writing career took a very different direction after Wheaton. During my medical career as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I wrote in my sparse spare time. In 2011, I closed my clinical practice to write full time. I look forward to purchasing your book on writing when it is finished.
Below is a piece Wes Craven wrote at Wheaton—I read it every Easter.
Resurrection Notes
By: Wes Craven. 1963, in Wheaton College Literary Magazine
In the fields the lily sleeps.
The sun had set. The sky, without inspiration, lay its purple robe of clouds in deep folds along the horizon, then put on black. And there was no wiseman’s star to lead the way that night.
In the fields the lily curls inwardly and is still.
It was the night after the crucifixion of the God-man they called Jesus. Now let us be truthful: Easter is the celebration of the impossible. It is a festival in recognition of the making culpable of the most obvious paradox: for a stone womb gestates putrefaction, not life; the putting away of a body is admission of defeat; a grave is not a place for angels, but for the weeping of women and the stares of sullen men. Ask the old ones; they will tell you: after the death of a god, a man must again learn to live by the laws of the world. He must look after his own life; no one else will. Do not look for the impossible from God; learn to recognize poverty where it shows it shows itself. When the days of wine and roses must be traded for blood and thorns, before life may come, who is there that is really so anxious to live?
In the fields the lily hides its fires within.
But history is the anticipation of ourselves. Yesterday it was a part of ourselves that leaned back against the tree and shot craps with the boys, cursing the fool up there that dropped his bright blood on our spotless clothes. And too, it was part of ourselves that came weeping and lifted him down with great sorrow. We put him in the place once meant for our own burial, rolled a stone over the rude mouth darkness that swallowed all of our hope so easily. And once again it was the serpent, and his child the worm, that had won the prize.
In the fields the hoarfrost seeks the lily.
The night after our God had broken all the rules, had staked too much on this thing called loving and had been snuffed out like a lamb among the lions of Rome and Jerusalem one slept. No one ever sleeps on the night a god dies.
Now in the fields the fragile lily twists once then opens in the night.
The birds stirred in their nests at a sudden spring wind, the beasts coughed hollowly in their lairs, tense as the earth trembled feverishly. All across the fields, there was a febrile moment. The lily was awake, the earth trembled as a mortal women bringing forth a son of God. The light spread in a growing form—like the movement of an angel’s robe in the half-light of a tomb. We who saw Him die; we who put Him in our own tomb. (remembering with some embarrassment that we could not find a place for Him to be born), we who came to pour our inspissated perfumes upon His body, hoping to hide the stench of a dead god—we were not prepared to face a flaming angel. The sealed stone of Roman imperative could not hold Him, and we were amazed . Could it be that He was more than the rabbi? Were his words more than bravery? When we finally grasp the meaning of a barren tomb, we shout jubilation outside in the early dawn. Now in the depths brak-green forest is a clearing and a field. There our lonely voices cried alone for generations of ages; there the lion roamed unfettered and broke our bodies in his great maul…this dread eternal forest that is death and dying, hate and holding was our home.
Then rose the lily and bloomed in the early morning.
That dawn came upon the wilderness and drenched the heavens in scarlet; the streams of the earth ran red with the reflected fury of a whole darkness being vanquished.
Easter morning, the lily was there, pure white upon the fields, pure white within the forest , to be picked and taken to every believer’s table. The waters of the stream are now pure and quenching, in a way they never were before; the tomb is eternally thwarted. So the word spread: love does not stop at death; the grave is a passage, not a dead end, an isthmus between time and eternity, death and life.
Why? Because the lily lives.
Can’t wait to sit once again at the feet of my favorite writer when this beauty comes out! So grateful, Philip, that you’ll be sharing your wisdom on what you’ve learned about writing for nearly six decades. Thanks for encouraging me both through your writing and in person. Continuing to pray for you and your health.