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William Least Heat-Moon - Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

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William Least Heat-Moon Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

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Winner, Distinguished Literary Achievement, Missouri Humanities Council, 2015
The story behind the writing of the best-selling Blue Highways is as fascinating as the epic trip itself. More than thirty years after his 14,000-mile, 38-state journey, William Least Heat-Moon reflects on the four years he spent capturing the lessons of the road trip on paperthe stops and starts in his composition process, the numerous drafts and painstaking revisions, the depressing string of rejections by publishers, the strains on his personal relationships, and many other aspects of the toil that went into writing his first book. Along the way, he traces the hard lessons learned and offers guidance to aspiring and experienced writers alike. Far from being a technical manual, WritingBlue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happenedis an adventure story of its own, a journey of exploration into the myriad routes of heart and mind that led to the making of a book from the first sorry and now vanished paragraph to the last words that came not from a graphite pencil but from a letterpress in Tennessee.

Readers will not find a collection of abstract formulations and rules for writing; rather, this book gracefully incorporates examples from Heat-Moons own experience. As he explains, This story might be termed an inadvertent autobiography written not by the traveler who took Ghost Dancing in 1978 over the byroads of America but by a man only listening to him. That blue-roadman hasnt been seen in more than a third of a century, and over the last many weeks as I sketched in these pages, Ive regretted his inevitable departure. Filtered as the struggles of the blue-roadman are through the awareness of someone more than thirty years older with a half dozen subsequent books to his credit, the story of how his first book happened is all the more resonant for readers who may not themselves be writers but who are interested in the tricky balance of intuitive creation and self-discipline required for any artistic endeavor.

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About the Author William Trogdon who writes under the name of William Least - photo 1
About the Author

William Trogdon, who writes under the name of William Least Heat-Moon, was born of English-Irish-Osage ancestry in Kansas City, Missouri. He holds a bachelor's degree in photojournalism and a doctorate in English from the University of Missouri. Among his writing credits, he is the author of Blue Highways, which spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 198283. William Least Heat-Moon lives and writes outside Columbia, Missouri.

A Note of Thanks

In addition to those people named within the chapters, my appreciation to Edgar Ailor III, Steven Archer, Thomas Dillingham, L. J. Keown, L. D. Laws, Jo Ann Trogdon, Clair Willcox, Sara Davis, Mary Conley, Kristi Henson, Annette Wenda, Jennifer Cropp, Susan Ferber, the University of Missouri Ellis Library and its excellent staff, and especially to the thirty-seven characters whose stories are the foundation of Blue Highways.

I.
Hacking Out

The winter of 1977 began the day before Thanksgiving and lasted nearly to the first week of spring. Even in the middle latitudes where I lived in central Missouri, snow falling on the second of December took months to turn, glacially, into sooty heaps melting just enough to change into a dirty ice that remained until a week beyond the vernal equinox, and only then did the remnants soften into gray honeycombs before at last turning to slush promising the end of the long and hard season.

At age thirty-eight, overdegreed and undereducated, living a life that could be represented by the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, I was iced in by failed expectations and a cold logic suggesting I should expect no interior spring thaw. Wearied of waiting for some sort of change to the obstacles I saw before me, I decided to try the ice-ax method of hacking and hewing a way through debilities of stasis and into movement that might find a path out of the frozen fields of Missouri.

If you've read the opening chapter of Blue Highways, you know what happened next: On the first day of spring I boarded my small three-year-old Ford van, called Ghost Dancing, and with its dicey water pump lit out for some other, and warmer, territory that could be termed Any Damn Place Else. That act may be the most American undertaking I've ever tried: an embracing of our storied, historied, ineluctable, continuing, kit-bag-over-your-shoulder solution to finding a new life or, if not quite another existence, at least something offering differences.

Now, a third of a century later, this little book is not about the ensuing three-month journey. All of that is in Blue Highways. Rather, this one is about what happened in the following four years, the fifty-five months, the sixteen hundred days after I returned near the summer solstice to the same placetopographically but hardly otherwiseand began trying to make sense of what I had encountered over thirteen thousand miles of back roads, and to discover where they might lead. The idea is to relate events in a narrative serviceable to other travelers and writers regardless of whether they use roads, rails, computers, or means simply of mind. (Where's the traveler who doesn't also gallivant about from time to time in the arms of a favorite easy chair?)

I want to set down how the second journeythe one emerging from the end of a pencil or issuing out of the interior of a portable typewriterwent. This trip is an exploration into the myriad routes of heart and mind that led to the making of a book from the initial sorry and now vanished paragraph to the last words that camenot from a stick of graphite but from a letterpress in Tennessee. I want this journey to escape me and reach someone who dreams of writing for an audience beyond self or family or friends, someone looking to offer stories to strangers, and to send them traveling beyond cyberspace and into the deepest chamber of the human heart. I hope this little chronicle is an analogue of larger undertakings.

Autobiography is a poorly named genre. After all, when we tell stories about ourselves, we're speaking not of who we are but of who we have been, somebody we once were, one who no longer exists except in memory, that mental function more attractive to errors, distortions, and fantasies than the myths of the American West or Sasquatch or cavity probes by aliens. Although I hope it is otherwise, this story might be termed an inadvertent autobiography written not by the traveler who took Ghost Dancing in 1978 over the byroads of America but by a man only listening to him. That blue-roadman hasn't been seen in more than a third of a century, and over the last many weeks as I sketched in these pages, I've regretted his inevitable departure. I wish I could have heard directly from him about the scent and flavor of those years when he was trying to tell the story of a long journey. As if foreseeing this day and realizing he would know things I don't, he left behind notes and pictures and documents for me to puzzle out in hope of writing accurately. Surely, though, he would shake his head over some of what's about to happen in this narrative that I want to escape the bounds of autobiography.

I've tried to make Writing Blue Highways the kind of book I looked for when I began comprehending what Blue Highways would require, when I started to see what the devil I was getting into. Although writers have been writing about writing almost from the beginning, I still haven't found anything containing what I was in search of. Had I anticipated the four years of travails following the three months of travels, and had I understood the impediments and encumbrances and barriers inescapably coupled with any serious writing, I could have lived less labored in mind and body. Writer Henry Miller said the most hazardous voyages are made without moving. Despite the three millennia of authors experiencing the bugaboos native to literary creation, I was little aware of their universality, and so, week after week, I blindly reinvented old means to kindle and stoke creative fires. When I mentioned the title of this book to a friend, he said, You're calling it Riding Blue Highways? I thought about it a moment until remembering it was the book that rode me.

What's here is not a manual on ways to writealthough there are chips of counsel; rather, it's a compact guide on ways to survive the demands of real writing, and perhaps a dispelling of a few popular illusions. This is the story of how Blue Highways began, repeatedly slipped toward the pit of failed dreams, only to clamber up and creep onward toward a rainy day in December 1982. As you'll see, in your hands, this biography of a book ultimately is not so much about struggles as it is about where struggles can lead, and in that way, like its progenitor, it too is a road book about traveling a strange and poorly charted land. If I can setdown things aright, then for a writer striking out into new territory, perhaps I can lay down a few flagstones, hang a rope bridge or two, and maybe even put up a couple of signs warning of dead ends.

II.
The Journey Contemplated

In the weeks leading to my setting forth on the road, I saw my ten-year marriage collapse and my part-time job teaching English at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, disappear because of declining enrollment. Underlying those changes was the memory of six hundred letters from colleges and universities saying they had no openings in my area; in a drawer was an unframed, unhung diploma commemorating five years lost in earning the legal right to attach to my name three, now useless letters, PhD. At commencement, a fellow graduate passed a note: Welcome, doc, you're now Ph.uckeD. Bumping bottom, dragging port and starboard anchors, I responded to the rejections with seeming illogic by returning to Missouri University for yet another degree, this one in photojournalism, something I'd started out for two decades earlier before waylaying myself into professordom. I'd heard that newsrooms were offering a few jobs, even if ones of limited promise.

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