James A. Michener - James A. Micheners Writers Handbook: Explorations in Writing and Publishing

2014 Dial Press Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 1992 by James A. Michener

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

D IAL P RESS and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, in 1992.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5164-1

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and McClelland & Stewart, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from Journey by James A. Michener. Copyright 1988, 1989, by James A. Michener. Rights throughout Canada are controlled by McClelland & Stewart, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and McClelland & Stewart, Inc.

www.dialpress.com

v3.1_r1

The writer who sits at her or his desk with an empty piece of paper staring back is like the explorer who stands at the edge of a new continent, uncertain of how to proceed. The basic process in writing a novel, a short story, or a play is one of constant exploration. Why does this defect in character lead to that behavior? Where do we go from here? How do you bridge the awful gap between a stirring start and a worthy conclusion?

This book provides visual proof of how inescapable this constant exploration is, how imprecisely it is sometimes pursued, and how it can lead to many false starts. Exploration is, as many adventurers in exotic lands have discovered, a process of trial and error, of selecting and rejecting a variety of courses before deciding on what is most profitable. Discovering the proper course of a narrative is like the charting of a new river as one follows its twists and turns.

The manuscript pages reproduced here show an exploring mind at work. Although the pages are rarely laid out in neat columns of tidy sentences, they do represent the search for exact procedure, the right name, and, sometimes, the deviation from the norm that would be more appropriate. They are offered as they came from my desk, and, obviously, each page was subsequently pored over and evaluated. More important, the pages that outline entire books, or substantial chapters within those books, depict ideas and choices caught in mid-flight while the writer was struggling for control.

I call this a workbook, for it shows in step-by-step fashion how the manuscript for a published book moves through a complex chain of operations from initial concept to finished book. It is therefore not a book on writing, for thats only one third of the job, nor is it a book on editing, because that comes late in the process. And it certainly isnt a book on the preparation of the finished manuscript for the printer, because that concluding part of the system is left in hands other than the writers.

No, this is a portrait of exploration. A workbook that begins as close as possible to the moment when the idea for the book is first conceived, moves through the tentative early steps, looks at how the writer herself or himself edits his own work, then moves to the skilled editor, the uniquely gifted copy editor, the illustrator or cartographer, and finally to the provisional galleys, which signal that the work is truly in print and, with some polishing touches, is eligible for publication. Shown are the sweat and grime of these various stepsconsidered romantic exercises by those who have never performed them.

The virtue of this workbook is that it presents these steps as they apply to passages of such limited length that the reader can keep them in mind while turning the pages. By following individual sections, paragraphs, sentences, or even specific words, the reader can trace the writers thought processes.

The subject matter has been chosen from two of my published books, the novel Journey and the nonfiction The World Is My Home, and it will be interesting to judge which of the two forms presented the more difficult problems. Actual pages are shown, often as they came directly from the typewriter or word processor. I use the former exclusively, my secretary the latter, for it requires a dexterity I do not have. Although all original editing was done by hand, it is the ease of the secretarys word processor that makes true editing possible.

My books have been praisedor condemnedas being easy to read. The book that follows proves the truth of Nathaniel Hawthornes growl: An easy read is a damned hard write.

Because in my old-fashioned cut-and-paste kind of editing I use paper of different colors to keep track of what Im doing, throughout this book to achieve differentiation and clarity, a mix of Bendays has been used. I invite the reader to check Bendays in the dictionary, for it is one of the miracles of the printing profession and will be used here to good effect.

JOURNEY

A Canadian
Novella

The genesis of my novel Journey was extraordinary. I had for some years worked on a long novel about Alaska, and whereas the main body of the manuscript hit those topics that would generally be of interest and might to some degree be familiar to the American reader, I was determined that anyone who read the book would be aware that Alaska had been in Russian hands longer than in American, and I planned some good chapters on that point. I would think that any sensible writer on Alaska would be obliged to dwell on that inescapable fact.

But I also had a highly personal agenda. Ive always been an admirer of Canadian history, the Canadian landscape, and Canadians in general. However, my interest this time was not in Canada as such, but in the great Mackenzie River, perhaps the least known and appreciated of all the worlds great rivers. I was detcrmined to do the Mackenzie justice, and to let the world know that there had been a Canadian gold rush to parallel the well-known one through Seattle and Alaska.

With those motives impelling me, I fitted into my Alaska novel not a separate chapter about the Canadian gold rush through the little town of Edmonton in Alberta, but rather an extended episode within the long chapter about the gold rush in general. Selecting from the hundreds of 18971909 characters who filtered through Edmonton, I chose four upper-class Englishmen with their Irish servant and set the five loose from their London club, brought them across the Atlantic by a new type of ship and across Canada by the transcontinental railroad recently put together by Canadian and American geniuses.