becoming a writer – Lee Duigon

Ocean Time

I’m occasionally asked how I’ve managed to write my series of “Bell Mountain” fantasy novels.

Well, it’s a long story, and it starts with my friends Bobby and Ellen in their basement, with me ten years old or so. We are making up wild stories. Bobby was old enough to have a subscription to a science fiction book club. We did our best to imitate the authors.

Point is, that’s where it started and it never stopped. Writing stories is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do as a career. It takes a long time and years and years of practice: not only in writing, but in reading.

“It walked in the woods. It was never born.” –Theodore Sturgeon, “It”

Boy, did that intro ever turn me on.

So how do you wind up with books full of countries, people, and cultures you made up and somehow made convincing? Too much goes into it to polish off in one blog post. Suffice it to say you really, really want to do it. You’d rather write stories than be president. You will study your art and never stop trying to improve it.

Your teachers will be the authors you like best and read again and again. Some of the writers who influence me, to this day, are Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy–these last three have been in print for thousands of years, they must have been doing something right.

And you must be willing to keep at it no matter how many times it gets you absolutely nowhere.

That’s enough for now. I hope I’ve made this interesting enough to spark some comments.

Bell Mountain Series: Lee Duigon: 9781891375668: Amazon.com: Books

My allergies are at me again today–I don’t know how to write a fantasy novel while my nose is making like Niagara Falls–so I’ve been reading Hell’s Cartographers, autobiographical sketches by half a dozen prominent science fiction writers.

Very nearly all writers go through a stage of cranking out novel after novel, story after story, without ever selling anything they write. One winds up asking oneself, “Why in the world am I doing this? Beating a dead horse! I’ll never get published, never get anywhere. Might as well quit!”

I mentioned this to Patty today, and her reply scored a point:

“I wouldn’t let you quit!”

She feeds me. She manages our household. She reads my work. We talk about it.

And she’s right, you know–she never let me quit. So I kept writing, and writing, and writing, slowly getting better at it as I went along. And out of nowhere–or rather, out of God’s all-knowing providence–along came the Chalcedon Foundation and, after taking me on as an assistant editor and publishing dozens of my articles… offered me a chance to write a novel. Which was Bell Mountain. Thirteen books ago, with two more in the hopper.

And a fantasy novel, no less! My first love. And all those writers, an army of them, right behind me, pushing me forward by example–Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sir Walter Scott, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis: I couldn’t possibly name them all. If I hadn’t read them, if I hadn’t learned from them, I could not have become a writer myself.

Nor could I ever come anywhere near achieving it without my wife’s support.

Thank you, Patty. Thank you, all you other writers who delighted me and mentored me.

And thank you, God the Father.