BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS

Isn't it ironic what we writers will do to make a living? Not that I'm an overwhelming success but I've done all sorts of jobs. I've filed credit receipts for an oil company, sold telephone equipment, typed tax returns (before computers!), managed an office, been a foreign-customer coordinator for an aerospace company, packaged sports cards and collections to be sold on QVC, and taught creative writing classes, just to mention a few. And I continued to write while doing so, as more famous writers have done.

William Faulkner must have been an odd Southern postmaster. I wonder if he wrote while sorting? Did he read the mail, or merely observe the people who came into his post office for character sketches, ideas?

Zane Grey was a dentist. Alex Haley wrote while in the Coast Guard about his own "roots." Bricklayers do beautiful work but there were none of his profession in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"--only toiling Oakies.

How could a management professor write such stirring tales of past-prime people and forbidden love in "The Bridges of Madison County" and "Border Music?" Robert James Waller certainly knows how to manage his own writing.

I have met some wonderful writers in classes I have taken, and students in my own classes. Former military writing great masculine tales based on what they experienced in their war; a bookstore owner who created characters any reader would have sworn were right out of a history book; a young teacher who wrote (and had published) seven romances in one year in order to be able to write for a living; and the woman who had been confined to a wheelchair since an automobile accident twenty years ago, a writer who put herself into the characters minds in order to walk again, as she put it. They are all writers, no matter what professions or disabilities they might have, and they all have stories to tell, or important experiences to pass on.

We writers are secretaries, stockbrokers, laundry workers, doctors, civil servants, policmen, even retirees. We are of all professions, all backgrounds, all sort of people. None of this really matters, certainly not to our editors/publishers or readers--they only want us to write well enough to engage minds in our work, to sweep readers off their feet, to sell those books or magazines.