Writing A Bestselling Series

Chapter 4: Writing Discipleship

When I switched my major from medicine to "Editing" at BYU, I really decided to immerse myself in my writing. Now, I don't want you to think that I gave up on everything else. I had other artistic interests. I had always been good at sculpting, had studied photography, and I was interested in oil painting, but I began to focus more and more on writing.

My very first story in my writing class with Eloise Bell though was a little piece called "Charlie in the Wind," a story about a budding psychopath who tries to help his best friend learn to become a man. At the time, I had quit working as a guard at the Utah State Prison about a year earlier, and I was very interested in what makes a sociopath.

When I wrote the first draft, I took it to the writing lab at BYU and asked a young woman to help me edit it. I was particularly worried that my punctuation might be a bit off. She began editing, but after a couple of pages she just stopped and began reading. She laughed in all of the right places and cried in the right places, and when she reached the end, she was in tears. She said, "This is great. Just turn it in," and I asked, "But what about the punctuation?" She told me, "When you can write like this, nobody gives a damn about punctuation."

So I was pleased that the story at least elicited a good emotional reaction, and I turned it in with a great deal of trepidation.

A couple of days later I got the story back, and my teacher had given it an A. She wrote a little note informing me that there was a short story contest coming up, and she suggested that I enter it. So I erased the grade, and found that my teacher had spilled something on the last page. At first I thought it was coffee or something, but then I realized that there were tears on the manuscript. I just left them, then went up to the box where the contest entries were stored, and dropped it in.

About four weeks later, I ended up winning third place in the writing contest and winning $50. I calculated that I had spent about seven hours composing the story, and realized that I had made over $7 per hour on my story. I wondered, You know, if I had tried harder, I wonder if I could have taken first place.

So I set a goal to win first place in the writing contest for next year, and I kept studying.

My course of studies over the next year included writing, and I began writing almost every day. I now had a goal to win a contest, and I wanted to come up with a story that would be worthy. But as I looked at several upcoming contests, I realized that there were even bigger prizes out there. So I wanted to come up with a slate of stories.

At the same time, I was ramping up my studies on writing. I was reading books on writing for my classes and doing exercises. I decided to try to learn from a number of teachers, and took classes in writing poetry, science fiction, and short fiction. I also read books on how to write novels and screenplays.

Much of what I did included research into various genres. For example, I subscribed to The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the Southern Review, Omni, Asimov's, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I read voraciously not just in modern literature, but I read short stories from many of the modern masters, and I fell in love in particular with the work of the Latin American realists. Borges in particular pretty much floored me, but there was Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a couple of other contemporary writers that really excited me.

I also began reading poetry daily. I fell in love with the works of Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, and Robert Frost, to name a few.

Then I was also studying literary criticism. I took a class from a historian who had us study every significant critic from Plato down to the 1980s. A few people dropped out of the class due to the heavy workload, but I absolutely loved it.