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Jack Whyte on Writing

Jack Whyte is often asked about the secrets of his success. What motivates him to write? How does he write? What's his advice to budding novelists? On the release of his newest saga, Clothar the Frank, Whyte reflects on the writing life in a guest column below.

I write every day, without fail. I may write only a few paragraphs, perhaps a page or two, on any one particular day, and none of what I write has anything to do with the fiction I generate for a livelihood. But I do write every single day, and I do it with an ease and fluency for which I am extremely grateful. I write letters and I write journal entries and, nowadays, I even keep a web log. I also write long, formal letters — effusions and fulminations, critiques, complaints, and even laudatory paeans on occasion — which I print off and send by snail mail to all kinds of people, and I compose emails by the hundred to a multitude of friends and acquaintances, and to readers who contact me through my web site. Then, too, I sometimes write poetry, some of it abstract, but most of it narrative verse, that is intricately and formally structured and anything but abstract. Words, words, words, words, words: my stock in trade. I probably write, process and generate between five and ten thousand words every day.

And yet, when people ask me how I write, I have to stop and think about it, because I don't really know the answer. And when people ask me for advice on how to write, and sometimes even on what to write, I hesitate and hum and haw because I feel genuinely unqualified to advise anyone on any of those things. The "how to" part of writing is something I simply never think about; it's just something I do because I have to. There's no choice involved, no alternative option. I am a writer and I always have been, and so I write about whatever happens to be uppermost in my thoughts at that time.

I've had to do other things all my life simply to earn enough money to allow me to keep writing, but each and every one of all those other things I did involved writing and storytelling in one form or another — even the years I spent in the advertising business qualified as storytelling experience.

I worked on my Dream Of Eagles series every day for thirteen years without really telling anyone. My wife and some of my close friends knew that I was working on a story and that it was taking up all of my spare time, but it was no big deal, just one of my little quirks, one of the things Jack did. But I ended up with three complete 600-page novels sitting on my office shelf in manuscript form before I ever thought seriously about trying to have anything published. I had a story to tell — one very long and complex story — and I knew it was nowhere near finished, and had it not been for the promptings of my wife and some of my friends, I wouldn't have approached a publisher at all, back when I did in 1989.

In consequence, whenever someone asks me how I write, or why I write, or how I know what to write about, my eyes glaze over in panic and I usually answer with a shrug and a largely indecipherable mumble.

As for asking me how to write and hoping for a cogent, intelligible response, well, you might as well ask me how to breathe. It's just something one does. And you do it because you have to, because you're driven to do it. But it's not exactly like breathing. Breathing is an imperfect analogy in that you can do it all your life and it will eventually deteriorate. That's not so with writing. Writing will always, indisputably, improve with practice. The more you write, throughout your life, the better you will get at doing it. Your writing will improve consistently as you work at it, providing of course that you retain all your other intellectual faculties while doing it. That seems so obvious and so self-evident to me that sometimes I have to school my features when people ask me the same questions, time and again.

There are things I can tell them, of course, and I do, despite the fact that they'll ignore my advice in their search for the magic bullet that will propel them to fame and fortune. Learn the language, I say. Learn the rules of grammar. Familiarize yourself with the parts of speech. Study the structure of sentences and learn about clauses, about analysis and syntax. Learn the rules of spelling and punctuation, then apply them to your work. Build your vocabulary. Buy yourself the biggest, most expensive dictionary you can afford and use it every time you come across a new word. Read, read, read, and then write and write and write, and then rewrite everything.

Nobody wants to know. But everybody wants to write a book."
— Jack Whyte

To learn more about Whyte's most recent words, words, words, check out his new book Clothar the Frank.

To check in on some of the author's daily musings, visit his new web log at www.penguinblogs.ca/whyte.