Getting Started as a Writer

                   2024 February Blog by Chuck Peek

Having become a wildly successful writer, I thought I owed it to struggling writers today to share a bit of advice about how to start out on the road to success. I truly believe that, if you pay close attention, I can get you close to the number of my readership—my last blog was read by 34 people! Well, who can tell how much of the blog they actually read? It doesn’t matter. They looked at the blog, which these days counts the same as reading. (The bar is now very low for anything to count as “reading.”)

There’s no use trying to cram in all the good advice I can give you, so we’ll just start with one very important idea, indeed a key to future success. If you find it useful (and I’m sure you will), I’ll follow up with more gems to guarantee you at least a portion of the wide readership I enjoy.

Don’t dismiss this first advice too quickly. It may sound like just common sense. That doesn’t disqualify it as not simply good but in fact vital advice. Here it is: Start Early in Life.

One advantage of starting when you are very young is that you are not burdened by so much knowledge that you can’t get right to the point. And, if you are at all influenced at a young age by comic books, you will not hesitate to illustrate your own work. And, most importantly, you will not have lost the confidence you had up until puberty. You will tackle things large and small with equal gusto.

[Here’s a little side advice—keep your early writing samples. When puberty has disturbed your self-assuredness or longer life has sapped your memory, these examples will stir you to screw up your courage and go at it again. By that point you should be fairly adept at screwing up.]

Rather than deal with this in the abstract, best I give you some examples so you can see for yourself how real potential as a writer reveals itself early in life.

This first sample, from somewhere around the age, oh say 5-7, received a 100, from my teacher at the time, I suspect one of the fine teachers I had at Orrington in Evanston. I’m only sorry looking back that I never conceived of writing something with the title “Orrington in Evanston.” Radio was still very popular in those days and that sounds like a sure bet for a radio series title. If a light and sardonic story, possibly the voice of Dick Powell? Or if dark with intrigue, maybe Orson Welles. Just hear them speaking it: “Orrington in Evanston.” (I invite brief sketches of who or what both Orrington and Evanston might refer to in such a series! Maybe it is not too late!)

But, as writers say and my uncle Ken’s stories demonstrated, I digress.  Here is sample number one, to be followed by a profound truth about writers [with some marginal gloss as we go].

Nancy’s balloon can’t fly high

because the string is to short        

 [do not worry to much about spelling at the start]

John went to get some string.

The string went with a bird.

She thought that the string

Flew away itself.

a bird fle waway with the

    [capitalization or even spacing are not of concern until much later]

String.

he thinks the bird should

have done it

  [Or perhaps just “should have it”—there is some erasure here in the mss.]

There is no reason, at this point, to comment on the obvious depths of character motivation—you will have registered that immediately as you read. But you would have no way of knowing that “John” was to be the name of a close friend in high school and “Nancy” was to be the name of the girl I married in college. This is what I mean by saying that writing can be prophetic. Although, admittedly, the prophecy could only be detected in retrospect, that is upon not only knowing a “John” and a “Nancy,” but in seeing how closely the imagined John and Nancy foreshadowed the actual way the later real John and Nancy thought about things.

You will not be far afield at this point, if you are thinking there is something Proustian, possibly mixed a bit with Thurber, in the world-view the early writer exhibits, way before he ever heard of Proust or Thurber, indeed long before he’d even read Walter Brooks’s Freddie the Pig series, or had come to know poets such as Ted Kooser or Bill Kloefkorn. Still, it stares us in the face and is unavoidable to come to grips with one way or another.

A bit later example shows how, even at a young age, a writer morphs into a more mature style. This sample is from my writing at about age 9-10. (At least, if we can read the details of the writing as reliably autobiographic, and in this case I can attest to that personally. Take my word for it.)

Life and Death

I am a fourth Grade Umpire, the kids that play baseball hate me at least I think they do. Every time we play baseball I’m umpire. Now for example lets take yesterday! The boys and I were having a nice peaceful ball game until the boy up didn’t strike at a good ball and I called strike out. Well then they all got mad well guess what I came in with a black eye. Now for another example the boys and I were having another good ball game until I called 3 outs. Well: results another black eye even before the other eye was normal. Now for another example yesterday I came inside. Now I didn’t know anything had happened but it had. I had a bloody nose. Now yesterday the boys and I were playing another game I called: out. Well, results: no not the same thing but they did call out; kill the umpire. So I say it’s a matter of life and death. The End.

(This piece is signed Chuck Peek but that early version of Chuck Peek hadn’t left enough space, so the last name curls up on the right edge of the paper toward “the end.”)

Now, you will notice right away the Joycean experimentation with punctuation, enhancing a rather stream-of-consciousness narrative—again interesting because I had only about then met the first of several girls I would come to know named “Joyce,” one of them who would marry a very close friend of mine. As I look back on this, however, I see the first forays into the existential contemplation of being and not-being—and even of just plain hard luck in life. As you will see before I finish, this could even possibly count as a forerunner of fantasy baseball, at the time not yet invented. (And I’d recommend not underlining…your reader should be able to register the appropriate emotion from the words themselves.)

If memory served, I could probably produce many examples like these…I don’t know because memory no longer serves and the samples here are the only one’s I’ve been able to find, these found in a box with the old report cards that seemed to cause so many unpleasant moments at our dinner table. At any rate, I’ll just add one more example.

This one is dated (and, a 3^rd piece of advice free of charge, always sign and date your writing. But feel free to experiment with how you register a date—another much-missed opportunity to show your originality. The date on this reads “Wed., 2, 1952.”

Dear Pres. Truman,

          I think I have got in this letter a piece of machinery that will let us win the war and have peace.

          The machine guns will be on something like this.

[here follows an illustration of a mount for the machine guns…the mount looks like a capital H with a “Mystery Science Theater” sort of neck and head rising from its cross bar—again way before there was a Mystery Science Theater!]

          I think and hope very much that will be the answer to our American problem

[Oh, blessed times when America had only one problem!]

          I also hope very much that you will youse this

                    Yours very truly

                              Charles A. Peek

There is a P.S. with arrows pointing to an attached page subtitled Plans to win the war and illustrating the placement of guns to shoot at people running one way, shoot overhead (at people in trees or at planes in the sky), shoot just planes, and shoot people running the other direction!

Just incidentally, this can illustrate one of the great values of underlining! And I’m still proud of the experimental effort to enhance merely pragmatic “use” with ethnicity or “local color” in the last line’s “youse.” Young writers are full of surprising innovations!

P.S. I do not believe I ever umpired a baseball game in my life—proving, as so many writers do, that you don’t have to write about anything you know something about.

At any rate, I hope these examples encourage you to start off your writing career early in life. If it is too late for that, I’m afraid that I have no further advice.

Kearney, Nebraska

February 2024

Charles A. Peek

I have no idea when I can summon the audacity to write concerning the enormous examples of stupidity emerging from the state legislature, let alone contemplate the national scene…but I suppose I should try before my April cataract surgery gives me even clearer sight! I guess that leaves March.