I’ve been interviewed three times.

The first time was in 1982 at a science fiction convention in Vancouver, B.C. The interviewer, a woman from a local TV station, thought I was Frank Herbert. The interview ended abruptly when she asked me, looking back, what I thought of Dune and I told her.

The second time was in 1991 when a reporter on the environmental beat asked me how I had conquered junk mail. I don’t ever expect to field a question on this topic again.

The third time was in 2023 when I won a contest at Moment magazine. One of the editors asked me for writing advice for beginners. I told her that there’s so much writing advice flying around the world that it could make you insane trying to make sense of it. As a writer, I could’ve offered some subtle imagery (roll up your sleeves, dive into the deep end, step up to the plate, fish or cut bait, cut the tape, cut the crap, the longest journey begins with a single step), but instead I kindly suggested that you just do it. I don’t believe I quoted William Zinsser, but I should’ve: “Write it first. We’ll figure out what it is later.”

I can’t predict if anyone will ever ask me this again (if they do, I have Hemingway cued up), but I do stand by my statement that there’s too much writing advice in the world. My favorite used bookstore has an entire bookcase of barely used how-to-write books. My second favorite used bookstore could boast the same if they ever got organized enough to fill up a bookcase with these hopeful yet unwanted books.

This is the part where I contradict myself

Are all writing books useless? Here’s a definitive answer: Yes and no. Yes because you could easily substitute learning about writing for writing. No because a few have spoken to me. They might speak to you. Here’s one:

Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer was published in 1934, which might make it the first book ever published on the topic. (If I’m right, the second would be Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, published in 1938.) Becoming a Writer still sings. Ray Bradbury read this in high school a year or two later, and it meant a lot to him; Becoming a Writer is mentioned 10 times in Becoming Ray Bradbury.

Brande believed that writing could be taught, that we all have some genius inside us, and that writing is usually taught wrong: creative writing classes only teach the technical aspects, when they should be investigating the personality flaws that get in our way. She had a lot to say about unlocking the unconscious.

She divided beginning writers into four categories:

• The person who finds it difficult to write anything at all.

• The one-book writer.

• The occasional writer (writes well but suffers long silences).

• The uneven writer (excels in some things but not in others, creating no satisfactory whole).

Brande’s diagnosis of the beginning writer’s troubles made me think of Thomas Mann: “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Brande’s ideas about the unconscious reminded me of something Brenda Ueland wrote in her autobiography, Me: “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead on after another.”

Finally, Brande, almost a hundred years ago, gave me my motto:

“It is well to understand as early as possible in one’s writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.”

If you read the edition with the introduction by John Gardner, you’ll find that it’s appreciative for a while, but soon veers into a defense of creative writing classes. This strikes me as a dick move.

Jeremiah Murphy was a Boston Globe columnist who was one of my journalism teachers in college. “Throw the semicolon key right out of your typewriter!” he said in our first class. He taught us how to write an obituary, which has served me well. He was probably as scared of us as we were of him.

Jeremiah Murphy’s Boston is not a writing book, and because it was published in 1974 I don’t recommend it unless he was your teacher, too, or you lived in Boston in the 1960s. But Murphy learned an important lesson early his career when the paper sent him to Rome to cover the elevation of a Boston cardinal.

“When I got to Rome I somehow got my identity mixed up and decided I was Harrison Salisbury or Scotty Reston of The New York Times or somebody like that,” he recalled. “My stories were flat.”

His editor, after reading these stories, called him and said: “I want you to write this story just the way you would write it from South Boston.”

After the ceremony, “I walked part of the way back to the hotel in the rain. I needed time to get the lead just right in my mind. I got up to my room and ordered a big steak and a lot of beer, and then I sat there in my skivvies and wrote that story just the way I would have written it from South Boston.”

So the editor’s advice (“I suspect now it was really an order”) “taught me that when you get behind a typewriter you have to be yourself, and this is what I always try to do.”

Good advice; thanks.

My word count: 67,575. I might be able to finish the first draft by the end of the Labor Day weekend. As of this evening, I have my protagonist hanging by a thread over a pit full of Bengal tigers who are really angry about colonialism. All I need is a timely rescue and an epilogue.

Not Bengal tigers, but still dangerous.