I wrote some research papers in undergraduate school, but they didn't amount to much. Graduate school taught me how to write, and I owe that to seminars. I loved seminars because most of your grade there was based on papers, and I always made A's on papers. I did well enough on tests, especially essay exams, but writing research papers was my thing.
Graduate school professors can be demanding when it comes to papers, or a least they were back in the years when I was there. I did most of my graduate work in Mississippi (that was home for me) at Miss. State, Univ. of Southern Miss., and Ole Miss. Dr. Tip Allen at Mississippi State, along with Dr. Gordon Bryan, did the most there at making a writer out of me. And that's because they stayed after me to do better at it. I got my M.A. there, then went directly to Southern Miss to work on a doctorate. They had the biggest and best Political Science Dept. in the state at the time, and that's where I met Dr. William Tuchak, Dr. Bill Hatcher, and others who demanded good work in seminars. Ten years later I went to Ole Miss and had some good professors there, but I already knew how to write research papers by then . . . and nobody complained about them.
Dr. Tuchak was a Russian, or more precisely a Ukranian who'd come to America to get his doctorate. And he was tough, and I loved him for it. I can remember him saying, "You write much better than you speak, and you must work on that. He even coached me some on how to speak because he didn't worry about my writing. I spent some quality time with him, planned on spending more but he died not long after I left there and went into teaching. I did learn to speak well enough to become a good lecturer, but for the most part, I stopped writing after graduate school. My teaching time was spent at a small college that didn't have that publish or perish attitude, and even though I produced a few journal articles over the years, I didn't try writing a book until my forties . . .and it was fiction.
That first book is still unpublished and for good reason. It isn't worth publication; it's that bad. There's a world of difference between putting together a dissertation or thesis or term paper than in writing fiction, and I soon learned that. I had ideas, just didn't know how to write them down. That's when I had to learn to be a storyteller first, a writer second. I still struggle with the writing part, but sometimes the struggle pays off. I've got books in print, finally. Writing is still hard work, but when you enjoy the challenge, you don't mind the effort. I'm not a composer. My first drafts are ragged, and the book doesn't start to emerge until after a third or fourth rewrite . . . and sometimes that takes years. I just published serveral books that took ten years in the writing. Sometimes it's good to sit on it for a while and see what hatches. And sometimes you just end up with a rotten egg. I've got a drawer full of them.
But here's the deal, as I see it. You need to get comfortable with your book before publishing it, and by comfortble, I don't mean absolutely sure about it. You just finally reach a point to where you feel like, "Well, Ok, it's hatched out now, and it's not the best looking bird I've ever seen, but maybe it'll fly." Let someone else be the critic. There's something to be said for perfection, producing something you're really proud of, but there's also something to be said of finishing. Get done with it, decide if it's good enough for publication without being perfect, and then get on with something else. As long as you're learning and growing as a writer, your work isn't wasted effort.
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