Remembering Tommy Thompson, Part II

  Ten year's worth of sales pitches as a furniture salesman produced an ulcer, so Tommy Thompson found a  writer's position with Douglas Aircraft. He said he knew his destiny the day he wrote writer as his occupation on the front of his World War II coupon ration books. He then met several well known southern California pulp writers, among them Tod Ballard, Cliff Farrel, and Tom Blackburn, who befriended him "because they wanted a guitar player-singer at their monthly business meetings, and because they knew I was in awe of them.

"I felt guilty among such high and lofty personages and started writing madly. I made my first sale to the old popular publications magazine, Fifteen Western Tales, for half a cent a word. The die was cast. I went through the usual amount of stories about the little boy feeling sorry for his deathly ill mother, and giving her poison. And the farmer whose well had run dry and all the rest of the gruesome gamut that beginning writers see as literature."

He then sold a few Western stories, at "one whole cent a word, and greed took over." On DJ Day he took a six week's leave of absence from Douglas Aircraft, and wrote sixteen pulp Westerns that sold. He said, "I haven't been back to work since."

Over the years Thompson developed the habit of rising at four each morning to write before he left for work. When he began writing full-time, he sporadically maintained an office in downtown Los Angeles, whee he kept regular business hours, putting in four hours of intensive writing, sans telephone calls and other interruptions.

His wife June ran interference for him and proofed his work throughout his writing career. He confessed that she could spell but he couldn't. "She never makes suggestions, but she has a very clever way of sometimes seeming to fail to understand. At which point I go into a towering rage, scream and yell, trying to defend myself, and in so doing I will suddenly stop, grin, give her a kiss and say, 'Thanks, it's all straightened out now.' I sometimes think she's a better writer than I am."

Pre-sixties pulp writers had to be prolific in order to earn a living from their craft, and Thompson's theory was "take care of of the inventory and it will take care of you. I kept fifteen or twenty stories [circulating] in New York at all times and the checks would keep coming in at a fairly steady rate. Sometimes eight or ten stories would sell at once and I would go into a panic to rebuild the inventory."

Thompson's novels would take from two weeks to six months to write during his early years in the business. During the time he spent in the television industry, he sometimes created two one-hour scripts over a weekend for a production company preparing to film on location. "If I'm hungry, I'm very prolific," he said. "If I'm affluent, I'm the slowest writer on earth." One of his novels, Outlaw Country, took two years to write and was released by Doubleday in December 1987, a good indication that he no longer worried about finances.

The veteran writer acknowledged that library research could be a bear trap. He enjoyed researching so much that it ate up huge chunks of his writing time. "When I was writing for the Saturday Evening Post and other big magazines with a sort of implied deadline, I would go ahead and write the story and then go back and check the facts. Because I've been in the business of writing Westerns for many years, I often find that I have very few changes to make to bring something up to total accuracy. I've never attempted a truly historical novel. If I had, I'm sure my research process might have been reversed." Research is the "real fun part of writing," he said, but he avoided it whenever possible.

He admitted that he had been overwhelmed by every book he started. "I overcome it by just plodding ahead anyway. He experienced two moods while writing: "Higher than a cloud or somewhere under the  belly of a snake. Anyone who says he hasn't suffered from writer's block just hasn't started writing. I have offered my typewriter for sale a least a hundred times, and have threatened to throw it out a second story window on numerous occasions. I've thought that if I burned my reams of unused paper it might help to get me out of this miserable business."

Two magnificent Spur Award plagues, his Saddleman  trophy and other writing prizes decorated his 14 x 18 ft. office, and served to cheer him on when, "for the ten thousandth time I am convinced I will never write another word."

(Excerpted form Maverick Writers)

Remembering Tommy Thompson, a WWA Founding Father

1913-1993

Plotting a novel was always Tommy Thomspon’s biggest problem. The prolific novelist-scriptwriter confessed that he had a “terrible time seeing an overall story. The actual writing is a pleasure and sometimes even a thrill. It’s driving myself to put the seat of my pants on the chair that is sheer hell.

“When I write the end, the two most wondrous words in the English language, there is a  blinding flash of glory that endures until the manuscript goes into the mailbox. Then comes deep depression as I realize what a horrible writer I am.  When [the book] sells, again comes  the burst of glory, and when it  appears in print I hang my head and dread meeting anyone who has read it. I’m embarrassed when somebody tells me that something I have written is exceptionally good, but I’m secretly saying to myself, “Please say it again.’ The self-confidence—I’ll avoid the word ‘ego’—of most writers astounds me.”

Thompson’s successful writing career never quite compensated for his erratic upbringing. Born in Dixon, California, the youngest of three children, he was the product of a broken home. His parents divorced  when he was two. His mother supported her brood as a cook and housekeeper in a logging camp in northern California’s Mendicino County and married a man four years later “who believed it was beneath his dignity to work for wages. He spent the rest of his life proving it.”

Tommy was a shy, withdrawn child, whose only playmates were a few children from a nearby Indian reservation. His older brother and sister left home shortly after they acquired a stepfather, but their youngest sibling was moved about the state, mostly to remote areas where there were no schools for him to attend.

Despite his sporadic education, he received a certificate of honor as the fifth grade student who read the most books in Fresno County. He also managed to be listed on his high school’s honor roll, graduating at the age of sixteen. He struggled through high school algebra and chemistry in high school, but was editor of his school newspaper. He had begun writing poetry at the age of ten, and his mother saved most of it, much to his chagrin. She submitted one of his poems to the Fresno Bee, and young Tom was “secretly thrilled” to see his work in print.

He recalls reading “everything I could get my hands on. In those early days, up in the high Sierras, my favorites were Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, and Harold Bell Wright—mostly because those were the books available.” His stepfather read western pulps magazine stories, and Tommy devoured them as well. He said that even though he dreamed of how wonderful it would be to see his name in print, he didn’t remember considering writing as the means to accomplish it.

Thompson left home upon high school graduation in 1929, and hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he signed on with the Dollar Steamship Company. He made four trips to the Orient and three around the world as a student officer, which convinced him to change his career goal from singer to sea captain.  He had played the French horn in his school orchestra and developed his singing voice, which he later put to use. The captain encouraged  his young officer to  sing with the ship’s orchestra to entertain passengers “so that dream didn’t really die.”

When the cruise ship was in port at Marseilles, Thomson’s natural father died, leaving him “the princely sum of one thousand dollars. Positive that I would never have to work again in my life, I left the ship in San Francisco and for some strange reason, paid a year's tuition to Heald’s Business College. There I learned to write shorthand, operate a typewriter and keep books. Discovering that I was filthy rich, several fellows moved in with me at the boarding house and I soon ran out of money and turned to the only thing I knew to make a living.” He sang for tips at various saloons in San Francisco by night and attended school during the day.

(Thompson’s writing career next week . . .)
Excerpted from Maverick Writers.

A Visit with Ellen Recknor

Ellen Recknor lived with a variety of animals in Scottsdale, Arizona. A night owl, she wrote western novels during the wee hours under her own name as well as Wolf MacKenna.  Me and the Boys and Prophet Annie won her two prestigious Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, and she said at the time of the interview several years ago that she would love to write additional novels with eccentric, humorous women as lead characters. Her talents and humor are apparent in the following:

Ellen, were you born into a creative family?

Creative? We were the Midwestern version of the Von Trapps. Dad played the trumpet and cornet on “Armed Forces Radio” during WWII. My mother played jazz piano by ear and also sang in the Ames Trio with two of her sisters before she married Dad. In fact, her siblings include a much–publicized poet and several natural musicians.

When did you take an interest in art?

When I was sixteen, I had my first dog portrait published in a national magazine. This was something I had been doing for quite a while to make extra money. Eventually, I acquired a stack of magazines and magazine covers with my portraits of show dogs on them. Later on, I found out that horse portraiture paid better, and I started doing more portraits of show horses and racing stock.

When did you begin writing?

I had always been interested in writing, but as more of a hobby than anything else. I think I figured that my aunt, the poet, filled the literary niche in the family, and so I was going to fill the artist niche.

When did you switch from art to writing?

In the late 1980s, when the stock market took the famous major nose dive, the money I was making in horse portraiture suddenly wasn’t there. By this time, I was specializing in Arabians, a breed whose value, overnight, went from about four million for a good horse to about a buck-sixty. A short time before this disaster happened, I had read a magazine article about some girl who had just sold her first romance novel for $50,000. There was an excerpt included, and I remember thinking, “I could do better than that.” Famous last words, right?

I sat down one night with a yellow pad, and wrote the first chapter of a novel, set in the West. This was a natural thing, I suppose, since I grew up during the golden days of Westerns, and was a Jesse James junkie and John Wayne’s #1 fan. The next day I borrowed a friend’s computer, and learned how to use it—and wrote the book in six weeks. This, in spite of never having read a romance novel in my life. I had a friend who read them all the time and she said, “Just talk a lot about the color of their eyes and use lots of adjectives.” I took her at her word. A year later, I had not only an agent, the great Oscar Collier, but a contract for that book. It was titled Wild Captive Fire by some addlepated marketing genius at Zebra, and was published in 1990. I think I used a pseudonym. And, by the way, I did NOT get $50,000. That magazine lied. Big time.

When did you start writing adult Westerns?

I wrote Westerns from the start. I was inundated by the culture of the West, I guess, both by choice and circumstance and by that time, I had moved to Arizona, so it was inherent. I wrote a total of eight western historical romance novels, plus a novella, under three different names. I have also written one contemporary woman’s novel, whatever that means,  short series of Western historical mysteries as Kate Byran, my own western historicals as Ellen Recknor, a dozen or so books in the Slocum series for Berkley, and a couple of Trailsman books for NAL/Signet. I’m currently writing as Wolf MacKenna for Berkley.

What’s the most difficult aspect of writing for you?

The part that I don’t like. And this can be different in each book. Since I don’t plot ahead I just take a character and run with him or her—it’s usually when I’ve run my protagonist up a tree and chucked so many rocks at him that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get him down. But I always do. Eventually.  Usually with a great deal of hair loss and gnashing of teeth.

Part II of Ellen's interview will be continued next week.

(Excerpted from Westerners: candid and Historic Interviews)

A Visit with Carole Estby Dagg

Carole left her position as assistant director of the Everett Public Library System to research and write the story of her great-aunt Clara Estby and her mother who walked from near Spokane, Washington, to New York City in 1896 in an effort to win $10,000 to save the family's farm and to prove women could do it. But because of the way the trip ended, they never published the book about their trek and agreed never to talk about it. "But times change, and what seemed shameful then seems heroic today," Carole said.  Seventeen years after leaving the library to research and write The Year We Were Famous. Carole's book was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Carole writes in Everett, Washington, in a converted woodshed on San Juan Island. 

Carole, what prompted you to write The Year We Were Famous? And do you know how many people took part in the walk?

Great-aunt Clara and Great-grandmother Helga kept journals during their unaccompanied 232-day trek across the country and meant to write a book about their adventures. Because of the way their trip ended, however, their records were burned and they vowed never to talk or write about the trip again. Times changed. Two women leaving their family at home to walk across the country on their own was considered scandalous 1896; one hundred and fifteen years later it was considered heroic. The time was right to share their story.

I was the only one of Great-aunt Clara’s nieces and nephews admitted to the hospital to see her before she died back in 1950, almost as if I had been commissioned as a child to someday write the story she never had a chance to tell.

How did you research the book?

My most important source of information was newspaper articles written about Clara and Helga as they walked across the country. I also read dozens of books about William McKinley, William Jennings Bryan, women’s suffrage, early railroading, rattlesnakes, and the eating habits of cougars. I studied old maps, drove part of the route with my daughter, bought period postcards on ebay, sewed a replica of Victiorian underdrawers, and combed antique stores for items similar to the ones they carried with them.

Why, as a librarian, did you buy a piano-sized loom and learn to weave?

I sometimes get carried away by research. When costuming puppets for a performance of a Samish Indian tale, I visited the Burke Museum to take notes on a chieftain’s robe and decided that the only way I could reproduce it on puppet scale was to buy handspun yarn and loom and weave it myself.

What sparked your interest in Western history?

It would be more accurate to say that I am inspired by women’s history in general, which tends to emphasize the lives of ordinary people sometimes doing extraordinary deeds, instead of textbook history which emphasizes kings and presidents. I started with stories of the west because I felt compelled to tell the story Great-aunt Clara was forbidden to tell and to attempt to solve mysteries about Clara which have intrigued four generations of Estbys.

What’s your work schedule like? Do you write every day and do you aim for a certain amount of words?

I often start the morning with old-fashioned paper and pen, brainstorming the next scene or backstory for a character, then going to the computer with my notes to see what I how to incorporate my notes into the scene I’m working on. I don’t aim for a certain number of words, because I know that 95% of my work will end up in the wastebasket anyway. I hole up in August in a converted woodshed on San Juan Island, where I may work ten or twelve hours a day with major writing and revisions. It may seem a waste of summer, but that’s when I have the fewest commitments on the mainland.

Although I try to write every day, sometimes research or promotion takes priority. And if grandkids are visiting, I might not write for a week or so, but will come back to writing inspired to dig in again.

Who most influenced your own work?

My biggest inspiration has come from children’s literary non-fiction writers and historical fiction writers. After hearing several of them talk, I was comforted to know it was OK to spend half a day researching what kind of pencil sharpener might have been used in a public library in the 1890’s and if I needed to revise twenty times, it didn’t mean I had no talent for writing – it’s just what it often takes.

Here are some of my favorites: Russell Freedman, Jennifer Donnelly, Karen Cushman, Katherine Paterson, Avi, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Jennifer Holm, and Ann Rinaldi.

What types of children’s books do you write? And do you find that more and more kids are reading on Kindle, Nook and other e-readers?

I’m hooked on historical fiction—especially historical fiction featuring bold women. My next book (if my publisher accepts it) will be the sequel to The Year We Were Famous, in which Clara is an example of the New American Woman of the late 1800’s who wanted the vote and a career as well as a family. I’ve also started a book set in Alaska, and have notes on books set in Great Britain of the 600’s and in colonial America.

I have no empirical evidence, but I suspect (or hope) that children are still reading old-fashioned paper and ink books more than e-readers.

Advice for fledgling writers?

Never stop learning and never give up. I received twenty-nine rejections over a period of thirteen years before signing a contract. I took each rejection as a sign I still had more to learn and took eight more college classes in writing and at least a dozen writing workshops. Seventeen years after starting TYWWF, I finally saw it in print.

Seek the support of other writers. You might picture writers toiling in solitude, and a lot of the time you’d be right. But much of your professional growth will also come from writer’s groups. I’d urge children’s and young adult writers to join SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators), which offers workshops, speakers, contests, moral support, critiques, and access to agents and editors.

Thank you, Carole.

You can visit Caraole at her website: www.CaroleEstbyDagg.com
Her book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32EWPJt8i_A

A Visit with Susan Page Davis

Susan Page Davis is an award-winning author with thirty-nine published novels and novellas. A Maine native, she has also lived in Oregon and recently moved to western Kentucky.  Susan has six children and eight grandchildren and loves to spend time with them. In January, 2011, she was named "Favorite Author of the Year" among readers of Heartsong Presents books. She’s a member of Women Writing the West and American Christian Fiction Writers and a past winner of the Carol Award (ACFW’s Book of the Year) and the Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award.

Susan, Why did you decide to take a farrier’s course after earning a degree in history?

I loved horses and had owned a few. I’d always wanted to learn the trade. Back in those days, I believed my career would lie in the equestrian world, not the publishing realm.

 Which came first, your interest in genealogy or your novel writing? And did one further your interest in the other?

I’ve always made up stories and have preserved some that I wrote as a child. But I never thought I could be a “real” novelist then. My interest in genealogy developed in college, when I belonged to a history club, and the advisor encouraged us to learn about genealogy. The research and documentation methods I learned through genealogy have been very helpful in writing historical novels. A few of my husband’s and my quirky ancestors have inspired characters.

 Were you able to write while home schooling your six children? And have any of them inherited their parents’ writing talent?

I didn’t begin seriously writing fiction until 1999, when the four oldest were mostly grown. However, I did work as a news correspondent during their upbringing, and also wrote magazine articles. When I started writing fiction, I had two toddlers. We continued home schooling until we moved to Kentucky (they were 16 and 17 at that time, and I had about two dozen books in print). All of the children are very verbal, and several are published. Megan co-authored three cozy mysteries with me (The Mainely Mysteries series). Amy has published poetry and nonfiction articles. Jim has published articles and is about to e-publish his first novel, a fantasy. Phoebe and Page have also published articles, and Nathaniel has begun writing fantasy.

It must be great to have a husband capable of editing your work. Do you ever have disagreements about his edits?

Oh, yes—all the time! Mostly it’s over word usage. I have to say, he’s usually right. He’ll say, “This sounds too modern for 1857.” When that happens, I have to go and look it up in English Through the Ages or on the Online Etymology Dictionary. He spent 21 years editing news, and he’s edited quite a few books. He’s good at finding mistakes and also seeing plot holes.

When did your interest in the West and its literature come about?

I married a true westerner. Jim’s father was born in Albuquerque, and his mother on a ranch in Oregon. We lived in his home state of Oregon for a while after we married. But I grew up watching and reading westerns.

How do you research your Western books from Maine? Do you visit the sites before you being a book?

I have been to almost all of the places I write about with a couple of exceptions. The West is not hard for me, having lived there and returned many times. Our oldest daughter and her family live in Idaho, and Jim still has close family in Oregon. One of my sisters used to live in Arizona, and I got to visit her there. For my Oregon Trail stories, I’ve driven the route several times and done a great deal of research. Texas was a challenge to me. I’d visited, but hadn’t spent much time there. I was a little intimidated, knowing there are so many wonderful writers in Texas. Books, computer research, another visit, and help from friends enabled me to find the information I needed.

What’s your writing schedule like and do you outline?

I absolutely outline. I had to learn that from my first fiction editor. After my first book, she bought based on the synopsis, and she didn’t want to have to read the entire book to know if she would buy it. I had to learn to craft a compelling outline for her.

My writing schedule begins as early in the morning as I can get moving, usually between 6 and 8 a.m. I write or do writing-related tasks most of the day now. I take breaks for time with my family and try to lay my work aside in the evening and on weekends, but that isn’t always possible.

Has the ebook revolution affected your sales in any way?

Yes, it has. All but one of my publishers have put at least some of my books out as e-books, and in October 2011, I noticed that for the first time, my e-book sales on Amazon outnumbered my paper book sales. When the royalty statements come, the picture will be clearer, but I think electronic sales will continue to grow in importance for writers. I love e-books, because now I can find nearly any book, even if it’s been out of print for decades. Right now I have 19 titles available as e-books, with more coming soon.

Advice for fledgling writers.

Read a lot, and write something every day. Take the time and the effort to master the craft of writing. Grammar and punctuation DO count! But story rules. A good story, well told, will bring you success.

Thank you, Susan.

You can visit Susan at her website: www.susanpagedavis.com.