Writing A Bestselling Series

Chapter 5: Taking the Challenge

When I got my first writing contract from Bantam Books, I had two problems. One was my health. I was still fighting off my chronic fatigue syndrome. The second problem was that I had never written a complete novel. Sure, I'd written a dozen short stories and I'd started four novels, but I'd never figured out how to get through that tricky middle and ending.

In 1986, I spent four months suffering from fevers that spiked to 105 degrees very often. During that time, I was only able to get out of bed for maybe three or four hours per day, most of the time, and that time was spent watching my daughter while my wife was at work.

My throat was sore all of the time, inflamed and burning, so I eventually got a tonsillectomy, which helped somewhat. I found that vitamin therapy was the only thing to help the chronic fatigue, and that didn't produce any rapid results. For the next three years, I felt like a V8 engine that was running on two cylinders, and the truth is that you never fully recover.

I often wondered if the CFS would kill me, but I wasn't that lucky. I tried a number of things to boost my productivity. I found that drinking colas helped keep me alert, but soon the extra sugar, combined with the lack of exercise, caused me to add unwanted pounds.

I was trying to get through college quickly, but the CFS didn't allow it.

My studies went well despite the illness. I kept writing and learning my craft. I volunteered to be the managing editor for a couple of the on-campus magazines, and in my literature classes, I was having a blast. Early in the Fall of 1986, I stopped to visit a couple of my professors in the hallway, and Eloise Bell introduced me to another professor, Sally Taylor, saying I was "that literary genius." Sally smiled in a teasing way and said, "Oh, a literary genius, huh? We'll have to put that to the test." Within a couple of weeks, it seemed that all of my professors were addressing me as "the literary genius," and I spent a lot of time fielding questions that stumped the rest of the class.

So my writing, literature, and editing classes were going fine, but my energy levels were so low that I was dragging along, barely able to maintain a minimal class load. Meanwhile, my wife became pregnant with our second daughter, and a rare opportunity came up. The head of the Editing Department at the college had an opening for a student editor who would work with faculty members, trying to raise their writing to publishable levels. It was the highest-paying job in the English Department for an undergrad, and so I applied for that, and soon landed the job.

Soon I began spending half of my time editing as an intern, working on various books, articles, and proposals by a host of professors. I began editing everything from medical and mathematics textbooks to history texts, religious books, and novels, and occasionally writing articles on English usage for publication in a regional paper.

I was getting a rich education, but not getting much done on the novel that I had contracted, and after a year of this my health began to decline further. The CFS came back with a vengeance. I knew that I would have to take a break from college, and if I did that I would lose my job. So I thought a lot about how to move ahead on that novel.

My unsure feeling about how to structure a novel didn't quite go away either. I read widely in books on writing, trying to get some tips on structure, and found . . . nothing that I considered to be helpful. The best advice came from Algis Budrys, a literary critic for the Chicago Sun Times. His little seven-point plot chart became the basis for the expanded method of outlining that I use today. But I have to be honest: At the time, I felt that I was really winging it, just trying to write the scenes in a way that felt right to me.

Ultimately, I'm convinced that as writers, that's all that we ever do. We create outlines to give us some structure, guide us as to where we go. But ultimately as we are writing the scenes, we will come up with new ideas and new directions for our novel, and often have to go back and reconsider our outline, re-draft it. I have found that most novelists tend to do this.