False starts and little victories in route to a second writing career
You’d think success in one type of writing would forecast success in another.
You’d be wrong.
Or at least, I was dead wrong that a long career in news and feature writing, often about unsolved murders and other crimes, would somehow magically “transfer” over into success writing crime fiction, or any kind of fiction.
Of course, it took practical experience and regular disappointment to disabuse me of the idea that a lifetime newspaper reporter and editor could just waltz into a new genre of writing.
Turns out, I cannot waltz.
I started writing for my local newspaper when I was in high school, back in the 1970s, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Based on the first piece I wrote, the paper offered me a regular “teen columnist” gig. I wrote features and entertainment reviews through college and beyond, and a full-time reporting job – covering government, politics and corruption – followed, and so did more than thirty first-place awards in state and national journalism competitions.
That was the easy part.
I’d written some crime fiction in the early 2000s – unpublished – and made copious notes for additional stories, but I didn’t get around to actually writing more of it until after I took a company buyout in 2019. After leaving the full-time job I’d loved, I continued to work on true crime books I was co-authoring with a longtime friend and writing partner and started writing what turned out to be a couple of hundred pop culture and news pieces for sites like CrimeReads and others.
And I returned to the idea of fiction writing. I mean, I’d been writing non-fiction for forty years. How hard could it be to get published as a crime fiction writer?
(That sound you hear is me laughing at myself now that the pain from my ignorance and hubris has faded. Good times.)
The old saying is that it takes a village to raise a child. As it happens, it takes a community to make a fiction writer.
I’m lucky in that I grew up loving reading, from Hardy Boys books to comic books to anthologies that collected horror stories and repackaged them as nightmare fuel for kids like me with overactive imaginations.
I think that all that reading – along with perhaps unintentionally analyzing movies and TV shows and absorbing their structure and conventions – helped me with all kinds of writing, particularly fiction. I understood that there were best practices (don’t show a gun in the first act unless you re-introduce it later; service your characters) as well as times when it was good to break free from the expected.
Before I did much fiction writing, I worshipped at the shrine of modern-day legends like Stephen King and Robert B. Parker and Dennis Lehane and Jan Burke and Eleanor Taylor Bland and other writers.
And at about the time I started writing fiction, in the first years of the 2020s, a number of incredible writing talents turned crime fiction on its ear. S.A. Cosby is probably the first of those new voices that comes to mind, but there are others. These writers not only wowed their readers but inspired other writers to try new ways of storytelling and remake the old ways.
But could I take that inspiration and turn it into tools?
I used to read Parker’s annual Spenser or Sunny Randall books or Lehane’s searing Patrick and Angie books and think, how could I possibly do this?
The key to even hoping to reach those heights was getting to know Cosby and other great modern authors in a way that outstripped reading their one book a year.
And the means of doing that was Twitter.
I should note that Twitter, whose new owner has made it an unreliable narrator, has always been a place where sincere people, particularly women, felt like they wore a bullseye on their foreheads. Some people left Twitter even before it was renamed something that its most dedicated users will never call it.
But some stayed, and some of us have forged a strong community. Oh sure, there are still a lot of jerks. But where else can we see the creative minds that write our best fiction and non-fiction tune up their thoughts while they’re still in the process of writing? Where else can we get to know a little bit of our favorite authors’ personalities?
Where else can some of us who are leagues below Cosby or Megan Abbott in talent actually feel like we know them, even a little bit?
I think the strangest thing about “knowing them” – and I understand I don’t really know most of these authors – is realizing that writing is not easy or a certain thing for many of them. Some of the best writers out there acknowledge they get rejections or they continue in their day jobs because they can’t survive and maintain a household on what they make from their books.
This shocked me. Not since King wrote about buying a hairdryer for his wife when he’d sold “Carrie” did I feel like these were not gods, despite their dizzying talents.
They were writers. I started to write “like me” at the end of that sentence but the actual writers who I feel are most like me are the writers who are a little below the radar but still pushing, still striving, still rising to meet challenges every day. Sometimes the challenge comes in the form of a rejection. Sometimes it’s in the form of an ailing loved one or fraught political times.
Writing is a solitary and sometimes lonely profession. A writing conference or two a year helps chase that isolation away, and sometimes forges friendships.
Authors who are active online, on various social media platforms, get to experience at least a remote form of those friendships throughout the calendar year, between conventions and conferences. We get to express how much we enjoy another writer’s latest book or story. A lot of us engage in the kind of give-and-take that genuinely inspires.
Some of us exchange drafts of our work with trusted confidants. Their feedback makes our stories better. Their encouragement makes us better. The writing community online is one of the most encouraging groups of people ever, cheering fellow writers on and touting their work. The biggest cheerleader, judged by his talent and reach, might be King himself. He’s extraordinarily generous in pointing readers toward great writers.
The depth and breadth of other writers who have helped me – some much more than they will ever know – is great and to cite them here would turn this piece into just a list of names.
I’m kind of reconciled to the idea that, at my age, it’s unlikely I’ll walk into a bookstore and see a book with my name on the cover. I do love seeing my work in anthologies and online publications though. I wish I could see every one of my writer friends’ names prominently displayed not only in Barnes & Noble but Target and Walmart.
I still can’t waltz, but with help from my writer friends, I figured out that it’s possible to thrive and feel encouraged and encourage your colleagues, peers and those who have “made it,” whatever that phrase means. And that’s a wonderful feeling.
Keith Roysdon is a Tennessee writer. His crime novel “Seven Angels” won the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest. His short fiction has been published by Punk Noir, Shotgun Honey, Cowboy Jamboree Press and Slaughterhouse Press. On Twitter, he is @keithroysdon
