Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 19, 1993 TAG: 9304170275
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HUGH A. MULLIGAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. LENGTH: Long
"This is a pretty good story." says James Michener from the vantage point of 40 published books, 10 years as an editor at Macmillan, a Pulitzer Prize and the President's Medal of Freedom. "Literate and well put together. Debbie spent a lot of time on this one."
Debra McDonald beams shyly, if tentatively, knowing from past experience with the evening seminar there was surely more to come.
Michener doesn't disappoint.
"What bothers me," he says, rapping the table with his pencil, "is that near the bottom of the second page we have this terrific episode where a kid is bitten by a snake in the jugular. But it seems to be thrown away. Not enough buildup. You got to give it some pizazz, but don't ask me how."
Everyone laughs, even Debra, who admits, to more laughter: "That was going to be my next question."
Sessions like these at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg sometimes last for five hours, and the 86-year-old author rarely reaches for his aluminum cane without spending another half-hour in earnest conversation with the budding writers, many of them mature adults like Debra, a church social worker who never finished college.
Among the participants are a Korean-American woman working on a history of her forebears settling in America; a rock band singer with an alert ear for dialogue overheard in seedy bars and nightclubs; a grandmother with an idea for a book: "Grandma Goes to College."
The class next turns its attention to a chapter outline of a proposed novel about 12th-century troubadours in Provence, France, submitted by Ralph Warrington, who teaches horticulture at a Sarasota high school and has had a varied career as a farmer in North Florida and the director of an art galley in London.
While copies are distributed, Warrington confides his amazement at Michener's energy and dedication. "Not only does he read all our stuff, he takes the time to attach a column of typed criticism, which we go over together. He's a tough editor, big on the hyphen, the apostrophe and the grammar you should have learned in grade school. But that's good. He wants us to be professionals."
Pushing the gold-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses farther up on his nose, Michener goes over the outline in customary detail. "The milieu here is wonderful," he enthuses. "Avignon, a marvellous town. I hope you know enough French to handle the research. One serious defect worries all of us romanticists. The hero doesn't meet the girl until the eighth chapter, then runs off to Italy and doesn't see her again until the 12th chapter. That's certainly a tepid love affair."
The irony, always gentle but to the point, elicits another wave of laughter. "You've got a problem in storytelling, which is why we're here," he resumes. "I've been down this road lots of times, and it's important to get the chapter sequences right."
The octogenarian author has been down thousands of roads in more than 100 countries, savoring the landscape, absorbing and often living the local lifestyle, assembling the characters and situations for an almost unbroken string of best sellers, from "Tales of the South Pacific" in 1947 to this year's "Mexico."
Publication, "getting it on the shelf," is the goal of this advanced seminar, practical advice from a work-hardened pro, not esoteric theories of symbolism or deconstruction.
"You're not a writer until you get it in print," he reminds them over and over. "Otherwise you're just shadowboxing." He is dismayed to find that several in the class have "been kicking the same material around for years." With a stern thump of the pencil, he urges them to "knuckle down, get it in the best shape possible and mail it off to someone. I say this as your friend and old pro. You don't need any more nice words from me. I couldn't have done the work I did in my lifetime just fiddling around and never finishing anything. Do it. Don't dream it."
And he is there to tell them how to do it, how to contact "the 60 or so publishers that I would be honored to place a book with," how to write the "letter of inquiry" that might entice one of them to ask for an outline and sample chapters. "This could be the most important letter you'll ever write," he says.
Often the class functions as a make-believe publishing house, with Michener in the senior editor's chair and novelist Susan Brown, who teaches creative writing at Eckerd, playing the company president cautiously out to invest in a promising manuscript.
"Dr. Michener really instilled a work ethic in me," confides Warrington. "First novels, he tells us, are written at 4 in the morning before the writer goes off to a dreary job, and after 11 at night, until you're drained and brain weary. If you can't do that, you're not going to be a writer."
When the term began in October (it lasted through March), students wondered what to call this highly honored, dignified man in chino trousers and open-neck sports shirt who shambled in on an aluminum cane (to cope with permanent vertigo) and enlivened their evenings and lives with a compassionate wit and wisdom.
"I suggested mister," Michener recalls in an interview at his apartment near the campus. "Then someone started this doctor stuff, which I guess is all right. I am a doctor 36 times over, all of them' honorary, but in five different fields, including science."
His gaze falls on the standard typewriter at his elbow, the kind you hardly ever see anymore, a massive cast-iron Olympia with a curved type font and a keyboard big enough to pound with gloves on. "I suppose I've done several million words on that beauty," he muses. "They're hard to come by. Know where I find them? I pick them up for 25 bucks from banks, where they were put in the basement when the computers took over. I've got nine of them: three here, three in Texas and three in Maine. I can't risk running out."
Following the habit of a lifetime, the Old Pro is at it every morning, from 7:30 to 12:30, pecking away with two fingers at another book. "If I don't get it done in the morning, it doesn't get done," he says. "That's why I don't let student papers in the house before noon."
Near 80, Michener underwent triple bypass heart surgery, replacement of his left hip, extensive dental rebuilding and suffered a minor stroke that has slightly incapacitated his left index finger. He rebounded with "an indecent display of frenzied energy - 11 books between 1986 and '9l."
At the same time he teaches older would-be novelists in the evening, Michener also conducts afternoon seminars for undergraduates at Eckerd, a private liberal arts college with an enrollment of 1,350. Then he moves on to the sprawling University of Texas at Austin, where the enrollment is 53,000, to teach mainly graduate students, "although a few hot-shot undergrads always manage to infiltrate."
Summers are kept free for writing "and a little relaxing" at Brunswick, Maine, "near the Bowdoin campus. We always like to be near a college."
Michener admits to being a tough marker. "I won't accept a late paper. I want them to produce. I will not accept a paper that is not typewritten, double spaced, with proper margins, but now mostly I get word processor print-outs. I want them to be submitting manuscripts to me as if I were still the editor I was for so many years at Macmillan."
After class, over a beer or coffee, students often ask themselves and each other why at his age such a stunningly successful author would allocate time from life's dwindling calendar to encourage their dreams.
"He never said so, but the feeling I get," Warrington ventures, "is that he wants to give something back. He had a bleak childhood, a fatherless boy brought up by a kindly Quaker woman who had to take in orphans and other folks' laundry to survive. What helped him most was an education. He's a great believer in education."
Michener's first job after graduating summa cum laude from Swarthmore College was teaching the third grade at The Hill, a private school in Pottstown, Pa. He never lost his fondness for the classroom. "I've taught at almost every level from kindergarten to graduate school at Harvard," he says. "Even while at Macmillan, before I began my writing career, I always expected that when I retired at 65 I'd double back into some university and end my days teaching. Well, it's come around to that, but in an entirely different way."
One day he shared with the class the epitaph he has proposed for himself: "Here Lies a Man Who Never Showed Home Movies or Served Vin Rose."
It summarizes, he told them, "what I would say to anyone wanting to be a writer. If you take wine, let it NOT be an insipid mix of half this and half that, but a clear white or an honest red. Be a professional."
by CNB