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NEVER TOO OLD, NEVER TOO YOUNG

How many times I have heard it said-“I wish I were younger.” If the people who utter these words are up in age and taking about entering the Olympics or becoming a ballet dancer, I can understand, they are too old. They had missed their calling in life. But if they are talking about writing, that is something altogether different. I do find such statements very disturbing. Being too old is not a valid excuse for not writing. How can one be too old to write? The older one is the more experience one has. With age comes wisdom.

No one ever questions the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. They were actually kids when they made their mark in history. Plato, together with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy. Plato, founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world, wrote his famous Dialogues when he was eighty.

James Michener was forty-one years old when he took up the pen. As I mentioned before, his writing career began during World War II, when, as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to the South Pacific as a naval historian. Only until later did he tum his notes and impressions into Tales of the South Pacific, his first book and the basis for the Broadway and film musical South Pacific with the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein. He didn’t start turning out books until he was in his fifties and sixties. He was ninety when he died, and still writing.

I was in Singapore when Somerset Maugham came to town, as a guest of Franz Schutzman who was the general manager of the Raffles Hotel at the time. Maugham was on his last sojourn around the world. He had visited Bangkok in 1922 and again in 1961. In 1965 he was still thinking about stories to write when he died in his villa in southern France at the age of ninety-two.

We can’t forget the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw. He was born in 1856 and died in 1950 at the age of ninety-four. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. He authored sixty-three plays, but he didn’t have success until he was in his mid-forties, and that was The Devil’s Disciple.

We know he penned his most famous play, Pygmalion, when he was fifty-six, which became an award-winning movie film, My Fair Lady in 1956, six years after his death. No one ever said George Bernard Shaw was too old to write.

Then we have Pablo Picasso. I admire him very much, for the beautiful art that he produced as well as for his tenacity to continue to work with his advancing age. The world remembers him as a Spanish painter, a cubist, and sculptor, but he was also a writer. He lived to ninety-five. He married his second wife in 1961 when she was thirty-four years old and he was seventy-nine, forty-five year her senior. Even into his eighties and nineties he produced an amazing amount of work and reaped enormous financial benefits from his work. He died in 1973. Private museums have been built to enclose his works.

We can’t stop growing old, that is certain, but a writer in advancing year can produce good works providing he doesn’t let his outlook become jaded. He must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of all things. He must never entirely grow up. It’s important he interests himself in matters which have nothing to do with the maladies of old age. lf he does he is dead, as dead as that person with a lost dream. I don’t mean deserting one life for another one of fantasy. The writer must be realistic. His approach must be sincere and not a recreation for then the end product will be doomed to mediocrity. Nor should his writing be a refuge. If it has no effect it has no value. The pessimist is the one who refuses reality, but the writer is the one who accepts it. His approach, however, must be reasonable, and that is the secret of the success of a writer.

One is never too old to write, for with age comes wisdom, but neither can one be too young to start. We have Francoise Sagan to prove that point. She published her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, in 1954 at seventeen. She produced dozens of works during a career lasting until 1996. In addition to novels, plays, and autobiographies, she also wrote song lyrics and screenplays. She died of a pulmonary embolism on 24 September 2004 at the age of sixty-nine.

Let it be said that fiction is truth, and fiction is the truest thing there ever was. It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out the failures of others; not the doer of deeds who could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is there in the arena doing what he has to do-writing.

Unlike all other modes of writing, travel writing enters another dimension. Writing for a travel writer is transcendent, a means to pass on information that is informative, I but restricting. However, given enough time, the travel writer turns to other modes of expression, and some of us live our dreams of Travel become expatriates.

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SOME MAKE IT…
…With a Hefty Price

There was a studio apartment open on the top floor in my apartment house and Robert and Irina moved in. He was determined be would become a writer. I gave him a list of publishers and editors in Bangkok and told him to start knocking on doors.

It wasn’t long after Robert and Irina moved into the tiny apartment that I made a book signing agreement that took me to Barnes & Noble bookstores across America, a tour that lasted more than three months. When it ended I was anxious to return to Bangkok, and had decided to move into a bigger house and give up my apartment. We had hardly unpacked when Robert was knocking on my door. He was excited. It seem in a few short months Robert began to sell stories. Editors liked what he wrote.

“Irina must be happy,” I said.

“I am afraid not,” he replied. “She returned to Panama. She wants a divorce.”

Robert and Irina divorced and Robert went on to make his name in writing. The Bangkok Post runs his travel and adventure articles almost every week and there is hardly a magazine in Southeast Asia that doesn’t carry his by-line. He writes regular contributions for Tennis magazine in America and travel publications around the world. His assignments take him on journeys to faraway places like the ancient Silk Road in Uzbekistan, sailing in the Andaman Sea or motorcycling in the Golden Triangle. He is invited to stay in fancy hotels like the Mandarin Oriental in New York or on luxury train trips throughout Europe. But fancy hotels no longer please him. His name in print does, and he is happy doing what he is doing-writing. In the harsh reality of life as a professional writer, dreams don’t always come true. But for Robert his dream of a being a writer did. But there was a price he had to pay. His wife had left him.

Wanting to Write vs Wanting to be a Writer

Austin Berry was also determined to write. But this is a case of wanting to write versus wanting to be a writer.

They are not the same. Austin was interested only in writing which I didn’t learn why until much later. When I first met him he was teaching school in Bangkok. Today, some half dozen years later, Austin is an attorney, a Law Clerk to the Honorable Harold A. Ackerman, Senior U.S.D.J. in New Jersey. It’s hard to imagine that a few years before he was teaching school at the Royal Palace in Bangkok, and now he’s practicing law. It just didn’t happen. It was Austin’s scheme of things.

Austin graduated from Baylor University in 1999 with a degree in business. The year before he graduated he had enrolled in two “study abroad” programs that Baylor offered. The first half of the summer he traveled throughout western Turkey studying political science. The second half of the summer he traveled with his sociology professor and several other students throughout Southeast Asia, from Bangkok to Lampang and Chiang Mai in Thailand and then on to Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. His sociology professor had contacts with Chitralada School in Bangkok. Austin found Chitralada School particularly interesting as it was within the moated walls of King Bhumipol’s palace grounds. The school’s administrators extended an invitation to the Baylor students to return to Chitralada School upon graduation and teach English in the primary or secondary schools.

Austin had always wanted to travel abroad and now this was his chance. After graduation he moved to Bangkok and began teaching in Grades 5 and 6. He relished the experience, teaching in a royal palace, like a male Anna and the King of Siam, but after a year of teaching he found that instead of traveling that he had looked forward to, he was spending all his time grading papers and preparing lesson plans. Teaching at the royal palace was demanding.

“So what do you intend to do?” I asked him when he came to visit me and explained his situation.

“I want to start writing, and that way I can travel,” he said, straight to the point. In an effort to change his circumstances, Austin hatched the plan of writing travel stories. He did more than plan. He bought books on how to get published in magazine and how to write query letters. He then sent queries to big travel magazines in America. Rejection slips followed. He soon realized that the magazine market was not itching for another untested travel writer. It was then, he admitted, that while browsing the travel books in an Asia Bookstore in Bangkok, he noticed books with my name on the covers. He bought At Home in Asia, about expats living in Asia, read it and became completely enthralled with the fantasy of a writer’s life. Austin learned I lived most of the time in Bangkok. After a couple of e-mails we met.

I didn’t know how serious this guy was. He liked his teaching job but he liked traveling more. To test him, I told him to come back in a week and bring something he had written plus ten ideas for articles. In a week he knocked at my door again. He had both with him, a story and ten ideas.

I scanned through the story he had written. His writing was good. One of the ten ideas he had was an article about expatriate authors living in Thailand. He also had a list of names of half a dozen writers living in Bangkok. He was on the right track. I took him to meet the editor of Living in Thailand magazine, to pitch the idea. The editor bought it and Austin wrote his first piece. He moved up the ladder rapidly now. After that first article, I took him to meet Asha Sehgal, who at the time edited Look East, a very popular English-language monthly magazine devoted to travel in Thailand. Asha liked Austin, and set him up with a plane ticket and a few thousand baht to travel to Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. Austin took a day off from teaching and made a long weekend of traveling the island, photographing it and writing articles about his experiences. The commission of one article about Koh Samui resulted in several articles in that issue, including the cover photo for that month’s edition. Asha liked Austin enough that she offered him the Managing Editor’s position starting immediately. Austin was understandably thrilled, but he still had a few months left to teach at Chitralada School. He did not feel it was right to welsh on his obligation to the school, so he finished his one year term there and then began working as the Managing Editor of Look East.

This was exactly the job Austin was looking for, and determination got him there. It afforded him the opportunity to travel and write, to live abroad, and to get paid for doing it! Austin would set out for a ten-day trip to some comer of Thailand, photographing along the way, and then return to Bangkok to write the articles. He would spend the rest of the month compiling the magazine with the articles he just wrote and the photos he just took. As soon as the proofs came back and were acceptable, he would set out again for another journey to another corner of Thailand, once journeying to Laos in search of articles.

Austin’s ambition to write did not stop with Look East magazine. He also had stories published in Living in Thailand, Traveller, Thailand Tattler, and Elite magazines, all based out of Bangkok. He continued to work for Look East magazine and write freelance articles for other Bangkok magazines, but, after two-and-a-half years of living in Thailand, Austin felt like he had accomplished his goal of living abroad for a period of his life. The tragedy of September 11, 2001 in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, also weighed heavily on him and he thought it was time to head home and try to make a difference in any manner he could. Thus, he decided to return to the United States to begin law school and thereby pursue another long- time goal.

Even in law school, Austin continued his passion for writing and his road-not-taken attitude by lobbying the law school faculty for permission and funding to start a new legal journal dedicated to the critical analysis of decisions emanating from the federal courts of appeal. A new journal had not been created at the law school in more than ten years, but he ultimately succeeded in his quest. He attributes his success with the journal to his experience in Southeast Asia as a freelance writer and Managing Editor of Look East magazine.

The Price of Patience and Waiting Attitude

There are writers who write fine books based on a personal experience. Leslie Buzz Harcus, a former US Marine sergeant and China Marine, is one of these people. He had worked up a plot for a novel with its setting in Tsingtao, a seaport on the Shantung Peninsula in China. Buzz had been stationed in Tsingtao after the war.

Buzz had taken a writing course at Michigan State University but he attributes his wanting to write stemmed from his reading. “I love to read, especially action novels,” he said in an interview. “From my reading it was natural for me to want to try my hand at writing. So much had happened to me in China when I was stationed there as a Marine I wanted to write about it. I drew upon my experiences there and blocked out the basic idea for a novel. I had the title before anything-China Marine: Tsingtao Treasure.”

Buzz labored away on an old manual typewriter. Work became easier when he graduated to a computer. He began querying publishers and soon discovered writing was one thing; getting published was something else. “I tried time and again to get a publisher to read my material only to get repeatedly rejected,” he said. “I did re-writes, several re-writes, many in fact. I finally reached a point where I said no more re-writing; the manuscript was done and that was it. I had to find a publisher to read my manuscript. The break came when I received a letter from Wolfenden Publishers. The editor wanted to take a look at my manuscript. I posted my book, neatly printed, and waited. At last, the editor liked my book. Would I make some minor changes and clarify a few points. I did and the book came out in 2005.”

Buzz did not stop now. He finished his second novel on China, Tainted Treasure, which was published in 2008, and is working on two more manuscripts-Web of Greed and Thou Shalt Not. Buzz isn’t about to stop, even at his age. He claims once you have the title the rest is easy.

l don’t think I have met a newspaperman who doesn’t want to break away and write that book that keeps leapfrogging around in his mind. Some have done it, like Robert Woodward that I mentioned earlier. Mort Rosenblum is another. Mort was the bureau chief for Associated Press in Southeast Asia living in Singapore. I got to know him when I was outfitting my schooner in Singapore and during his free time he came to the yard to give a helping hand, not that he had much free time. He just liked boats. Mort always had a book or two he was working out in his mind. He left the AP in Singapore for Paris to become editor-in-chief of the International Herald Tribune. Eventually, with books that he wanted to write, he gave up chasing stories and reporting the news to turning out the books that he always wanted to. He bought a rakish river boat, more like Queen Victoria’s 1890 private yacht, moored it on the Seine River and moved aboard. Now, free at last, from his pen came a string of fine books-The Secret Life of the Seine; Back Home: A Foreign Correspondent Rediscovers America; Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light; Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit; Mission to Civilize: The French Way: Coups and Earthquakes; Reporting the World for America. His latest is Escaping Plato’s Cave: How Americas Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival.

Mort Rosenblum has no regrets. He enjoyed the life of a journalist chasing news stories around the world. He also enjoys sitting aboard his boat on the Seine River in Paris pounding out books. I often wonder about Charlie, the guy I mentioned who wanted to write and planned to go to Tahiti, but decided he needed to make more money before he went. I wonder if he regrets his decision. But then he would never know, for he never tried.

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SOME MAKE IT…
… In One’s Unique Field

Roy Howard started publishing Sawasdee, Thai Airways’ in-flight magazine. The magazine’s editorial offices were in Hong Kong and Roy hired a bright young writer, Dean Barrett, to edit the magazine. As a contributor to Sawasdee I got to know Dean quite well and we became friends. Dean stuck with the magazine for more than a dozen years and then decided to devote his full time to writing books and plays. His writing output is phenomenal. Even before I met him, before he published my stories, I enjoyed reading his articles in Orientations magazine, a glossy Asian arts magazine that was very popular at the time. He wrote on Asian history and I was particularity fond of his articles on Chinese trade routes.

Anyone who reads Dean Barrett’s books will gather than he is an authority on Asia, and rightfully so. He was trained as a Chinese linguist at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California and, at graduation, he was certain he would be sent to China or Taiwan. But the Army assigned him to more studies at the Army Security Agency that included graduate work in Chinese Area Studies at San Francisco State College. Dean also received his Masters Degree in Asian Studies from the University of Hawaii. He was set for big things. The Army sent him to Thailand where they speak Thai and not Chinese.

As a writer, editor, photographer and publisher, Dean had lived for twenty-five years in Asia, fifteen of those years as managing director of Hong Kong Publishing Company. He wrote and photographed several non-fiction books on Asia and edited several cultural and travel magazines. He also wrote hundreds of articles on Asia and was the winner of several writing and editing awards including the PATA Grand Prize for Excellence for writing on Asia, particularly on Thailand and on Chinese culture. He wrote a weekly satire column for the Hong Kong Standard for five years under the pseudonym, Uncle Yum Cha (“Uncle Drink Tea”).

Dean left Hong Kong in 1986 and moved to New York City, to pursue a career in playwriting and to find a composer for a musical he wrote.

Dean found New York very conducive to writing, especially living in the East Village atmosphere where he had an apartment. It was here he spent two years researching the Ch’ing Dynasty at the 5th Avenue library. He began writing Murder In China Red, a novel in which the protagonist is Chinese from Beijing who lives in New York.

Dean left New York after completing the musical and returned to Asia, this time taking up residence in Bangkok. Why Bangkok? He felt he was closer to the action in Bangkok. Soon to hit the bookstands was Skytrain to Murder followed by Don Quixote in China: The Search for Peach Blossom Spring.

Dean loves writing plays and he receives letters from students and actors around the world asking permission to stage his plays. “The musical, unfortunately, is a Broadway style and needs lots of money to get it staged properly,” he said. He travels to New York twice a year to meet with his composer. He continues to seek ways to market musicals in today’s tight money market. “The text of the musical and most of my one-act and full-length plays are up on-line which is how people read them and ask permission to put them on.”

Dean Barrett is a prolific writer and he writes what he please without concern about the critics. He has written extensively on Hong Kong’s traditional fishing community that includes a fairytale: The Boat Girl and the Magic Fish. His novels on Thailand are Memoirs of a Bangkok Warrior and Skytrain to Murder. His novel t in China are Hangman s Point and Mistress of the East.

Does Academic Background Count?

While Dean Barrett has an academic background, Robert Davis has a background of hard knocks. The results are the same. Both are determined writers.

Robert was a professional tennis coach, and a very successful one. He had a high salary and traveled all over the world. He had a very beautiful wife. You might say Robert Davis had everything. But he wasn’t happy. He wanted to be a writer.

It was several year ago that l first met Robert, before he began writing. It happened one afternoon while I was sitting at my desk, trying to concentrate on a script that was giving me trouble, and there came a knock at my door. At the time my wife and I were living in a small two-bedroom apartment in Bangkok, on the fourth floor, a walk-up without elevator. Like writers who work at home, my place was cluttered with stacks of books, journals and research material. My wife answered the door. “Someone is here to see you,” she said.

Another disturbance! We had rented the apartment as a place for me to get away so I could complete a ten-hour TV television script I was commissioned to write on King Narai of Siam and his Greek Foreign minister. I had given instructions to my publisher and others that I did not want to be disturbed unless it was important.

I went to the door, dressed in shorts and T-shirt, unshaven, and I found standing there a neatly dressed young man with a bottle of wine in hand, and on his arm was a very lovely Latin woman. “Hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said and handed me the wine. The accent was American. “It’s Chilean wine,” he added.

What was I to say? I asked him to come in. He introduced himself, Robert Davis, and the woman who with him was his wife, Irina. She spoke very little English. Before I could ask him what he wanted he spoke out-“You publisher told me where you lived. He didn’t want to tell me until I explained that I was in Bangkok. I thought maybe you lived in America, but when he said Bangkok I was thrilled. I live here too, that is when I am not on the road.”

“So you want to meet an author,” I said.

“Yes, but it’s more than that,” he began. “You see I read your book Who Needs a Road, and the book had an effect on me.”

“You want to get a four-wheel drive and drive around the world,” I said, a bit sarcastically. I didn’t mind answering his questions but he was intruding. He could have phoned first.

“No, it’s more than that,” he said. I was really puzzled now. What did he want? All the while we were talking his wife Irina was looking around the apartment. She was elegantly dressed, in a long Thai silk dress and sporting some fine expensive jewelry. She seemed out of place in a writer’s flat. Robert continued, “I want to be a writer. I want to learn to write like you do.”

Not again, I thought to myself. How was I going to get rid of this guy? But I hesitated. There was something different about him. I didn’t quite know what it was but I was about to find out. He had a career, and a very lucrative one. He was a successful tennis coach, with players under his wing on professional tennis tours. He had the ideal, envious profession that had taken him all over the world, not only to places like Paris and London but also to places such as Reunion Island in the Seychelles and Santiago, Chile. Plus he had a high salary, and his expenses were paid. He lived first class in the best hotels in the world. In Thailand he had been contracted by the Tennis Association of Thailand to serve as National Coach, a post he bad held in countries such as Peru and Panama.

Robert and Irina lived in a large house with gardens and servants in the suburbs of Bangkok, and with his lovely wife be traveled the world over. His wife was happy, his tennis players were happy, everyone was happy, everyone except Robert. He had long had this insane desire to be a writer. I had no indication of the depth of his desire that first time we met. Nor did I know then what motivated his desire. Perhaps because, as I later discovered, he was an avid reader. Not a desultory, haphazard reader but an earnest one. He read everything he could, and this included many of the classic writers. Later, when we became friends, we talked about writing and writers, and I found conversations with him invigorating. He would come charging to my apartment and expound about an obscure passage in Tolstoy that he found. I could no longer get angry with him. Robert knew what good writing is, and he had no time for the mediocre. “If you are going to read,” he said, “you might as well read good writing.”

I am getting away from my story. At that first meeting I felt I had to paint the picture as it was, and if that meant dissuading Robert, so be it. I told him what writing really entailed. Only a handful of writers ever make it big. The blockbusters control the successful writing market, and they are commercial. “I don’t care about money,” Robert said. “I just want to write.”

This guy wasn’t going to be easy. I told him one story after another about would-be writers who when they learned how tough it was gave up. I explained what motivated dream writers. They imagine the life of a writer to be full of glamorous nights and million-dollar advances. Little do they know of the reality of the life of a writer. The rejection letters, financial struggles and matrimonial difficulties. A writer’s life is a lonely one.

Most women, wives and sweethearts, don’t understand that. I myself went through a couple of divorces until I found a woman who believed in what I was doing. “A writer’s life can be a lonely life,” I said, looking at Irina. She didn’t understand English but I think she knew what I was saying.

Robert still said he wanted to be a writer. “There’s only one way to be a writer,” I said. What I was about to tell him was certain to make him think twice. “If you are serious, you have to give it your full energy, let nothing else stand in your way.” I then gave the example about all the newspaper writers, each with a book festering inside them. The only way they ever wrote that book was to quit the newspaper work.

That was my first meeting with Robert. A month passed and there was a knock at my door. It was Robert. “I followed your advice,” he said, beaming.

“And what was that?” I asked. Robert had seemed like a sensible guy, with a beautiful jet-setting wife, so I knew what the answer would be. He gave up the idea of writing. I was wrong.

“I quit coaching,” he replied.

“You what!” I shouted. “What about the players you are coaching? Your house in Nonburi, and your wife? Does he want to be married to a writer?”

“I gave up the house, and we are looking for a small flat,” he said. He explained that his wife was not happy. She would have to give up the beautiful life, Paris and London and all the romance and glitter for a small pad in Bangkok or wherever it might be. He tried to make her understand that it would be all right in the end.

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SOME MAKE IT; SOME GIVE UP

Learning to write is like the swimmer attempting to swim the English Channel. For days on end, for weeks, for months, he practices. Finally the day arrives and he begins his swim. He jump into the water, begins swimming and reaches the half way mark when he fears that the swim, the struggle, is beyond his capability. He believes he’d never be able to make it to the other side, to the end, so he turns around and swims back to where he started. He was halfway there and he gave up. Is not launching a writing career much the same? We quit when we are half way there. How many times I felt like that swimmer when I first began writing. Would I be able to make it? It’s only after I reached my goal that I said: “Why all the fuss? That wasn’t so bad.”

I wonder how many writers give up even “after they are halfway there. If one’s desire to be a writer is great enough, and not a passing fancy, he will make it across the channel. But how do we determine if a person who asks for advice about writing is truly serious or is only dreaming. Do we help them? Or do we wish we had copies of The Writers Digest to give them, as my friend Hal Goodwin did to me? It’s not easy to determine who is serious and who is not. Sometimes I do misjudge, like I did with a forty-five-year old man from Florida whom I shall call Charlie.

Charlie convinced me he was serious. We had emails coming and going, back and forth, hot and heavy. Charlie was persistent and wouldn’t give up. He claimed he had always wanted to write and he decided to give up his well-paying job in computer design, or some such field, and pursue his dream. Could I please, please answer some of his questions and give him a few tips. I told him much of what I had written in the preceding pages, basically that it’s a long tough road and, even after reading what I had to say, he was still ready to give it his best shot. He wanted to follow in my footsteps, to do the same that I had done, and that was to go to Tahiti to write. I gave him suggestions where to stay cheaply, and even the names of some of my friends living there who might give him a helping hand. He was thrilled. In one e-mail he said he had purchased his air ticket, and in another he had already packed. The only thing left to do was to notify his boss at work that he was leaving. He was required to give a two-week notice.

I hadn’t heard from him for a month or two and was certain that he was in Tahiti living in a palm-thatched hut with the laptop on a table in front of him. I wrote to my friends in Tahiti and asked if he had ever showed up. They hadn’t heard from him. Naturally I wondered what happened and I took a chance and wrote to him at his old e-mail address. An e-mail came back. Charlie told me he had notified his boss that he was leaving, and his boss felt so badly about it that he offered him a promotion and a big raise in salary. Charlie said it was an offer he couldn’t turn down. He would continue at the job for another six months, saving up more money and then go to the South Pacific. I never wrote to him again, and never bothered to answer his e-mails. His determination to be a writer wasn’t strong enough. He would always find some excuse. Either you do it or you don’t. There is no in-between. I am sure after six months, Charlie found another excuse for not pursuing his dream of becoming a writer.

That was Charlie, but not all people are like Charlie. Some people do make it and they write some very fine books.

SOME MAKE IT…
…With the Book Inside Them

We often heard it said that every person has a book inside him. It is true; every person is a book. We may not think so, about that seemingly boring guy living next door, but we could be wrong. One doesn’t have to have to move mountains to be interesting. I mentioned earlier Henry David Thoreau. His biggest adventure was watching grass grow and yet he wrote a book that became a classic in American literature-On Walden Pond. When I see people sitting by a lake, I wonder if they might have another On Walden Pond in them. Maybe they do, but bringing out that book that’s inside them, making their story interesting enough to read, that is what writing is all about. Henry David Thoreau knew how to do that.

When the Bangkok Post interviewed author Paul Theroux and asked him if he believed that anyone could become a writer, he replied, “Everyone can write, but not everyone will find readers. The point of writing is finding someone who cares about what you write about. This should be the vision of a writer, to persuade the reader that what they are reading is the truth and that it will alter their view of the world. Otherwise what you’re doing is just wasting your time.”

Small trivia can make good reading if the writer is clever with words. And who knows, a bit of trivia might have literary value. Suppose it’s a memoir. It may provide readers with a piece of history, with some meaningful insight on life. The writer then has succeeded, even if that book doesn’t sell. A book in a shelf for future generations to read is not a book lost. One person I knew who wrote such a book was Jorges Orgibet, Jorges wrote his autobiography, From Siam to Thailand, mostly for his friends, he said. I don’t think he realized the historical value of his book. He wrote about Thailand when Bangkok had less than a thousand Brits and only fifty Americans living in the city.

Jorges was a foreign correspondent, a former newspaper publisher and the editor of Business in Thailand magazine. His popular “Backdrop” column had been a regular feature in that magazine for twelve years.

Jorges’ career began as a US diplomat to Thailand, which he gave up to become a correspondent and film director. He filmed 341 documentaries for NBC news. In 1953 he opened the Associated Press bureau in Bangkok and was the co-founder of the Foreign Correspondents Club.

Jorges never thought much about From Siam to Thailand but I find it a wonderful piece of writing. The book gives us a graphic picture as to what the kingdom was like in the old days, before it became Thailand. He gives readers an intimate view of kings and prime ministers, cabaret girls, bandits and high society–plus some of the strangest private train trips on record. And Jorges knew everyone in Thailand, those who were someone and those who wanted to be someone.

Roy Howard was a businessman. He too wrote his autobiography, Good As It Gets. I assumed, when he gave me an autographed copy, that it was the standard book that one wants to hand down to their children, one that has no literary significance. I found it the complete opposite, a good read to the last page.

Good As It Gets deals with history, people, places and events. It’s the history of Thai Airways International in a capsule but it’s not confined solely to the airline.

Compared to Jorge, Roy Howard was a latecomer in Bangkok, having arrived in 1959. Still, he came when Bangkok was evolving from a small provincial town in Southeast Asia to a budding and up-coming metropolis. He came before Thailand had an airline and arrived at Don Muang airport having just turned twenty-four years old. He began work at Cathay Advertising and became involved helping launch a new airline-Thai Airways International. When the airline offered him the job of advertising manager, with frill expatriate conditions, he accepted. For the next thirty-three years he helped the airline grow in 1960 from three DC-6B to a fleet of nearly a hundred planes making it one of the largest airlines in Asia. Out of this experience came Good As It Gets in which he recorded the birth and history of the airline.

What makes the book interesting is the people we meet. There’s Dr. Gertie Ettinger, an Austrian Jewish refugee, who, together with her husband, Egon, also a doctor, had arrived in Bangkok before the war and had proceeded to look after the majority of the European expatriates.

There’s Neils Lumholdt, the son of the publisher of one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, who became a leading figure at Thai Airways. Roy doesn’t let the world forget him. Roy also names Phil Murray, one of the most interesting characters he met, and another American character, Keith Lorenz, a freelance writer who reputedly worked for the CIA, and who drove around Bangkok in his car with a bear in the passenger seat. He write about a “charming lady,” Mrs. Chitdee at Thai Airways who was joined by a PR consultant from London named Robin Dannhorn. Robin arrived in Bangkok with his wife and two young children, wearing conservative suits and horn-rimmed glasses, which soon changed.

He also tells how he met, through Bob Udick, editor of the Bangkok World newspaper, an American writer who was half-way around the world driving a Toyota Land Cruiser, and was looking for sponsorship for a series of travel articles. Roy agreed for Thai Airways to sponsor him, “Little realizing that Steve would eventually write more than 3,000 articles for the Bangkok World and the Bangkok Post.” I was that Steve and so began my career in Asia. I finished my motor trip, returned to Southeast Asia and have been around even since.

In the advertising game Roy throws out names like Michael Brierly, Hans Lindberg, Russ Jones, Paul McKeon and Evan Maloney, all legends today. He tells us about Sam Peck, a laid-back Californian who had joined Thai Airways from the SAS organization in the USA. He tells us about his starting to jog with Al Eberhart. Roy eventually became a marathon runner with over a dozen runs to his credit.

We learn something about Swiss artist Theo Meier who settled in Bali before the war, and with the help of Prince Sanidh Rangsit, a cousin to the king of Thailand, moved to Chiang Mai where he spent the last 22 years of his life, and whose paintings are now much sought after today. And there are others, so many others, many who would be forgotten had it not been for Roy Howard keeping their names alive. I have to give thanks to Roy Howard and Jorges Orgibet for their fine books.

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HAZARDS, PITFALLS AND DANGERS
Be Yourself, Continue Learning and Innovating

Not all agree with my premise that to become a writer all one needs is lots of hard work and determination. Success doesn’t come easy and this we might say is a pitfall. I have my critics. Writer Steve Van Beek believes you need more than determination. You must have a love for words, and the love of word means the sounds of words. Steve is an accomplished writer. He has won several international awards and his scholarly book on The Arts of Thailand is a classic work. Steve came to Asia some forty years ago and lived several years in Nepal. He speaks Nepalese like a Nepalese, and I could say the same for his Thai. I have known him since the early 1970s when he began a supplement for the Bangkok Post called “Outlook.” He bought several of my stories for the magazine. Other than a writer and filmmaker, Steve is a concert pianist. He gave up music to travel and become a writer. He also turned from editor to adventure. He built a kayak and paddled down the length of Chao Phraya River in Thailand, taking fifty-two days. He explored the headwaters of the Mekong River in China and followed it down through Thailand, Laos and Cambodia to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.

Steve believes that to write well the sound of words is important. “A writer must have a feeling for the sound of a word,” he said. When Steve writes a few lines, he recites out loud what he has written and only then can he judge his work.

Yachtsman Ed Boden, much like Steve Van Beek, loves words, and he loves to read. He was an aerospace engineer working on the space program at JPL in Pasadena and gave it up to sit aboard a tiny, 25-foot long sail boat and sail around the world. He now had all the time in the world he wanted to read. He also believes success, success in anything we do, writing included, depends a great deal upon luck.

He believes that I make one’s success in writing sound too easy. To do so is a pitfall. He attributes success in part to luck. “In the real world,” Ed states, “only a few people get to see their ‘carefully contrived plan’ carried to fruition, while the vast majority never even see them at all. Successful people are those who have, somehow, been able to call on their talent and then have had Lady Luck smile on their efforts. Then, there are the untold numbers of ones who had the required talents to put together their plans, many that would have been superior to those of the ‘successful’ folks, but inexplicably they were rewarded with Lady Luck’s frown. Talents, too, comes in varying grades of degrees from weak to strong. Interestingly, the ability to call on a talent is really a talent too.”

I agree somewhat with what Ed had to say but with one exception, and that is luck. People tend to say a person accomplishes certain things because he was lucky. Ed points out that I was lucky with Mr. Sullivan, the editor of Life. I could have left his office and never got to meet him, and my life would not be the same. My good luck was that I remained long enough in his office to hear the secretary pass out Mr. Sullivan’s address to another writer. This is where I disagree. Had I not talked to Sullivan, it wouldn’t have mattered. I would have found another means to reach my goal as a writer. I recall an incident that happened when I was present with John Fulton, the American matador, when the press was interviewing him in Seville. A reporter said, “You are very lucky; you have never been gored.” John quickly responded, “I don’t call that luck. I call that being more cautious than other matadors.”

Some people associate luck with statistics. Toss a coin a thousand times into the air, and 500 times it will turn up heads and 500 times tales. Certainly, had John Fulton not retired early, one day, if we believe in statistics, he would have met a fighting bull’s horns. That was a pitfall but can we not turn a pitfall into our advantage? Is not writing the same? How many good works have been abandoned because the author gave up? Unlike bull fighting, a writer can never push his chances too far. If he is good, the world will hear about him. Make a rejection slip from an editor a badge of courage.

But the world will not hear about a writer if he falls prey to false advertising. Here is where the danger lies. What wonderful opportunities these advertisements offer. If I subscribe, the ad tells me, in ten easy steps, I can make it to the bank. The ad makes promises. For a fee, naturally, my book will be submitted to not one but to many book distributors, and these include Amazon.com, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, the three biggest. They state their packages include full-service, and automatic distribution with online retailers.

These book promoters are not lying. They will, certainly, submit books from their clients. But then what? Anybody can submit a book to Ingram, Baker & Taylor and Amazon.com. But what the e promoters don’t tell me is that Ingram Baker & Taylor and Amazon.com do not promote books. They just distribute them.

Writer can promote their own books if they are willing to put forth the effort. I discovered this with my book Who Needs a Road. Al Podell, the co-author, had experience in promotion, having been picture editor of Argosy magazine. He went himself to the offices of Bobbs-Merrill, requested a desk and the publisher’s stationery and sat down to write letters. He then had the publisher post the letters to newspapers, radio and TV stations, men’s club and women’s clubs and, perhaps, even to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts as well, telling them all that I was coming to town and available for interviews. It not only worked, the promotion succeeded far more than I could handle. Podell surprised even Bobs-Merrill. They couldn’t print books fast enough.

A writer’s danger is wasting time. Pondering and not acting. It doesn’t cost money to become a writer; it costs time. But time is not to be wasted.

When I was a young man in Paris I liked to visit the cafes on the Left Bank. I had my favorite and in the beginning I found it inspiring to sit among so many gifted writers and artists. But each time I went to these cafes, the same artists and the same writers were there, day in and day out. Shouldn’t they be in their rooms and studios writing and painting? Were they no more than parvenus of the arts, talking, mocking, and bragging about what they were going to do, dreaming, but not producing. I stopped wasting my time listening to them.

Writing a book is only the beginning of problems. Once it’s completed, what do we do? After writing thirty books I still face the same dilemma. The book has to be sold. The danger is the mistake we make thinking that a book will sell itself. It most definitely will not. It needs to be publicized. Months before books are published book critics weigh in on what should be read and what should be avoided. For librarians, bookstore buyers, and online booksellers, these “trade reviews” provide crucial direction amid a flood of more than 150,000 titles a year. At one time these reviews came free. No more.

Kirkus, founded in 1933, is the most expensive or these trade journals (3,000 subscribers pay $450 a year), but its reputation for ferocious independence and brutal reviews makes it a valuable guide in a world of hype. While Publishers Weekly and Library Journal might correctly predict the success of a novel, you can always count on Kirkus to draw blood. Kirkus does allow, however, self-published authors, long ignored by the trade journals, to buy a Kirkus review for $350. This does require some thought. If Kirkus is going to charge people $350, will they then write honest reviews?

I find it dangerous to fully trust publishers. We make the mistake to think they are omniscient, that they know all the answer, what is good and what isn’t. Publishers can very well misjudge a writer’s work. What is alarming is how they can influence writer when, in fact, they have their own interest at heart and not the writer’s. I have known cases where publishers have held up good material simply because they didn’t want other publishers to get hold of it. They do this by asking writers to give them options on their work, sometimes paying a pittance to hold it. Rather than rely on publishers and nonprofessional friends and associates, I create a work that is the product of my own skills and thoughts rather than what someone else thinks my work should be. Proofreading is one thing writers need, but content editing is quite something else. Editors tend to overreach.

Spelling and grammar, naturally, are important but for these I can correct them later. What is important is the thought, the writing itself, the message I have to tell. Spelling and grammar come later. My friend Dave Pryor, a golfer had a problem, not with grammar, with putting. He had a hard time with his putting. What did he do? He learned to putt. He practiced until he got it down. “What’s so difficult about grammar?” he asked when I mentioned how difficult grammar can be at times. “Get a good grammar book and start studying.” He was right, and I did just that. I taught myself grammar. When I look at some of the writing today I wonder if grammar is important at all. But that’s not the point. Grammar is important. It’s like Picasso and Salvador Dali painting abstract art. They had to learn to paint a hand and flowers in a vase first. They didn’t start with abstract art. That came later.

Nevertheless, we must know our grammar and punctuation. It’s easy to master nouns and verbs, but the difficulty begins with the case, subjunctive and pluperfect. Punctuation is even more important than grammar. A misplaced comma can change the very meaning of a sentence, like the professor who went up to the black board and wrote a sentence-“A woman without her man is nothing.” He asked the student to punctuate it correctly. The males in the class wrote: “A woman, without her man, is nothing.” All the females in the class wrote: “A woman, without her, man is nothing.” No one can say punctuation is not important after that.

What is more difficult than mastering spelling and grammar is learning to be logical. Easily said but not so easily done. For instance, to get someone into a room you have to go through a door first, and to do that a writer must be logical. You don’t need a PhD in philosophy to reason that out. You must learn to play with word, logically. The fun part of writing is playing with words.

Both a pitfall and a danger is making enemies. Writers make enemies. You can’t please everyone. “If you put my name in your book I’ll sue you.” I apply caution and use a different name. Now they say: “Why didn’t you use my name?” I can’t win-that’s a pitfall. The danger is they might sue me.

Notice in the introduction of most book there are disclaimers that state “any resemblance to a living character is purely coincidental.” Don’t you believe it. There is no original thought. It’s impossible to imagine a person or a thing that is nonexistent. Writers base their characters on people who are real or who, at least, were real at one time. When Somerset Maugham toured Southeast Asia in the 1920s, he gathered background material for his novels and short stories. When the stories appeared in print, it caused quite a disturbance among the patterns for his supposedly fiction characters. One story in particular was “The Letter.” An attempt was made to bring suit against him but the courts ruled against it. Nevertheless, he left some ill feelings behind.

It was also said that Joseph Conrad disturbed some residents in Singapore when they turned up in his novel Lord Jim. And James Michener found himself in difficult times with the publication of Hawaii. He exposed many families who got their starts by devious means, and it was said he could never return to Hawaii. It seems a bit far-fetched but we do know Michener sold his beautiful cliff home on Oahu and moved his residence to the mainland.

There is one other danger for which writers should beware. That is to believe that he is infallible

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