Les Whitaker grew up on an Ozark farm in the 1950s, where at a young age he learned the value of hard work. When he wasn’t working, he read everything he could get his hands on. One day each week, the bookmobile parked at the post office for a couple of hours, and Les would check out all the books they’d let him take at one time.

He says, "I looked at the shelves and decided that one day, a book with my name on it would be up there, too. I went home and made a place in the smokehouse, got a leftover school notebook and a pencil, and started to write."

That commitment was made when Les was in the seventh grade. He says, "I’ve put more spare man-hours into writing than all other interests combined. I have to write. I changed shifts at my job to get on nights, where as a fast worker, I had plenty of time to write. Laptops hadn’t been invented then, so it was still longhand.

"When the notion for a story comes to me, I sit down and write a couple of chapters. I do not hold with the notion that one should try to force words onto a screen as a form of self-discipline.

"After I finished my very first full-length story—conceived in a fraction of a second and three years to write out longhand—I had no interest in even editing the thing, and that scared me. I feared I’d shot my bolt. Turned out to be a perfectly normal reaction."

After a very active and stressful working life, Les now puts a premium on calm. On any given morning he works on broken things in one of his three workshops. Then in the afternoon, he retreats to his upstairs lair to write. Later in the day he usually gets in another writing session.

Besides writing, his other interest include blacksmithing (only in cold weather); he goes to garage sales and flea markets and finds lots of interesting things, many of which he resells for good money, after repairing them; and he enjoys photography and plans to one day enter some of his best in a show.

Les still loves to read about many different things: the medieval economy of western Europe; the silent film industry; and he studies everything he can get his hands on about archeology.

I’m retired. I had a very active and stressful working life, and now I put a premium on calm. On any given day I work on broken things in one of my three workshops. I don’t do heavy work anymore. Along about 11:00 I tune in Rush Limbaugh, eat lunch, and fall asleep on the couch. When I wake up I go upstairs to my lair and write. I come down in time for the O’Reilly show, and fall asleep watching it. When I wake up I go back upstairs and write some more, then I go to bed and read until I get sleepy. Most of my life I’ve been a hard worker. Idling around never appealed to me. I grew up on an Ozark farm in the ‘50s, where I learned the value of hard work.

A list of things I’m not interested in would be shorter. I do blacksmithing in season (cold weather) and I forge with wood, like the old men did when I was a kid. My next big project will be a 'built from scratch' model railroad. I garage sale and flea market and find lots of interesting things, many of which I sell for good money, after repairing them.

I love to read but don’t read much fiction. My literary interests are legion. Just now I’m reading about the medieval economy of western Europe; last winter I read everything convenient on the silent film industry; and I’ve been a fan of archeology since I discovered it existed.

I have a digital camera and I take pictures of landscapes and animals and whatnot. I hope one day to enter some of my best in a show. In high school I wrote a short piece about driving a stripped-down, brakeless, fenderless, doorless Model B Ford back and forth to grade school. You could do that, then. The teacher read the thing to the whole class, which garnered me instant hatred and envy. I’d been driving since I was ten, everything from log trucks to tractors to the family car and pickup.

Probably organization. Certainly punctuation, which I deliberately use in my writing style in ways that would make Strunk and White take to drink and has disturbed several editors. The thing is— first know the rules, so you can break them intelligently.

I never outline a story. I conceive it in my head, sit down and write it, and then rewrite until satisfied. I can write on most subjects of up to a couple thousand words with an hour’s notice, and come in dead on the wordcount. Once, a lady pal of mine entered ‘us’ in an SF contest, and wrote me asking if I knew of a quick plot. I had read the Golden Age SF as a kid, and one story has always stuck with me. So I updated the technology, did a few little things, all the while writing to the ‘spec’, and brought it in at exactly 1K words. Took about an hour or so. We got honorable mention. I think it was too ‘out there’ for that contest. We should’ve won.

I began writing in the seventh grade. In that time and place, the bookmobile would park at the post office for a couple of hours one day a week, and I’d go down there and check out all the books they’d let me have. I looked at the shelves and decided that one day, a book with my name on it would be up there, too. I went home and made a place in the smokehouse, got a leftover school notebook and a pencil, and started to write. I learned soon that more pencils were good, plus a way of sharpening them other than a pocketknife. My dad ‘liberated’ a pencil sharpener and a big brown eraser from work. I can still smell the scent of that thing as I rubbed it on the paper, the technique of double-spacing and lining-out having not yet occurred to me. Dad also put a window in so I had better light. That winter he added a small woodstove, and I finished insulating the inside with cardboard. It worked well enough. Then I got my mother’s Remington portable typewriter. Now, there’s a great way to build a large vocabulary, trying to figure out what other word might work to fix a typo the easiest way. I had a dictionary. It didn’t have the word ‘computer’ in it. My son pointed this out when I tried to give it to him some years later.

By the time I’d reached my older teen years, my desire to write was well entrenched. I learned by reading other books, especially science fiction, westerns, and adventures. I’ve never liked whodunits, horror, or fantasy. I read nonfiction as it came to hand.

I did try reading a series of ‘how to write’ books, but for me they never worked. I took a postal class from the ‘Writer’s School’. That was enough to convince me I’d rather go it alone. I knew from the first, I think instinctively, ‘to write what you know’. I would quibble whether writing is a ‘craft’. I think it’s more an art form. Tech writing and grocery lists aside.

I’ve put more spare man-hours into writing than all other interests combined. I have to write. I changed shifts at my job to get on nights, where as a fast worker, I had plenty of time to write. Laptops hadn’t been invented then, so it was still longhand. When the notion for a story comes to me, I sit down and write a couple of chapters.

I do not hold with the opinion that one should sit down and force words onto a screen as a form of self-discipline. After I finished my very first full-length story—conceived in a fraction of a second and three years to write out longhand—I had no interest in even editing the thing, and that scared me. I feared I’d shot my bolt. Turned out to be a perfectly normal reaction.

Yes, I’ve got a ‘cycle’ of romance stories set in a certain locale in southeastern Missouri. As soon as Needle is ‘launched’ I intend to carpet-bomb Harlequin with them. A vignette is a small, economy-sized ‘vign’. In the large vign, one can dump lots of words and scenes, but a vignette has to be carefully packed, neatly arranged, all features congruent to make it work, if it’s meant to be shown. Properly done, they can be charming.

In general, I write romances. I do them for the sole reason that I like to. I have one adventure shoot-em-up that’s languishing. It’s rough, the minor characters are stupid and cruel. Only the two main characters are nice. I think that’s why I don’t bother with it. I’ve got a little jewel of a humor yarn, but I’m not a humorist. I don’t know where it came from. It’s an unfinished short story.

As I’ve said, I have Harlequin in mind. My very best piece of writing, ‘Dunbar’s Station’, is outside their genre, so I’ll have to hunt a suitable publisher to submit that to. Unlike most stories I write, it is on a darker subject, but with a nice ending.

I never, ever outline. I tried that once, when I tried to write a mystery. I’ve found it stifles creativity. If I get a ‘hot’ story going, the characters begin to grow of themselves, and the story spins right off my fingertips. I sit down with an idea and begin to write. Once I had a minor character begin to grow, then displace the main. That was fascinating to observe, even as I wrote it. I think an outline would’ve killed what has turned out to be a really nice story. I develop my characters during rewrite, though I rarely change anything of significance. I ‘flesh out’ scenes with color, scents, seasons, emotions, etc. Keeping the seasons straight can be tricky, and therein, at the top of each chapter, I’ll ‘outline’ a couple of things that indicate season and general subjects in that chapter. Nothing formal. Usually, I use a chapter title as a mnemonic.

I have a special folder in my computer. It has an access code to open it. It is labeled ‘Dumb Junk’, and there I go to try out the things I think might have promise but are a tad bizarre at first glance. When I was a kid, my mother routinely rooted through my writings, throwing many away, since the notebook pages were written on both sides, thus full and therefore useless. I had no privacy. I come up with a lot of ideas just by studying people and listening to them talk. For instance, a group of men carry on a discussion in a vastly different way from a group of women, provided both groups are separated in either time or space. I choose one storyline over another based upon personal appeal, nothing more. If I don’t like it, I won’t try to salvage it. But I won’t throw it away, because occasionally I will go back and fiddle with it, and eventually, it’ll become a story, or be incorporated into a better one.

Well, thank you, but Needle really never was my first choice for a science fiction yarn. I essentially wrote it for fun some few winters ago and was amazed when it was accepted. Not that it isn’t a good yarn, just not anything I thought would go as a first try. Of course, I’ll go where the market is. I tell people who ask, "Writing and selling a story is like unto going to a flea market where everyone else is selling birdhouses—and only birdhouses. Your birdhouse has to appeal to a buyer over another’s birdhouse, or it doesn’t sell."

I have one yarn about half-written that is stumbling badly. I really liked the beginning but it went sour. I know why, but I haven’t figured out which way I want to go. I have a couple of other ideas that are in the ‘2 chapter’ stage. I was at an art show with my wife and found a young man who was doing remarkable representations of Golden Age Sci Fi illustrations. I now have one hanging on my wall.

My favorite is called ‘Jerry’s Friend’. Jerry is mentally handicapped, and he is the POV character through which the story unfolds. He is a physically huge young man with a child’s mind, and he takes up with a small, very cold man named ‘Snake’. Snake has a real name, and feels sorry for the way the other men treat Jerry at the sawmill where they all work. He befriends Jerry, who wants nothing more than acceptance. It ends with Jerry’s death, trying to save Snake from arrest.

Would you consider publishing some of these short pieces as a collection? Short story collections are very popular now.

I didn’t know that. Of course I’d publish anything an editor wanted to accept. Batting out enough shorts to fill a collection couldn’t be much of a problem, but I’ve never actually considered it.

Eh? Is that one of those technical terms? Of course I have more than one voice, since all my stories save ‘Jerry’ and ‘Dunbar’s Station’ have different POV’s. Anyway, the trick is to give your characters different voices, I’d think. That can get tricky. One way to practice is to write straight dialogue, no ‘he said, she said’, and re-read it to see if you can tell who’s speaking after the fifth or sixth line. It’s best if you put the thing away for a few days or a week, then try it.

Primarily first person, because I like to. For genre romances, it makes the story seem more intimate. There are drawbacks, and some stories can’t be written well in the first person. At least, not by me.

To sell more yarns. And to try to find a publisher for ‘Dunbar’s Station’.

I’ve just finished the final rewrite on ‘Fireball’. I’m looking for a reader. It’s a romance that begins with interest between a 26 year old man and a 15 year old girl, and progresses through the social problems they face until she comes of age. Next in line is a rewrite on ‘Yuk Foo’ (working title!) wherein I’m going to throw in a fast switch of events at the end so the underdog wins. It’s one of those ‘triangle’ things. Next in line is ‘Burning Duck’, completely finished except for some technical research on running an old steam railroad engine, a couple of chapters worth of ‘vetting, and that’s ready to go. It’s about a young woman who rallies a low-rent neighborhood to fight the city’s condemnation of their homes, and discovers the man she fell in love with is behind the rezoning. And lastly, there is ‘A Choice of Evil’, the unpleasant one I mentioned earlier. It’s actually ready to go, but I want to fiddle with it just a bit in a couple of places. Other than that, I’m waiting my next great idea.

Satisfaction. Personal satisfaction. It would be great if Needle did really well—unusual for a first effort—but I’ll keep trying, because you see, I have to write. When I discovered I could actually create characters, settings, even a whole town, I experienced a real sense of achievement.

They are very encouraging. My wife gives me all the space and help she can. She’s an artist who shows and sells her work. In the area of creativity we are very much alike. Point of fact, she did the cover for Needle. My two children support my efforts. My son-in-law gave me the best boost on ‘Dunbar’, and he’s not a reader at all. My granddaughter is coming along: she’s eleven, and has her own folder on my computer. I never look in it.

Write. Write more. Write more and more. If you wear the letters off your keyboard about twice a year, you’re right in the zone. When you write, write what you know, or can reasonably research and imagine. Watch out for ‘Webwin’, (Webster by Windows, the dictionary the Windows spelchekr uses.) Get a good, thick Oxford Dictionary of the English Language. Used ones at garage sales are perfect because they’re cheap. Mine cost me $3. It’s about 4 inches thick. Get a thesaurus, a good one.

Don’t fear editors, they have a stake in your success too. And don’t do a huge rewrite to please one, because you’ll tear the heart out of your story. Above all, be yourself, write what’s in your soul and don’t let ‘rules’ interfere a whole lot, particularly where style, mood, dialogue and that ineffable quality called ‘vision’ lives and breathes in all its glorious colors. If the story’s good, a good editor will point out your excesses—though you should be alert enough to catch most yourself. Don’t bombard editors with wacky, half-polished, first-draft stories and defend them hotly as ‘my vision’. There are limits to what can be done in a given genre; the trick is to see how far you can bend it. Put another way, try to write with a different coloration.

Find a person with whom you can work to bounce your stories, or fragments thereof, off each other. You’ll both grow. Learn to trust yourself. In fact, learn yourself. That can be very difficult. I know that submitting a story can be like sending your pumping, bleeding heart out to be stomped on, but get over that. Make your birdhouse more attractive or in some way different.

Do not imagine you will support yourself as an author. Few can do that, even as few rise above the high school star quarterback and get into the NFL. Remember, there are only about four or five basic storylines. Everything is a variation on a theme. Every generation recasts the great stories in its own image.

Learn to listen to actual speech patterns, and for unique ones. Observe people to see how they interact in real life. Look for odd personal mannerisms that can serve as ‘beats’. Lastly, never pay anyone to agent your deathless prose. Guess how I know that.

Above all, write.