Confessions of an Amateur Writer, Part I

Five years ago this week, I checked into Buffalo Bill’s Hotel and Casino on the border of California and Nevada.

I was going to write a book – or at least a big chunk of one.  Two months earlier, my life had changed during a January, 2010 two-week visit to Uganda – my first foray into anything that could be remotely called a “Mission Trip” in my first forty-two years of life.

While in Uganda, I spent a week working in a juvenile prison in Masindi with four other American lawyers and an American non-profit worker.  What happened that week was later dubbed “The Masindi Project.”

It was, perhaps, more appropriately referred to by my oldest daughter Jessica as “Dad’s mid-life crisis.”  While there, I struck up a highly unlikely friendship with a sixteen-year-old Ugandan prisoner named Henry and we became lifelong friends.

During these two weeks, I sent daily e-mail updates to family and friends about what we were experiencing.  I found the process of capturing feelings and experiences and distilling them into written form to be equal parts challenging and gratifying.  After we returned home, I talked to Henry every few days as the juvenile cases we prepared for trial were taken to court.  Kids were being released almost daily, so I continued sending regular e-mail updates to the growing list of those eager to hear what was happening. Some of the recipients encouraged me to write a book about my experiences.  I laughed.

Soon thereafter, I read Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

In Chapter One, Don writes about Bob Goff: “I have this friend Bob who writes down everything he remembers . . . He’s the only guy I know who remembers his life.  He said he captures memories, because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen; it’s as though he hadn’t lived the parts he doesn’t remember.”

After reading that, I had a strong conviction that I didn’t want to forget the memories I made in Uganda – I lived those moments (deeply and intensely) and I didn’t want them to disappear.  That’s how I found myself (taking the advice of some friends and family) as an amateur writer locked in a cheap hotel with my laptop, an ice chest full of diet coke, and a card table I brought with me (it is a really cheap hotel).  I wanted to make sure I never forgot what happened in Uganda.

That’s when I learned a lesson that real writers already know – the first page is the hardest to write.  Where does the story begin?  Using my mammoth reasoning skills, I concluded it should start at the beginning.  But where did this story begin?  Was it when we arrived in Uganda?  Was it when we decided to go?  Or did it begin before we decided to go – at all the times I had previously decided not to go anywhere outside my comfort zone?  I knew that Henry’s story was entwined with mine, so was the beginning when he was arrested?  But the story of how and why he was arrested itself started sooner – much sooner.

From reading Don Miller’s book, I knew the story needed to have an arc – an inciting incident resulting in crisis with rising and falling action, ultimately culminating in a resolution where the main characters experience change.

So I mapped things out along these lines.  Henry’s inciting incident would be his wrongful arrest, which led to his harrowing two years of imprisonment, culminating in his release from prison with the assistance of our team.  My inciting incident was Bob Goff’s conference speech entitled “Love Does” (later a best-selling book) that caused me to cede a bit of control of my life and go on this one-time trip where I met and helped Henry and some other juvenile prisoners get home to their families, and in the process grew spiritually.

If I could only get started, I reasoned, then I could pound this puppy out over the course of a few months, at most.  I was accustomed to writing lengthy and complex legal briefs and law review articles, so I should be able to do this.

Foolishness.  Utter foolishness.  Though I was entirely oblivious to this at the time.

As I often did with legal writing, I decided not to get bogged down at the beginning – I just started writing about what happened – I would organize these into chapters later.

Over the course of those three days, I got about fifty pages written – less than I hoped, but about what I realistically expected.  I would finish the spring semester of teaching two months later, then spent June finishing the book.  I was pleased with my plans.

But by April, my plans were obliterated.  My neat little story arc for Henry shattered.  While he was acquitted in the original murder charge that landed him in juvenile prison, he was convicted on a second charge associated with the tragic death of another prisoner who died shortly after a failed escape attempt.  Henry wasn’t going home.  Instead, he was very likely facing an extended prison sentence.  And my story arc collapsed just as hard – I found myself back on a plane headed for Uganda to be with Henry and questioning where God was in all of this.  So much for neat and tidy.

Fortunately, things got back on track again in May.  After lots of prayer and legal wrangling, Henry was released on probation and resumed school.  So I resumed writing.

I also began researching how the book publishing process worked.  I bought a book off Amazon and started reading.

I learned that the first step in getting a book deal was securing an agent.  Makes sense.  And the way to get an agent, I learned, was through what’s called a “query letter.”  This one-page letter describes the book, the audience, the author, and the author’s platform.  But I didn’t just want an agent.  I wanted a specific agent, and none other would do.

From the beginning, I had my eye set on the Yates & Yates literary agency.  Sealy Yates and his two sons Curtis and Matt are all Pepperdine Law grads, and Sealy was on Pepperdine’s Board of Visitors.  I knew they represented lots of high profile writers and that they were stellar at what they did.  Serendipitously, I found out that Sealy and Matt would also be attending the inauguration of Ken Starr as Baylor’s President in September of 2010, so I decided to skip the query letter phase and directly approach them about representing me.  By that time, I had finished the first seven of what I believed would be fifteen chapters.

During a pre-inauguration lunch with a bunch of Pepperdine folks, I sat next to Matt and slyly broached the subject.  He was kind and agreed to take a look at what I had, but was also honest with me about the fact that Yates & Yates worked almost exclusively with “established” authors.  The subtext should have been clear — amateurs need not apply.  Later that day, I handed him the first seven chapters.

Looking back now, I cringe at my audacity and laugh when I think about what was going through his head.

As expected, this plan crashed and burned.  I’ve been too embarrassed to ask Matt if he ever read what I gave him, but I sincerely hope he placed it on the six-story-high pile of unsolicited manuscripts from wannabe writers he gets each year.

Mercifully, Matt didn’t follow up with a rejection letter.  If he had, I probably would have quit right then.

In my next post, I will discuss how and where I learned just how little I knew about storytelling and where I found some very helpful answers.