February 4, 2008
Monday

You have to put words on paper, a lot of them.
       — MacKinlay Kantor, 1904-1977, American journalist and fiction writer
on the writing process

I first wrote about MacKinlay Kantor on this day in 2004, the centennial of his birth. I recalled that as a sixteen-year-old novelist wannabe in 1963 I wrote him a fan letter and received a gracious reply and the gift of a signed copy of a collection of short stories, certainly my first volume autographed by the author.

MacKinlay Kantor must have put a lot of words on paper. His canon includes short stories, children’s literature, nonfiction,  journalism, a book-length narrative poem (Glory for Me) that became the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, and thirty novels. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for Andersonville.

Despite the Pulitzer, Kantor’s work was not the kind of literature studied by undergraduate English majors, and I stopped reading him after high school. By that time he’d pretty much stopped producing new work anyway. His political conservatism and his heartfelt patriotism that came across as jingoism did not garner him new fans, and he became known mostly for his genre work in detective fiction. Nevertheless, I never lost my affection for him, and should a novel of mine ever see publication, especially a work of historical fiction or a family saga,  you can be sure he will be mentioned in the acknowledgements and referred to in the interviews I’ll give in all the cities where I’ll be signing my books.

I still struggle to keep putting words on paper, even when I am not also trying to keep Melanie, the black bitch of my depression, quiet. I am a master of procrastination and finding ways to seem productive when actually I am going over paved roads instead of striking out into the wilderness to create new material. Today I assembled all of the materials associated with what lives in my files as “the dead cat story.” It’s the piece I’ve settled on to develop as my Bread Loaf admissions manuscript, due in early March. I photocopied all the notes and moodling work from the several volumes of my journals since I first began working with the idea in 2004.

When I was in Wyoming I made some notations about where that material was and an outline of several alternative scenarios for the story. I looked at the page and became dissatisfied with it. It was on paper from a pad I bought in 1982 (I won’t go down into the memory of why I remember that). It’s low quality stuff, probably with a high acid content. My notations in pencil had smudged, there were stray marks and irrelevant notes in the margins (such as the hours for the open house Christmas celebration at the library in Story, Wyoming), so I set to recopying the material on better paper.

That’s enough of a task to make me appear productive while actually not being so. But when I got to the middle of the page, I found that, in a list of actions to be included in a scene. I had intended to write “Gina ministers to the cat,” but I had actually written, “Gina miniters to the cat.”

On the fresh copy I wrote it correctly. On the old sheet I carefully erased “miniters” and wrote “ministers.” Not liking the way the corrected word looked with the rest of the sentence, I erased the whole thing and rewrote it to fit better on the line. Only then did I fold the sheet and put it into the wastebasket.

I don’t think that’s what Mr. Kantor meant when he advocated putting a lot of words on paper.

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