I'm a big fan of Louis L'Amour.

He knew how to tell a story, keep it moving, not pad it out with a lot of nonsense, not let the author get in the way and he was great with one liners.

He said a few things about writing that I really liked.  He said that he learned while writing fiction for pulp magazines that you really had to grab the reader by the throat with your first line.  He had a lot of great openers in his stories. 

Like this one from Mojave Crossing;

"When I saw that black-eyed woman a lookin' at me, I wished I had a Bible."

Aren't you dying to know what happens next?

And tell me you wouldn't love to tell some blow hard he wouldn't make a pimple on a tough man's neck.

Louis also said that he didn't believe in writer's block.  Just sit and describe what you're looking at and keep going until you think of a story.

I can buy that.

But he also said he didn't buy it when writer's complained about distractions.  He said distractions were a cop out and he claimed that he could sit with his type writer on the high way median and write with traffic whizzing past.  He didn't believe in distractions.

Well, heck, Louis!  Give me a laptop and plop me down on the highway median and I could write, too!  There's no one on the median asking "Honey, have you seen my keys?"
or
"What's for dinner?"
"Can I have ten bucks for a movie?"
"Have you seen my iPod?"
"Where are my shoes?"
"Did Katie call?"
"Can I have a ride to Jude's house?"
"There's an open house at school tonight."

There are days when I yearn for the peace and quiet of a highway median.

When I was growing up, my Dad wrote every day.  His office was in the back of a house filled with nine kids.  But Mom was there to field those kinds of questions and requests.  Dad had an office in the back of the house, tucked under the back stairs, behind the kitchen.  His office was originally a maid's quarters, complete with it's own bathroom, so he could work all day and we didn't see him at all.  He also sound proofed the office to the best of his ability; he corked over the glass of the front door and he closed off the other door by building a book case over it for all his issues of the magazine.

Nothing absorbs sound better than 400 copies of Reader's Digest.

That second door  opened up next to the big brick fireplace in the living room.  Mom placed a table with a magazine rack beneath it and a brass lamp on top of it in front of that door.  In time, we forgot it even was a door.  When we really little, while playing hide and see, we wiggled behind the table, pulled open that door a few inched and squeezed under the lowest shelf of the book case.  Eventually, we all got too big to do all that wiggling and Dad got smart and plopped big boxes of research under the lowest shelf.

But a highway median would have worked, too.

 

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