At last, we arrive at the fourth face on my personal Mount Rushmore, and that face belongs to one Mr. Evan Marshall. Unlike the previous three luminaries, Mr. Marshall is not known to me as an author of fiction, though he has written some murder mysteries that I owe it to myself to investigate; see what I did there? But no, Evan Marshall is a high-powered New York agent, and while I never approached him in the hubris of my youth, I did read his book.

The book in question was The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing. I must assume that in his role as a literary agent, he was constantly exposed to writing of all levels of quality while simultaneously seeing what he could sell and what he couldn’t, and his genius was to take that randomly arriving knowledge and organize it into a series of axioms and formulae that brought discipline to my writing.

You need to understand something about me: The first book I completed, which isn’t available for public consumption anywhere and with good reason, was made up entirely on the fly. Writing “by the seat of my pants” didn’t begin to cover it. I never once saw a dog hole or rabbit run that I didn’t feel was worth exploring, and boy did I explore them, making up unnecessary scenes and side quests that would do a game designer proud. The end result was a 140,000-word wandering opus that might have been good at 80. In the innocence of youth, I sent this to a professional agent and sat back to wait for the checks to roll in.

What rolled in instead was a well-thought-out critique of my style and technique, and I am forever grateful to Ms. Lee Shore for setting me on the right path before I ruined my reputation with everyone in the industry. This was over a generation ago, and I guess professionals still had time to do things like that for amateurs. I preferred, and still do, to think that she saw some underlying talent and chose to encourage me. I have heard Lee’s name attached to some shady practices in the years since, but she did right by me.

So then the question became where to find this discipline. I had found some how-to-write books, so I knew they were out there, but now I went on a search. How to plot, how to outline, how to create tension, scenes, characters, ad infinitum. Trouble was, the vast majority of these books assumed you already knew most of these things and were more about keeping them in their proper format if you like; hard to explain, but most of them didn’t address my needs at all.

At this same time, I was a member of the Science-Fiction Book Club, and you know how those work: Each month they sent me notice that they would be sending a certain book which I could decline by sending back a card. For some reason, they saw fit to offer The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing. Why not? I thought, one more useless how-to for my burgeoning collection.

I never gave a thought to why Sci-Fi was offering this, but when it arrived two weeks later, I had found my teacher! Everything was laid out in charts and tables. How many characters do you plan to have? Then you need this many scenes. Four characters, for example? Then eighty scenes will get you where you need to go. Not only that, but these are broken down; the main character gets 48. The next two characters get 11 each, and the least important gets 10. Who are these characters? The hero, obviously, the villain, the sidekick, the henchman. More characters? One drives the subplot; one is the complication that threatens to derail the hero’s quest for success. Where do you place eye-opening surprises? Who comes to focus in what part of the narrative? It’s all right here in black and white.

I needed discipline in my writing. After a lengthy search, what I found was a Marine DI to rival Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in laying down how it works. I’ve been writing books that have been enjoyed by their readers, few though they are, ever since, and I have to give credit to my DI, Evan Marshall. I have had pantsers who want to denigrate my work say that I have no creativity, that I’m just following an outline. I don’t know where they think I got that outline, but my reply is always, “How are you going to tell me a story if you don’t know what it is?”

There are as many ways to write a story as there are writers, and I know some pantsers who are really very good. I’m not one of them, and I doubt I ever would have had any success without the incredible kismet of a Sci-Fi book club bringing me the exact how-to-write book that I needed at the exact time I needed it. Anyone believe in things that are “meant to be?” That’s a concept that’s hard for me to dismiss. How about you? Anyone want to talk about your own formative influences? I’ve found it very cathartic, and I’d love to hear about yours!