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Dedicated to the Craft
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10264 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1993 |
1,882 Words |
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Russ Braley
Russ Braley was a U.S. Navy mine disposal officer in the
Mediterranean and Pacific theaters in World War II. For
twenty years he was a foreign correspondent for the New York
Daily News. He is the author of Bad News: the Foreign Policy
of the New York Times (Regnery Gateway, 1984). |
HOMELAND
John Jakes
Doubleday, 1993
John Jakes, author of the new best-seller Homeland, is a friendly, easygoing man with the self-assurance that comes from having paid his dues. He has had three books on the New York Times best-seller list at once. Sales of the eight novels in his Kent Family Chronicles, an epic historical saga, are between forty-five and fifty million and still counting.
What's the secret of that phenomenal success?
"It's just my conjecture, but I would say, first, dedication to the craft, willingness to do the work. The harder you work over a long period of time, the greater the chance that luck will strike, and luck has something to do with it," Jakes said in an interview.
"Also, I learned to be ruthless with myself, especially after I wrote some plays. It's good discipline for a novel writer to write plays and then stand in the back of the theater and watch his stuff failing. You need to accept criticism and take a good editor seriously."
Jakes was forty years old and had published forty books, mostly paperbacks, when he struck his first vein of gold with The Bastard in 1973, the initial novel in the Kent Family Chronicles. Philip Kent, born Philippe Charboneau in France, illegitimate son of a titled Englishman, fights the British in the American War of Independence. He becomes a Boston publisher, and his progeny spread west as the United States grows. Then the vein became a mother lode: Kents are present at the Alamo, the California gold fields, the Civil War, and the Chicago Fire, always in close contact with real historical figures. Between 1973 and 1980, readers snapped up The Rebels, The Seekers, The Furies, The Titans, The Warriors, The Lawless, and The Americans.
A writer develops
The prolific Jakes sold his first short story as a sophomore at DePauw University in Indiana in 1950, but that first $25 check did not signal quick riches. Anthony Boucher, editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and later president of Mystery Writers of America, had Jakes rewrite that first short story, about a man battling a malevolent electric toaster, and later bought a couple more of his pieces.
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