Louis L’Amour, who had sold 200 million books when he got around to writing an interesting memoir, said this about writing:
The raw material is not important. It is what the writer does with the material. …
At least once a week I get a letter from someone who has material he wants me to shape into a story (wanting, of course, a piece of the action). But a writer builds a readership because those readers like what he does with a story, not because of the material.
It’s a way, I suppose, of looking at the craft of writing, although I don’t imagine that L’Amour would dominate the curriculum at most writing programs.
This way of thinking about writing is foreign to me. It’s taking me a while to think through it. The writers I most admire conduct some kind of experiment with their life — go to Walden Pond, for example, or try to escape the Jim Crow South — and write about the process of imagining a better way to live.
A writer like Thoreau or Richard Wright owns his material, maybe is his material. The material is important.
Writing is a broad subject. Sometimes we find ourselves talking apples and oranges.
• Source: Louis L’Amore, Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 85.
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