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Advice from a Berkshire writer

Having a way with words and being a professional writer are two different things.

The September 10, 1972, issue of The Berkshire Eagle contained a full-page article headed, “Trancendental (sic) Meditation – a Growing Phenomenon.” It had a picture of two young meditation teachers. One of them was me, with a head of black curly hair, long since gone.

I came across that article earlier this year when my wife and I were packing up to move to the Berkshires after respectively spending 32 and 40 years in Los Angeles. Our decision raised many an eyebrow because people in their Medicare years don’t normally flee warm climates to settle in New England, nor move from a one-story house to one with steps. But this was the only area in the country that checked all our boxes: small towns, natural beauty, tranquility, culture, and access to family and old friends. For me, it also seemed the ideal place to cap a writing career that had, in a sense, begun in these fecund hills.

I’d developed a crush on the Berkshires in the late 1960s when I’d occasionally drive out from Boston to visit friends who moved there. Having lived in dense urban neighborhoods all my life—in Brooklyn and Manhattan before Boston—I was enchanted by the landscape and the lifestyle. So, after training as a meditation instructor, I chose Western Mass. as my territory and spent 1971 hustling from Amherst and Springfield to Williamstown and Great Barrington, giving talks and classes. Then I decided to see if my dream of becoming a writer was a legitimate aspiration or just a recurring fantasy. The Berkshires seemed the perfect place to conduct that test, so I rented a room in Stockbridge for the warm months of 1972.

The plan was to spend most evenings and weekends lecturing and teaching, and the daytimes at my makeshift desk, which was an old door resting on cinder blocks. I dared to imagine becoming an heir to Melville, Wharton, and the other scribes who had found inspiration here. In truth, I was as insecure as an unwanted child about my writing prospects. I needed, and craved, validation from a respected professional. As it happened, I had someone in mind.

I had come to know William Gibson, the celebrated author of the Tony-winning play and Oscar-winning movie “The Miracle Worker,” when he and his wife, Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a distinguished psychologist at Austen Riggs, took one of my meditation courses. I found them so interesting that I found reasons to visit their home on Clark Road in Stockbridge as often as I could without becoming a nuisance.

I was nursing two writing projects at the time. One, a vaguely conceived treatise on the influence of Eastern philosophies in America, amounted to a pile of notes and photocopied pages from library books. The other consisted of related short stories. They were mostly scribbled anecdotes, but I deemed one story polished enough to show to Bill Gibson without being too embarrassed. I imagined that he’d read it with an expert eye and give me crucial feedback. Maybe he’d even become my mentor and open doors to publishers.

He did none of that. But he did give me some trenchant advice that I’ve always remembered, as well as a story I’ve enjoyed telling for half a century.

One day I got up the nerve to tell Bill I’d written a short story—hint, hint. Before I could muster the courage to ask him to read it, he blurted out, “I’m not going to read it.” I started stammering that the thought had never entered my mind. He cut me off. “Everyone has a story,” he said, “and some of them can even write.”

He went on to explain that having a way with words and being a professional writer are two different things. I can’t recall his exact language, but I remember the gist with crystalline clarity: A true writer has to love the process, not just the product; has to be okay sitting for long periods playing around with ideas and words, often with little to show for it; has to find joy in replacing a merely serviceable word or phrase with a more perfect one, or moving a passage from an okay place to just the right place, or crossing out hard-earned paragraphs and deleting superfluous metaphors and useless anecdotes, or tearing up entire pages—and then agonizing over whether to change the changes and, if necessary, doing so ruthlessly, again and again.

I took Bill’s implicit message to be, “Do you have what it takes?” What he said was something like, “I don’t want to waste my time on a guy with one story. When you have four or five, I’ll help you as much as I can.”

Over the next few years, as I moved from place to place, I kept scribbling and asking myself whether I could meet Bill’s criteria for being a real writer. When I discovered that I could, it was a life-altering epiphany and a huge relief.

Short stories turned out not to be my genre. But, in 1976, I sent Bill and Margaret a copy of my first nonfiction book. They liked it or said they did, and it meant a lot to me. I sent them copies of subsequent books as well and was always proud to receive a congratulatory postcard or letter. Many years later, the short story I never showed Bill became a useful anecdote in my first novel (“This is Next Year,” 1992), and the notes I compiled in Stockbridge grew into a well-received book (“American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West,” 2010).

Ever since those days in the Berkshires, I’ve been doing what Bill described: sitting for long periods, moving sentences around, searching for better words, better syntax, and better phrases, and forcing myself to kill the extraneous baubles that William Faulkner famously called a writer’s “darlings.”

Regrettably, I lost touch with the Gibsons sometime in the 1980s, but at least Bill knew that I’d met his standards as a professional. Now, after countless articles and more than 25 books written, co-written, and ghost-written, I pass along his insights to would-be writers who seek my advice.

Sometimes I also share another memorable remark of Bill’s, usually for entertainment but sometimes with purpose. At one point in the seventies, after my first book crashed commercially, my agent was trying to place what would eventually become my next book. To pay the bills, I hustled TV Guide subscriptions from a phone room outside Philadelphia. I needed advice badly, and since I could sometimes sneak in a personal call, I dialed Bill Gibson and whined about my plight.

His first response was encouraging: Stay the course; writing is a tough game; sometimes success comes late. It did for him, he added. He was a family man in his mid-forties when “The Miracle Worker” opened on Broadway. I thanked him and assured him that I’d stick it out. “But what do I do in the meantime?” I asked, wincing at the sound of my desperation.

“Do what I did,” he said.

I reached for a pen so I could capture the wisdom that might help me escape telemarketing. “What was that, Bill?”

“Marry a doctor.”

It was a let-down, but the laughter was therapeutic.

I did not marry a doctor, but about 10 years after my wife and I married, she became a doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine. The Gibsons had passed on by then, so I couldn’t tell them that Bill’s half-serious advice had been somewhat prophetic.

Now, here I am, full circle in the Berkshires. My wife’s doctorate came too late to serve Bill’s intended purpose, but her expertise keeps my body strong and my mind alert as I work on a second novel and another nonfiction book. I can’t prove it, but it feels as though the current between my brain and the keyboard runs swifter and smoother in the pristine atmosphere of these hills. I also coach aspiring authors, to whom I pass along Bill’s sage advice. And if someone complains about how tough it is to earn a living as a writer, I might just tell them, “Marry a doctor.”

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