Jim Kyle Memoirs, Part 4 — Learning Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma

The writer with the Western viewpoint,” says Foster-Harris, “can write till he is ninety-seven and has to have help to totter to his typewriter each day. But his writing still sells.

        Of the Western Story in the sense of a story set in the Old West, he says, “The spell of the Western is the spell of green pastures over the hill. Look at the popularity of Western movies and on TV. The hero always leaps on three or four horses and rides a few thousand miles to kill a few million bad men.” The girl in the Westerns is unimportant. “She’s just a trophy. Keep her on the shelf and award her to the hero. Let him decide what to do with her.”
        Plotting, which many beginners find the bugaboo of writing, Professor Harris considers no problem at all. “The way to catch a plot,” he explains, “is the way to catch a woman. Pretend not to be interested.” The student who complains that it is impossible to find a new plot because all the plots have been used, he tells, “You don’t need a new plot. Just put a little parsley on the same old dish!”
        I was in the program during what were possibly some of its best years: 1949-52. Just a year ahead of me, Tony Hillerman had graduated. By the time he died in 2008, he had published 29 books, including 17 mysteries featuring Navajo police officers Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. He had received every major honor for mystery fiction.
        William R. Scott, who published “Onionhead” (made into a great movie starring Andy Griffith) under the pen name Weldon Hill to disguise its autobiographical roots, finished the courses the year that I began (he also wrote for The Covered Wagon, the campus humor magazine, as “Steinway Hemingbeck”). Neal Barrett, recently honored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, was a classmate both at Classen in OKC and in the program at OU, although we were never close.
        I don’t remember just how I learned of the program’s existence. Quite possibly, it came to my attention through the magazine Writer’s Digest, which I read religiously at that time and which was quite enthusiastic about the courses.
        I do remember, though, that it wasn’t simple to get into in the first place. You couldn’t just sign up for it and start going to class. You had to fill out a detailed questionnaire, complete a sample story, and survive a one-on-one interview with Campbell himself if the written material passed muster.
        One of the questions was “Why do you want to be a writer?” My somewhat flippant reply was “Because it beats working.” When Campbell got to that one during my interview, he chuckled. “I think you’ll discover otherwise,” he said. He was right. Nevertheless, he accepted my application, and I showed up for class with my box of Crayolas and pulp magazine in hand, as required.
        The crayons and magazine were part of the technique to discover the scaffolding on which a pulp story was built. He assigned one color to “narrative verbs,” another to “description,” still another for “emotion,” and so forth. We were to go through a specified story in the magazine, marking each word with its appropriate color, then determine the amount of each color in the story by measuring the total length of its lines.
        After doing this for each of the stories, we began to get a feel not only for the amount of each kind of content, but for the patterns in which they occurred. Our introduction to professional techniques had begun.
        On the wall of Campbell’s oversized office which also served as the classroom was a small framed cartoon. It had four panels, each showing a person shouting a single word. The words were “Hey,” “You!” “See?” and “So.” One day after class, I asked Campbell about its significance.
        “That’s the formula for non-fiction,” was his reply. “You begin with ‘Hey’ to grab the reader’s attention, follow immediately with ‘You’ to make it personal. When you do that, you have him hooked. The ‘See’ provides the main body of the article, and ‘So’ wraps it up neatly.”
        That simple four-word formula is the most important single thing I learned in the entire three years I spent in the program. I’ve never been able to keep a fictional character alive long enough to tell a salable story, but “Hey, you! See? So” has bought me two homes over the years and kept food in the pantry since I learned it. Even before completing the courses, I had sold two non-fiction articles to national magazines, including a personality sketch of Bud Wilkinson to Sport Magazine.
        If you look closely, you can see that I’m still using it right here. It works.
        During my years in the newspaper business, I didn’t pursue magazine work seriously at first. However, after acquiring a family, I began writing for ham radio magazines to supplement a reporter’s pay.
        After I left the Oklahoman and moved to the Los Angeles suburbs to become an electronics tech writer in the defense industry, the increased cost of living there made extra income a necessity — especially after the 100-hour weeks and their accompanying overtime pay came to an abrupt end. That’s when the formula really began to pay off — and bought my first house.
        I became a contributing editor for a start-up magazine called 73 that was run by an editor with whom I had previously worked. He needed copy to fill its pages, promised to pay on acceptance, and I needed money. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. My typewriter filled half of those pages during the first year of publication, and I remained on the masthead as a contributing editor for 10 years. Some of my first published books were collections of articles written for 73.
        I also wrote for more general electronics magazines, and even sold material to Mechanix Illustrated for its electronics section. This prolific output caught the attention of another magazine publisher who was planning to move his operation from California to Oklahoma City, and who offered to pay my moving expenses if I would work for him as an editor on three trade journals. Since my whole family was homesick, I jumped at the chance.
        The editorship lasted just one year, but taught me about “the other side” of the publishing business. After it folded, I free-lanced for a couple of years before joining General Electric to write the service manuals for the very first “TV Typewriter” computer display terminal — and even then continued to write for publication on the side. During the free-lance years I published my first book; the count eventually passed 20, all on highly technical subjects.
        Aside from the books, I did very little outside writing from 1965 until the mid-Eighties. I had discovered the joy of writing software; at G-E I had access to computers. This led me in a roundabout way to become active on the CompuServe network, a predecessor of the Internet, and that in turn resulted in my becoming a “sysop” or “system operator” for the on-line forum sponsored by Computer Language Magazine.
        Discussions there brought me back into the magazine writing world, and I began selling a few articles to CLM. Those led to an offer by Allen Wyatt, at the time an editor with Que Publishing Company, for me to update, as a second edition, a book he had written. I jumped at the offer, and added a couple of chapters to the original, including one about the “undocumented” computer code that lay at the foundation of Microsoft’s Disk Operating System known as MS-DOS.
        Prior to the 1989 release of “DOS Programmer’s Reference, Second Edition,” that code had been a closely guarded trade secret, known to only a handful of folk outside the Microsoft labs. What I had published was nowhere near all of it, of course, but it gained notice throughout what was then still a cottage industry providing PC software.
        In 1990, a literary agent approached me to see if I was interested in joining a team that would produce an entire book devoted exclusively to the undocumented aspects. At almost the same time, my long-time employment with G-E, Honeywell, MPI, and BancTec Systems came to an end. Again, I jumped at it. “Undocumented DOS” turned out to be the closest thing to a best-seller I ever did, rising for a while into the top 20 for technical trade books, going into a second edition, and being translated into Russian and Japanese. Nobody ever made an offer for the movie rights to it, though — and it was a collaborative effort with four other fellows, anyway.
        So looking back on more than 60 years as a published writer, I find it difficult to pinpoint all of the major landmarks I’ve passed — but I’m certain that my time with Campbell and Harris was the most significant of all of them. Even though I never completed a successful short story or sold a novel, they taught me what professional writing is all about. And their legacy lives on, not only in the accomplishments of those who learned directly from them, but in the program itself which continues to this day.