I’m often asked about writing; so, here’s a breakdown of the three most frequently asked questions about me:
How did you get started in writing? When I was five years old, my mother worked from home as a typist. All day I’d hear the click-clack of the typewriter as she typed up pages and pages of labels for direct mailings. When she got to the last label on the page, I got to type in the zip code. I was still learning my numbers, and my reward for a correct answer was being allowed to type that number. That said, it probably took me anywhere from one to two minutes to type those five digits—a far cry from my mother’s eighty words per minute.
When my father got home from work, he’d remove the typing ribbon and let me have at it. I would sit at my mom’s desk, located in the corner of our kitchen, and pound away, pretending to write extraordinary stories that everyone wanted to read.
Once I started school and learned the basics of reading and writing, there was no stopping me. As a young child, I was constantly reading the Encyclopedia Brown series (Donald J. Sobol) and the Choose Your Own Adventure books (R.A. Montgomery). As any writer will tell you, reading is a part of writing. I still read as much as time allows. My wife and I decided a couple of years ago to no longer watch TV in the evenings and have devoted that time to reading.
Why do you write? This question has a simple answer—because I have to. I can’t see myself doing anything else. I’ve tried other professions. So many years were spent in restaurants, machine shops, warehouses, and retail. As I went through the motions to earn a paycheck, there was always a story eating away at me, and I counted the hours until I could race home and write them down.
On breaks, I’d fill up notebooks with ideas, dialogues, scenes, and outlines. I left messages on my answering machine in later years, which evolved into recording ideas on my cell phone.
Mainly I write because I enjoy it. With non-fiction, it’s the process of researching and organizing data, interviewing people, and discovering things unknown or forgotten. In fiction, it’s creating characters, painting pictures with words, plot twists, and surprise endings. As a result, some of my writing takes years to accomplish, while other works are written in two weeks.
For example, my horror novel Necropolis Knights: The Gravetime Society of Seven Cemetery took more than thirty years to complete. Mind you, some of those years, the manuscript sat on the back burner, yet the characters and storyline were always on my mind. It started as a short story (nine pages to be exact), but when I shared it with a small writer’s group in the early 1990s, I was left with the feeling that they wanted more. So, I added to the story, introduced a couple more characters, and it grew into 120 pages. From that point, it went through a critique, and I took the suggestions to heart and then started the daunting process of sending it to publishers.
It was still a snail-mail process at the time, and I got nowhere. After rewriting the story—again—I went with a company that critiqued the story and received valuable advice. Then, I took another twist with my story.
I wrote it as a movie script. In my mind, this story always played out as a movie. I never finished the movie script, but in 2016, I finally got serious with the story—again—and in 2018, it was published! All 240 pages!
Looking back, I think I was attached to the characters and felt I was one of them, experiencing everything right there with them and didn’t want it to end.
One of my latest books, The Little Black Book of SINS, is much different. I had the idea for a long time but never acted on it. Then one day, it all poured out. I constructed a brief outline in Scrivener and started to create each character. Two weeks later, the book was ready for review, then it went to an editor and was published (one month prior to Necropolis Knights).
What is my writing routine? I don’t have a set routine. I don’t have a particular hour or two set aside every day to write, but I’m writing all the time. No longer do I have to wait. When a thought hits me, I write it down. If a scene is playing out in my head, I write it down. Most of the time I write in the morning. Other times, I’m up late at night, clicking away on the keyboard.
My wife and I try to sit for an hour with no distractions—no TV, no phone, no social media, and spend that time writing instead. We also include as writing time, sending out queries, researching agents, and putting together outlines. On average, when I’m in a writing groove, I hit about 1,000 words in an hour.
This is how I got started, why I write, and my routine in a nutshell.
I’m a writer, are you?
T.M. Jacobs, a native to the shoreline area of Connecticut, now resides in various locations along the east coast with his wife traveling and working from their RV motorhome. He has written and published 15 books (one of which was featured on C-SPAN), over 450 articles published in various newspapers and magazines, teaches classes on writing and publishing, and is currently the owner of JWC Publishing. He is the founder and former editor for Patriots of the American Revolution magazine and has been a freelance writer since 1988.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timjacobsghostwriter/
Website: www.jacobswc.com
Email: [email protected]
