How Jack Did It....

 

Jack London was a famous American author who wrote such novels as The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf, and many short stories like, To Build a Fire, An Odyssey of the North and A Far Country. He often drew upon his own adventurous experiences in developing plots and characters. He was a forerunner of the great Ernest Hemingway and his stories often depicted man’s struggle against a cruel and unforgiving natural environment and the savageness of his fellow humans.

But how did London become so successful at writing and---

How did he know what he wanted to do?

As a boy, London was raised by his mother and his stepfather who adopted him after his own natural father rejected him by denying that he was his son. In San Francisco, Jack dropped out of high school to work in a cannery but soon left that dead-end employment to try his hand as an oyster poacher. He then worked as a member of the fisheries enforcement, a sailor, and a seal hunter in the Bearing Sea, which he described as a gruesome occupation.

In 1898, he was 21 and decided to join his brother-in-law on a trip to Alaska to join him on the Klondike gold rush, where, Instead of finding his fortune, he found the trip was a disaster and London claimed to have discovered only $4.50 in gold dust. He was trapped in an Alaskan cabin, while outside, in London’s own words---

 “Winter froze everything to icey stillness”.

“Nothing stirred” he wrote,

“The Yukon slept under a coat of ice three feet thick”

 A diet of bacon, beans and bread had given him scurvy. His gums bled, his teeth were loose, and his joints ached. London decided that if he were to live, he would no longer try to rise above poverty through physical labor. Instead, he would become a writer. So, he carved into the table the words 

Jack was determined to become a successful writer, but the odds were stacked against him. Not only was he poor but he had no literary background and no literary connections but within 5 years he became one of the most successful writers in American Literature and his stories today are still regarded as some of the most brilliant. He was such a triumph at writing that by 1907 he was making the equivalent in today’s money of $250,000 a month.

He went from a poor, dejected, unskilled, laborer and in a relatively short time, became a prosperous writer. 

The question is, how did he do it?

The thing about the secret of success is that it’s no secret because every time someone is successful, they tell everyone how they did it. Jack London was no exception in this respect.

He granted interviews and wrote articles on how he started and how he became a writer. Here are some of his suggestions:

1.  Be Prolific

“I knew positively nothing about it. I lived in California, far from the great publishing centers. I did not know what an editor looked like. I did not know a soul who had ever published anything; nor yet again, a soul, with the exception of my own, who had ever tried to write anything, much less tried to publish it. I had no one to give me tips, no one’s experience to profit by.”

 London’s solution was to write prolifically. And begin writing at different types of writing.

 “I sat down and wrote in order to get an experience of my own. I wrote everything-short stories, articles, anecdotes, jokes, essays, sonnets, ballads, villanelles, triolets. Songs, light plays in iambic tetrameter, and heavy tragedies in blank verse. These various creations I stuck into envelopes, enclosed return postage, and dropped into the mail. Oh, I was prolific.”

 

2.  Don’t quit your day job

 London, like many beginners with stars in their eyes, thought he would make money quickly as a writer but soon found out the opposite was true. Initially, instead of paychecks, he received hundreds of rejection slips. Finally, he found someone who was willing to publish one of his short stories, but it was for the contemptibly small amount of $5.

 Finding his way in literature became so difficult that after a time, he even considered returning to shoveling coal but thank God for us, he didn’t. One day, shortly before giving up, a publisher offered him $40 for a short story. This was the beginning of his literary achievements.

 Out of this came his experience, and advise, that it’s easier to reach success if you’re not always worried about money. If one has money for financial support, it’s likely to mean that creators won’t give up on their objectives as easily.

 

3.   Stick to popular genres

"A good joke sells better than a good poem."

By this he meant if one were to stick to the popular genres then his work would sell better to a mass audience.

“Avoid unhappy endings, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible.” 

This is ironic advice coming from London because he broke these rules in many of his stories. To Build a Fire is one example of a catastrophic ending for the protagonist. 

“In this connection, don’t do as I do, but do as I say.”

 4.  Don’t wait for inspiration

 “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration. Light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something remarkably like it. Set yourself a stint and do that stint each day. You will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.”

 If you set yourself a daily writing goal, whether it’s mountainous, like 5000 words, or smaller such as 500 words, and you follow through despite distractions, you will develop a good writing habit.

 

5.  Study the craft

AAnother way London learned to write was by poring over the works of great writers. 

“Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it’s done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you but dig it out for yourself.”

 The greatest writers give us a standard by which to compare our own work. Reading them is a road map to creating our own works of art.

 

6.  Stay healthy

 “See that your pores are open, and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all”.

 Writing is a sedentary job. Your brain is attached to your body. and you can’t do your best work if you’re weak or in ill health.

 

7.  Keep a writer’s notebook

 “Keep a notebook. Travel with it. Eat with it. Sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.”

 London wasn’t the only writer who kept a notebook. All great writers do the same to collect ideas and help get them out of creative ruts. Keeping a writer’s notebook is fundamental in creative writing courses. To be a prolific writer you must get used to the idea and the habit of writing down your thoughts in a notebook.

London’s suggestions on how to become a successful writer are easily transferred to whatever a person decides to be prosperous at doing. The above methods are the ones he put into practice to be able to write some of the most gripping and unforgettable stories in literature. The final words of the article are London’s own and probably the most important:

“Spell it out in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this Earth, this universe…and by this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life…. The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE…. With it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants.”