Write Anything: A Generalist’s Origin Story, and How the Writing King Actually Works

Richard Lowe, The Writing King, sat down with Bonnie Dillabough, The Web Woman and Bookaholic, for a wide-ranging conversation about the unusual road that made him a writer who can take on almost any subject, and the working habits, on process, blocks, and networking, that keep him productive.

Bonnie: Most writers are known for one genre, but you cover so many things, that’s where the Writing King comes from, right?

Richard Lowe is The Writing King, a professional ghostwriter and author who has written 113+ books under his own name and ghostwritten 54+ more for clients.

Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise IT, including two decades as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows.

From geology to cameras to the keyboard

Bonnie: Most writers are known for one genre, but you cover so many things, that’s where the Writing King comes from, right?

Richard: Right. My niche is that I can write just about anything. It comes from a very varied background. In college I was going to be a geologist, I still have the rock collection, now grown into a serious crystal collection. Then I met Steve Davis, now an executive at Disney, who with a partner hired me as Vice President of Consulting. Later I became VP of Consulting at another company while serving as senior designer on water-district control systems, including the Las Vegas Valley Water District. Then I found a home at Trader Joe’s for 20 years as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services, where great bosses taught me a lot about business, networking, and technology. When my wife passed away, I took up photography to fight the grief, the western national parks first, then Renaissance festivals across several states, then the belly dance community, where I became friends with well over a thousand dancers. Geology, computers, leadership, photography, relationships, it’s a lot of things I can write about as an expert. And now I’m writing fiction too, including science fiction.

Stranger in a Strange Land at six

Bonnie: What made you sit down and write for the first time?

Richard: It started with reading. As a hyperactive six-year-old, my mother took me to the library, probably to calm me down, and I fell in love with it, partly because you earned little gold stickers for finishing books. The stickers were spiders, and I like spiders, so I filled a sheet with spiders, then a sheet of scorpions, then another, reading a book a day until I’d climbed up to the adult shelves. The one that did it was in a box of my grandmother’s books left in our house: Stranger in a Strange Land. I read it at that age, four times, even though it’s full of grown-up themes and nothing a six-to-eight-year-old should probably be reading, because it opened a whole different view of life. I decided I wanted to be a writer, hit the usual wall of having no idea how, and then life got in the way, college, a job, a wife and child, the demands of Trader Joe’s. I kept putting it off until about 2013, when I looked at my finances at 53 and thought, I still haven’t done the one thing I always wanted to do, and I have enough saved to try. So I did, starting with ghostwriting, then my own books.

Start in the middle

Bonnie: Do you outline and plan, or go with the flow?

Richard: For fiction, I start smack in the middle of the book, then jump to the end and write that, then go back and write the beginning. With my science fiction novel, Peacekeeper, I eventually had to sit down and outline because there were too many plot threads to keep in my head. It’s taken a couple of years and runs long. Nonfiction is the opposite: I outline the whole thing first, write from the top down, and usually around the halfway mark I jump ahead and write the conclusion, then come back and fill the gap.

That early Peacekeeper draft has since grown into something far larger, the first volume of a planned series following an admiral through the collapse of a galactic empire, with the opening book now published.

When the page is blank

Bonnie: Do you ever sit down and just have no idea what to do that day?

Richard: When I don’t feel like writing, I let something else take over, promotion, marketing, cover artwork, and if that fails, I go for a long walk. But here’s what I’ve learned: if I still can’t shake it, then almost inevitably someone made a comment about my writing that discouraged me, sometimes blatant, sometimes as subtle as a flat “that was okay.” A remark like that can devastate a writer. So I go find it, and the moment I identify the criticism that’s been quietly sitting on me, the block clears up right away. It’s interesting how reliably that works.

Coloring books from dancers

Bonnie: You also make coloring books, and some are really beautiful.

Richard: I fell into those by accident. I was on Fiverr looking for someone to make book covers and found an artist who was inexpensive and quite good, and it struck me that I’d all these photographs of belly dancers, so why not have her sketch them into coloring books? We did four, with over 200 images, and it felt good to make art, so I produced twelve more, with a final one on human rights coming soon. I like producing art.

Fiction versus nonfiction

Bonnie: Which do you like better?

Richard: I like fiction better, but I’m not as practiced at it yet, so I find it harder. Nonfiction is easy, I can whip out 10,000 words a day, because it’s what I know and I write in a casual style, like I’m just talking to you. I type fast, dictate to roughly triple my speed, then edit it all down in the evening. Across my catalog I’ve now written well over a hundred books under my own name, plus the coloring and puzzle books, and ghostwritten dozens more, but fiction is the direction I most want to grow.

Ghostwriting: passion and bread-and-butter

Bonnie: Is ghostwriting something you enjoy, or more bread-and-butter?

Richard: A little of both. I enjoy working with clients, and because I’m very technical I tend to draw the high-technology jobs, the last one was over my head by about a light year and turned into a true collaboration, so I’m getting my name on the inside cover, which is nice. I enjoy ghostwriting, and it pays the bills, but writing my own books is the dream.

Network from day one

Bonnie: Best advice for someone just starting to write for a living?

Richard: Network your butt off. Meet people online, on Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, and then get into the physical world, libraries, bookstores, anywhere readers are. Join critique groups, start your own, and build a network of writers who’ll pitch with you, read your work, give honest critique rather than criticism, and help you promote when the time comes. I run the Clearwater Science Fiction Critique Group myself. That’s the number-one thing to do from the day you start writing until the day you keel over, a little every single day. The second tip: treat it as a business, not a hobby, the word “work” is right there inside “network.” It’s exactly the case I make in my book Networking Without the BS: short of spending a fortune to plug your book, building a network is how you actually become a bestselling author.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s Richard’s niche as a writer?

Breadth. A background spanning geology, computing, leadership, and photography lets him write knowledgeably about almost any subject, which is the idea behind “The Writing King.”

How does he approach fiction versus nonfiction?

He drafts fiction from the middle outward, writing the end next and the beginning last, and outlines once the plot threads multiply. Nonfiction he outlines top-down, then writes the conclusion around the halfway point and fills the gap.

How does he handle writer’s block?

First he switches to promotion, cover art, or a long walk. If he’s still stuck, he looks for a criticism, sometimes blatant, sometimes a subtle “that was okay,” that’s been quietly discouraging him, because identifying it usually clears the block.

What’s his number-one tip for a new writer?

Network from day one, online and in person, joining and even running critique groups, and treat writing as a business instead of a hobby. He makes the full case in his book Networking Without the BS.