The Lessons John D. MacDonald Taught Me About Writing and Life

When I told my husband I’d accepted an invitation to speak before the 6th John D. MacDonald conference, his reply was a very pointed warning.  “Beth, you must be out of your mind,” he told me.  “Those people are going to know a lot.  They’ll know not only when Travis McGee switched from Plymouth to Boodles but also why.  They won’t have to wonder whatever happened to Barni Baker – they’ll know.  And they’ll know which position Trav played in pro-football and whose lost family business he never got a chance to salvage. Plus MacDonald wrote so much more – dozens of books, hundreds of articles and short stories.  Sure, you’ve read some of his stuff, but you’re a fan, not a fanatic!”

I’m not sure about that word fanatic, but everything else he said was absolutely true.  Yet here I am – undaunted!  I stand before you not because I’m out of my mind or because I’m scholar who has made a study of John D. MacDonald’s oeuvre.  I’m here before you as a novelist who owes a great deal to a man I never got a chance to meet.  As I wrote in thee dedication of my latest Lauren Maxwell mystery, John D. MacDonald was “a master whose work showed me the way.”

Almost a decade ago, as she accepted my first manuscript for Pocket Books, my editor termed me “the Yuppie Danielle Steel.” Although some writers might quibble about Ms. Steel’s place in the literary pantheon, I know of none who would complain about having her bank balance.  Still, my stomach soured at my editor’s use of the term.  I knew I wasn’t – and couldn’t be – the Yuppie Danielle Steel. So I told her that who I really wanted to be was the female Elmore Leonard, and I proceeded to write a pretty good crime novel to prove it.  But I was lying.  I didn’t have the guts to say to her then what I will, with some reluctance, reveal to you now:  What I really wanted – and want – is to be the female John D. MacDonald.

Not until I’d completed three novels – each very different from the others – could I even admit that to myself!  When I finally did admit my ambition to myself and the world, I’d written enough to have a bit of  confidence that I might, with time, learn my craft sufficiently to approach the competence of MacDonald’s early prose.  Plus I had a terrific idea for a mystery series!  At that point in my career, which was several years after John D. MacDonald’s death, I made myself his apprentice.  And in consciously seeking his lessons on writing, I inadvertently discovered just how many lessons on life I’d unconsciously absorbed as a reader.

My apprenticeship began with the re-reading of all 21 Travis McGee novels, which enabled John D. MacDonald, through his seeker of a thousand tarnished grails, to midwife my own Lauren Maxwell mysteries.  He delivered the first of his lessons on writing in the kickoff McGee title, The Deep Blue Good-by.  When Trav tells his client, Cathy Kerr, that his investigation must be put on hold until he’s rescued a drunk and depressed divorcee named Lois Atkinson, he notes:  “There was no question in her mind about my obligation to stay.”  The key word in that sentence is obligation.  Although Lois Atkinson is a complete stranger about whom he knows very little, Travis McGee feels obligated to help her.  And that sense of obligation underlies many other encounters – some quite brief and some long-standing – that are depicted in the following 20 novels.  Why is Travis McGee obligated to help complete strangers?  Because although he lives alone on The Busted Flush and has never married, Trav is not a loner.  He doesn’t hold himself apart from other people.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  Despite his formidable defenses, Travis McGee remains open to people – even complete strangers – because he considers himself part of a larger human tribe.  And Trav’s sense of obligation, that passionate engagement in the lives and fortunes of his fellows, was the first of John D. MacDonald’s lessons to this writer.  In creating a hero, a word I use quite deliberately and unashamedly, the writer may want to fashion a protagonist who is alone but should beware of imagining a hero who is apart.  That sense of obligation to and engagement with other people is the bedrock of the reader’s emotional attachment to the hero.

Another enormously important lesson that John D. MacDonald instilled in me through Travis McGee is the fact that not all families are nuclear.  At a time when television, through series as varied as Father Knows Best, My Three Sons and The Waltons, depicted families solely as groups of people bound by blood relationships, McGee has no known blood relations but most definitely is part of a family.  Meyer, Junebug, Chookie McCall, Johnny Dow and the Alabama Tiger are all permanent members of his family, and from book to book, other more distant but much beloved “relatives” rejoin the family of McGee.  A bumper sticker that’s very popular in my home state of Oregon proclaims, “Love makes a family,” a sentiment that John D. MacDonald personified through the clan McGee.  The lesson the master taught this apprentice writer through McGee’s non-nuclear family is that the relationships we choose are often more important than the relationships we’re born to.  In imagining the family which sustains the hero, the writer must look beyond the kitchen table to the wider world of friends, colleagues and mentors who may be the character’s true family.  And in that wider world there is ample room for dedicated readers who quite rightly consider themselves part of the hero’s family.

Although John D. MacDonald taught me many other lessons on writing, the last one that I’ll mention tonight is probably the riskiest for the writer hoping for commercial success and, paradoxically, absolutely required for achieving that success.  Biting social commentary or hypocritical soap-boxing, engaging philosophizing or boring sermonizing – call them what you will but recognize that the reflective digressions of McGee and Meyer, more than any other element of John D. MacDonald’s mastery of his craft, account for the enduring popularity of his hero.  Careless readers find these asides overwhelmingly grim or cynical, as in this passage from Bright Orange for the Shroud:  “In some remote year the historians will record that Twentieth Century America attempted the astonishing blunder of changing its culture to fit automobiles instead of people.”  Or this observation from The Dreadful Lemon Sky:  “There are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.”  But such reflections just as often brim with optimism and hope, as in this excerpt from A Deadly Shade of Gold:  “Good men died today, leaving hearts sick with loss.  In quiet rooms young girls are writing poems.  People are laughing together in safe places.”  And this from The Lonely Silver Rain:  “When the hard winds of change blow through your life, they blow away a lot of structures you thought permanent, exposing what you had thought was trivia, buried and forgotten.  The sweet soft taste of the side of the throat of Puss Killian.  The rough and husky edge of her voice as her laughter stopped.  The small things are the lasting things.”  In those passages, John D. MacDonald lays himself bare, revealing his personal take on the world in a way that often challenges conventional wisdom and risks offending legions of potential readers.  He was a man with strong convictions who didn’t play it safe by telling the world what a market-tested majority wanted to hear.  He had a higher opinion of his tribe’s intelligence than the low expectations of pollsters and thereby reaped an enormous reward – 32 million copies in print by January of this year.  For an apprentice who’s been accused of “political browbeating,” that may be the most important lesson of all.  To win enduring success, a writer must care passionately about something and, whether in celebration or in condemnation, must unstintingly reveal that unique vision for all to read. For it is those personal revelations which resonate deep within the reader, who responds, “Yes!  That’s exactly the way it is!”

The lessons John D. MacDonald taught me about writing fall into the categories of character, world and theme, but beyond question, the most important lessons I learned from my master were about life and how to live it.  When I began reading the McGee novels in the mid-70s, I was an ambitious young reporter in Massachusetts who was plotting her rise to the statehouse bureau of her small daily and on to the Washington staff of a major metropolitan newspaper that could provide a launch pad for a national political column. Such grand ambitions but, in all due modesty, given a bit of luck and timing, I had the talent and the temperament to achieve them.  And, after all, that’s what people in any business do, isn’t it?  Aim for the top?  But a funny thing happened on the way to Capitol Hill – I took a detour by slip F-18 in Bahia Mar and met a fellow who’d chosen a different trajectory, a man who’d decided to live deliberately where and how he chose and not follow some pre-ordained path to conventional success.  And as my interest in that fellow grew, I quite naturally became interested in his creator, a man whose degrees certainly had placed himself squarely on the path to conventional success who had also chosen to beat his own unique trail through life.  One lived in Ft. Lauderdale and the other in Sarasota, and neither city was a mandatory destination for the global powers-that-be.  And while the men of John D. MacDonald’s World War II generation returned home to create the most stable and affluent society in the history of the world, he – like his fictional hero – took a pass.  No retirement plan or year-end bonus, no suburban fiefdom with backyard barbeque, no cushioned present and guaranteed future.  Rather than aiming for some spot that everyone agreed was the pinnacle of success, both John D. MacDonald and his knight in tomato-can armor took aim, with much care and deliberation, at the site and the situation that defined their own unique vision of success.  Rather than aspire to achievement, they aspired to life.  As the admen in charge of the Eddie Bauer account so aptly put it:  “Never confuse having a career with having a life.”

And so I stand before you as the author of the mystery series which features Lauren Maxwell – WHO? – and I’ve come all the way from Grants Pass, Oregon – WHERE? – to celebrate the great gifts that John D.  MacDonald gave to us all, especially his lessons about life.  His was a simple credo, one he once envisioned as the contents of placard to be carried by a solitary man walking the empty streets of any town, and so I’ll close with his words:  “Up with life.  Stamp out all small and large indignities.  Leave everyone alone to make it without pressure.  Down with hurting.  Lower the standard of living.  Do without plastics.  Smash the servomechanisms.  Stop grabbing.  Snuff the breeze and hug the kids.  Love all love.  Hate all hate.”

Address delivered Nov. 16, 1996 at The 6th John D. MacDonald Conference at The New College, University of South Florida, Sarasota

Copyright 1996 © by Beth Quinn Barnard of text and photos.  All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Photo top left by Dorothy Prentiss MacDonald/Courtesy Fawcett Books