Validation from Andre Dubus III by Mark S. Williams 

Before I wrote a word I had two lives, commercial diver and commercial fisherman. As a writer I was lucky, Mark the diver and Mark the fisherman provided the basis for two books.

At one point I started having doubts. What I was writing about was very personal and I wasn't sure I  wanted to share it. I came across a quote by a well-known writer whose name I have forgotten who said, "If you want to be a writer, particularly a non-fiction writer, you better get used to letting people into your inner being." I took that advice.

Long before I was finished with F/V Black Sheep I read an article by Andre Dubus III in which he talked about how hard it was to get his work published even after he had successfully published other works. When I was struggling to get any publisher to read my work, I remembered what Dubus had said and kept reminding myself of it.

Later I read an interview he gave most of which dealt with teaching writing, which is far beyond me. But what struck me was what he had to say about the mechanics of his writing. In all the readings and signings I have done since F/V Black Sheep was published, everyone seems fixated on how I wrote my book. When I read Dubus's interview I realized we had a lot of similarities.

First and foremost he had a famous father --- a writer. So did I --- a pro-football player. He had been compared to his father. I never had that to deal with. My father was not a writer and I sure wasn't one-tenth the football player he was.

Andre Dubus went to college in Texas, I went in southwest Louisiana where his grandfolks are from. Both of us worked as carpenters.

To write, he used to ride around on the backroads of Boxford in a Toyota and his spot to write was a graveyard. He went there to escape the noise of a household with three daughters in it. He wrote freehand in notebooks and one of his books was 22 notebooks long. I wrote two books freehand in notebooks in the front seat of my Toyota pickup after driving around, sometimes on the backroads of Boxford. I wrote in my truck because I live in a guesthouse that gets noisy in the morning. One of my books is 22 notebooks long. One of my favorite writing spots is a graveyard. Lots of similarities.

I bought a computer and taught myself to type by copying the contents of those 22 notebooks. People always want to know the mechanics of how writers write, go figure. That's how Andre Dubus and I write. Thanks, Andre, for the validation you gave me albeit unknown to you.