The late and arguably great Tom Clancy—born this past week in 1947—was never going to be remembered as a stylist. The characters in his techno-thrillers like The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games generally talked alike (unless they were villains) and he was never good at setting a scene.
However, before bestseller bloat started turning his ever-denser plots into 1,000-page bores, he could crank out a perfectly good wargame scenario for the kind of readers who liked theorizing over who would win in a firefight: Delta Force or Spetsnaz?
Here are some of Clancy’s rules for writing and life. Take them as you will:
- Tell the story
- Writing is like golf
- Make pretend more real than real
- Writer’s block is unacceptable
- No one can take your dream away
Perhaps not to everyone’s liking. But, then, not everyone has written the (still very readable) Red Storm Rising, which was seen as so plausible a World War III scenario at the time that Reagan read it to prep for his Iceland summit with Gorbachev.