Take a Blank Sheet

I WANTED TO WRITE (471 pp.)--Ken-nefh Roberts--Doubleday ($3.50).

Since Kenneth Roberts has been writing for 40 years (and cranking out bestsellers for a good many of them), would-be writers keep coming to him for advice. Will he tell them how to do it? So many people have badgered him for the answer, says Roberts, that he decided to write this autobiography. His point, across 471 pages: writing gets done not by talking about it or thinking about it, but by sitting down and doing it. Roberts knows.

He began as a reporter on the Boston Post in 1909. Much of / Wanted is a plodding recital of his rise from $18 to $45 a week (in six years) as a newsman, followed by success as a roving reporter for the Satevepost (1919-1937). In 1928, another champion of doggedness got him started writing novels. Advised his Maine friend & neighbor, Booth Tarkington: "Dig up the biggest blankbook you own and get going. Put down Arundel, page 1, Chapter 1,' on the first page, and keep right on working until you fall asleep."

Night & Day. Roberts took the Tarkington advice and has been living and writing by it ever since. In three months he traveled 3,000 miles, for the Satevepost, wrote four articles, went through 73 historical source books and wrote the first 60,000 words of his first novel "on trains, in railway stations, in hotel rooms, and occasionally worked all night." With a contract from Publisher Russell Doubleday in his pocket, he went to Italy to write, hung a schedule on the wall beside his bed: "Write a chapter every 4 days; write 1 1/3 1/3pages (1,500 words) every day for 120 days."

Arundel sold badly at first and so did the next three Roberts historicals until he made the bestseller grade with Northwest Passage. Thinking back over the long upgrade, Roberts peppers his book with envious cracks about other people's bestsellers and jabs at his literary betters, including Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner and George Santayana. Once, peeved because he never got the Pulitzer Prize, he teed off on the selection committee in an ill-tempered article for the Satevepost, took solace from his No. 1 position in a poll of reviewers who thought Northwest Passage deserved the prize in 1938. He decided never again to let a book of his be submitted for the award.

Read & Write. Roberts' relationship to Neighbor Tarkington seems to have been that of apprentice to master. The kindly

Tarkington drove him on, read his manuscripts (Roberts read them aloud to him when Tarkington's eyes went bad), made improvements and changes which Roberts accepted gratefully. "On some evenings he'd stop me at the end of almost every sentence, and we'd examine that sentence and push it around and rephrase it, clearing it up and sharpening it and smoothing it: adding a little to it ... [I] suggested that if he really thought the book had merit, he let me put his name on the title page with mine and take half the royalties."

Readers who plow through I Wanted to Write may wish that Tarkington had been around to discuss it with Roberts. He almost certainly would have cut out the ten-page list of people to whom Roberts wrote letters in 1935, together with the scores of pages of now-dull journeyman journalism reprinted here in full. He might even have suggested, as Roberts' publisher should have, that I Wanted to Write should be quietly put away in an old trunk.

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