As an author, I was struck by this insightful observation:

Near the end of the book you talk about the changes in the book business. It doesn’t sound pretty. What’s going on there and what have you learned as someone who has now written several books?

I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

I don't know about you, but I have that experience with music constantly now. I hear something I like and ask, "Who was that?" And even with Soundhound and all these digital tools, I never find out. And then I forget about the music.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here today to celebrate your commencement. Every time I give a speech, I like to quote Mark Twain who famously observed, "There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars."

I'll let you decide what I am.

As President Handley said, I am the Editor in Chief of Down East Magazine. I am also a novelist who writes books about Maine game wardens.

Usually, when people ask me for advice it’s about writing. But it occurs to me that writing advice can be life advice too. Let me give you some examples:

Rule #1: You can’t write well without reading.

You’d be shocked by how many submissions we get at Down East about cool things to do in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. These queries come from writers who don’t realize that when we call ourselves Down East: the Magazine of Maine, we mean that literally. We are not Down East: the Magazine of New Hampshire. The reason these freelancers make this mistake is because they haven’t bothered to read an issue for themselves.

The same goes for life. If you don’t read, you aren’t collecting information for yourself. You’re not exercising your brain. You’re jumping to false assumptions or letting other people tell you what to think. When you read, you take control of your own mind. You’re testing arguments. In short, you’re becoming an adult. Everyone gets older — we all grow old — but not everyone becomes an adult.

Another rule. Don’t sit around waiting for the muse to arrive.

It’s romantic to think that you can’t create something unless you are inspired. But that’s not the way it works. Inspiration isn’t something that comes to you; it’s something that you hunt down and pin to the ground.

The same goes for life. People, as a rule, don’t randomly give you gifts. You get the things you want in life by actively pursuing them. Malcom Gladwell wrote this great book called Outliers, and it he noted that the Beatles played live more than 1,200 times in Hamburg, Germany from 1960 to 1964 — they played more than 10,000 hours in sleazy nightclubs perfecting their craft — before they were “inspired” to write “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” 

Or think of your own lives and what brought you here today. No one knocked on your door to give you a diploma from UMA. You’re getting one today because you worked hard for it. 

Next rule: There’s no such thing as writer’s block.

If you can’t write something it’s because you don’t know enough. I tell my writers at work that if they are stuck they need to go do more interviews. The writing is hard if you’re trying to bluff people and pretend you know more than you know. It’s easy when you’ve done all the legwork. 

Let me give you an example from my own life. I write about Maine game wardens and I’ll often run into a problem. Wait a second? I’ll think. How does a warden trap a bear? What does he use for bait? I know doughnuts and bacon grease and lobster shells work, but I want my game warden to be an expert woodsman. And I’ll stop writing because I am blocked. The only solution is to call a warden and he’ll tell me that the secret ingredient in good bear bait is propane. Actually it’s a chemical called ethyl mercaptan, which bears love for some reason. I bet you didn’t know that. And neither did I until I made that phone call.

To be confident, you need to do the research, you need to do the legwork. That’s a rule you can use at your next job interview. Imagine you are invited in for the job of your dreams and the interviewer starts asking you one tough question after another. If you know your subject thoroughly—if you studied it hard and understand the industry and have researched that particular business and the challenges it faces—you will have no trouble answering the toughest questions. If not, you will be "blocked." And you'll walk out of the office with sweat stains under your arms and no job. 

Here’s a famous writing rule. Avoid cliches. Or as editors like to joke: Avoid cliches like the plague. 

When you use a cliche in your writing you are being lazy. For instance, “nerves of steel” or “fit as a fiddle.” (Does anyone know what that means by the way? Why do we associate violins with being physically fit?). But what you are also announcing is “I don’t have anything unique to say.” “My ideas are unexceptional.”

Now if I am an employer, who do I want to hire: the person with the boring ideas or the imaginative person who will help solve my problems, the person who can think for his or herself?

Another one: Don’t be afraid of rejection.

If you want to be a writer, plan on having people rejecting you. Some will tell you that you have no talent or nothing to say. Others will imply that your entire life has been a waste. Ignore those losers.

Stephen King’s novel Carrie was rejected by 30 publishers. Gone with the Wind was rejected 38 times. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was rejected only 12 times. Imagine the persistence it took for those authors to keep sending out their manuscripts. And imagine how it felt for those publishers when they realized the billions of dollars they could have made. 

So don’t be afraid of rejection. Have faith in yourself and keep sending your best stuff out into the world. 

If you are afraid of rejection, you will stop taking risks. If you are afraid to visit France because French people will make fun of your poor French pronunciation you will never see Paris (and everyone should see Paris). You won’t ask your secret crush on a date. You won’t start your own business. Why? Because you might fail.

I was smelt fishing with a Scottish friend last weekend, and he said his favorite movie was Braveheart (which I should have suspected because it must be every Scot’s favorite). And he quoted a line from the film that inspired him to become certified as an EMT in his late forties. The line from Braveheart is “Every man dies, not every man truly lives.”

The man — or woman — who truly lives is the one who risks rejection and failure. 

More writing advice: Ernest Hemingway once said that the first draft of anything is doo-doo.

Only, he was Ernest Hemingway so he didn’t use the word “doo-doo” and he probably had a drink in his hand when he said it.

His advice was absolutely true, though. Masterpieces are never written. They are always rewritten. Tolstoy wrote something like 8 drafts of War and Peace. And that book is 1,400 pages long!

The same goes for life. Your first drafts—your first attempts at doing something—are unlikely to go well. We fall the first time we try to snowboard. But if we keep at it, eventually we can become Seth Westcott. Or at least we stop falling so much and have more fun.

That gets me to my next editing motto: done is better than perfect.

Every month at Down East we have a deadline to get the magazine to the printer. If we miss it, we lose thousands of dollars in newsstand sales. So no matter how much we think we might improve an issue, at some point, it needs to ship.

The same is true with life. Done is better than perfect. Now that rule doesn’t apply if you’re a brain surgeon. We all want our brain surgeons to be perfect! But most of the time what we want is for something to be finished. We don’t want one perfect mitten. We want two pretty good ones.

That’s how I feel about this speech, by the way. I would have liked it be perfect, but now I wish it were done, and I bet you feel the same way.

That gets me to my last rule: Nothing has made a greater difference in my life than perseverance.

I went to graduate school with dozens of people who wanted to become novelists. Most of them were more talented than I was. Today only a few of us are published authors. The difference was that I wanted it more.

As a novelist, I subscribe to Ernest Hemingway's other dictum: "The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it." But I would add that Hemingway's advice applies to more than just books. Finishing is the key to so many things in life: football games that slip away in the final seconds (Patriots fans you know what I mean), sales calls that break down over negotiations, botched fundraising campaigns. It is so easy to lose focus or become discouraged; it is so tempting to give up when there seems to be no hope.

Sometimes quitting seems like prudence. More often, it is an excuse we use to avoid failure. The book that is never finished can never be rejected. Nor, however, can it ever become a success. It took me six years to write my first novel, The Poacher’s Son. I spent many, many, many sunny days at my desk, staring out the window watching people enjoy time with their friends and family, and I thought what I am doing here? I am wasting my life.

But I kept at it. And eventually I finished the book. Today The Poacher’s Son has been translated into 10 languages and is a bestseller in countries that I will probably never visit, like Slovenia and Romania.

Seeing a project through to the end is a test of will and a test of character. It is true that we learn a great deal from the process of doing something; the journey can be as important as the destination. But achievement comes from finishing. When you have struggled a long time with hardship and doubt, there is no greater joy than saying to yourself those three wonderful words: "I did it."

Those are words you can say to yourself today. You’re sitting here because you did it.

Congratulations and Godspeed.

We also discussed my goals for the series, especially in the context of other crime writers, including one of my favorites: James Lee Burke:

One of my motivations is to render the state of Maine as vividly as possible to people who have never been here before. I live in a special and unique place. Like anywhere in the world it has its flaws and dark corners, but the incredible beauty of the nature here is something that I want to get across. It’s something that I respond to in really good fiction and crime fiction.

I am open in my admiration for James Lee Burke, who I think is masterful at portraying southern Louisiana especially. He is most associated with the Cajun country. You read those books and you can smell the night blooming flowers. You can hear the thunderstorms rolling in across the Gulf of Mexico. It gives me something to aspire to in my own books.

I have a ways to go to reach Burke territory, but it gives me something to shoot for. Here's the link to the interview if you're curious to read the whole thing.

PS: Isn't that British cover of The Poacher's Son fantastic? Whenever I look at it, I say, yes, that is the place where Mike Bowditch grew up.

I might even slip in an excerpt for the forthcoming Massacre Pond if you need an added incentive for scheduling a Down East getaway.

View Rome, Maine in a larger map

The Kennebec Journal has this map showing the location of the hermit's encampment, at the terminus of McNally Lane, near Little Pond (which connects to North Pond). Knight Court is the junction between Route 225 and McNally and is named for the Knight family of Rome.

The "hermit's" compound was .02 miles from the nearest house, and yet we are told that his presence was unknown both to the landowner on which he had pitched his tent and to all of the neighbors (including those who owned dogs which would, presumably, have been intrigued by the scent of cached hamburger).  

How Knight came to choose this ideal location to elude authortities for 27 years is another of the case's many interesting questions.

Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit

This week, the buzz is about Christopher Knight, 47, the so-called "North Pond Hermit," who was arrested early on Thursday morning by Warden Sergeant Terry Hughes. Knight has confessed to more than 1,000 burglaries of cottages, houses, and summer camps around Rome, Maine, over the course of 27 years. During that time, he says he lived entirely alone in a tent compound in the woods, never interacting with other human beings. Terry Hughes told me that Knight claimed he hadn't spoken to another person since the '90s  — and Hughes, who has been doggedly pursuing the reclusive burglar for years — believes his story.

The saga seems so improbable it almost defies belief (the Kennebec Journal so far has the most comprehensive account of it, which you can read here). 

I learned about the arrest of the hermit late last week, before it was reported in the media, and there are still important details in this case that I haven't seen discussed yet. Not being a journalist for a day paper or news site, I can't pursue the story as intensely as I might wish.

Among the questions still needing to be answered are:

• What really drove Knight into the woods in 1986? Was there a precipitating incident that involved wrongdoing on his or another person's part? His desire to simply "disappear" is suggestive of some trauma he suffered as a teenager.
• Terry Hughes told me that Knight seems quite intelligent. However, it doesn't seem that Knight's decades in the woods were prompted by a Thoreauvian rejection of civilization or some other philosophical choice (he did have an affection for Robinson Crusoe). There are signs of obsession compulsion in the neatness with which he maintained his camp and in the habits he acquired to escape detection. What is (and has has been) his mental state?
• What explains his family's seeming nonchalance to his disappearance? A neighbor is quoted as saying the family thought Christopher moved to "New York City" which is far from the reality of what the man actually did as can be imagined. 
• The Knight family is well-established in the town of Rome (assuming Christopher is related to that branch) and well-known to wardens. How is it possible he was not recognized in the images law enforcement officers circulated widely in the community? Despite the affects of age, most of us bear some resemblance to other family members.
• Is it true that he had no assistance? Knight's compound is, by all accounts, a marvel to behold and yet he is very clearly no Bear Grylls or "Survivorman." He claims not to have hunted or fished but instead to have stolen and cached vast amounts of food. 
• The section of Rome where he lived is remote and untraveled in relative terms, but non-Mainers might be tricked into believing it was the North Woods, when in reality it is only thirty minutes from the state capital and a shorter distance from one of the state's largest cities (Waterville). It would be analogous to someone hiding out for 27 years in a wilder pocket of Westchester County, New York. Did no one ever stumble upon him even as nearby land was sold, surveyed, and developed?
• Knight claims he never lit fires because he feared detection, but why was he so scared to be found? His burglaries, while sustained and sweeping, might ultimately be reduced to misdemeanors by the time this is over. Was his paranoia a result of his isolation and living situation or prompted by knowledge he hasn't disclosed?
• How will investigators assess Knight's truthfulness ultimatelty? What, if anything here, might be a hoax? Many of the outlandish aspects of the story don't much matter, except as folklore (i.e. whether he hadn't seen his own reflection in years). But there are other elements here—especially those might brush upon other crimes by the man or by others—that need to be evaluated. So far Knight seems to have been taken almost entitely at his word. 
• Lastly, what will become of him, assuming he is convicted and serves what should be a relatively short time in jail? For his sake as well as society's, prosecutors have a duty to do everything in their power to untangle the enigma of the North Pond Hermit.

With the March 29 enrollment deadline approaching I am reposting this one:

I don't teach many writing workshops, but when Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance invited me to be an instructor at its annual Black Fly Writing Retreat, I jumped at the chance. First off, the retreat is held in Grand Lake Stream, a village in eastern Maine that just happens to be:

A.) Spectacularly scenic.

B.) The setting of Mike Bowditch's next adventure.

C.) One of the premier fly-fishing destinations in the United States.

The retreat offers classes in fiction, memoir, poetry, and YA. I'll be teaching crime fiction. Now that I have a few books under my belt, I'm looking forward to a chance to work with new writers in the genre. Here's a description of the class I'll be leading:

Take a look at any bestseller list, and you'll see that crime fiction consistently dominates the tops of the charts. The genre's continuing appeal is easy to understand. Storytelling is at the essence of our humanity, and no other genre is unabashed in its devotion to story as the "whodunit." In this class you will learn the building blocks of the well-told story. We'll discuss compelling characters whose actions drive the plot, the elements of suspense that keep readers turning pages, settings that illustrate the conflicts at the heart of the tale, and narrative arcs that avoid cliche while delivering a satisfying reading experience at the end. No matter your sub-genre (thriller, mystery, cozy, procedural, noir, or caper) you'll learn techniques to make you a better storyteller.

Sound interesting? Registration is now open.