Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS

Book excerpt: The story behind the writing of William Least Heat-Moon's best-selling Blue Highways is as fascinating as the journey that he recounted in his 1982 book. More than thirty years later, in Writing Blue Highways, Heat-Moon reflects on the four years after the road trip--the stops and starts in his composition process, the numerous drafts and painstaking revision, the depressing string of rejections by publishers, the strains on his personal relationships, and many other aspects of the toil that went into writing his first book. Along the way, he traces the hard lessons he learned and offers guidance to aspiring authors and experienced writers alike. Far from being a technical manual, this work is an adventure story of its own, a journey of "exploration into the myriad routes of heart and mind that led to the making of a book from the first sorry and now vanished paragraph to the last words that came not from a graphite pencil but from a letterpress in Tennessee."