How to Write Your Way
Through College

Twenty-five years ago, at the midpoint of my thirties, I decided I would like to go to college. The idea was startling to a number of people who assumed that I had already been there. I was a professional writer, wasn’t I? Didn’t that mean that I was educated?

It was startling to my husband, who had accepted the financial challenge of educating five children but had never considered the possibility of having to add a wife to the list. Where was the money going to come from, especially since my own contribution to the family income would be reduced by time spent in classes and studying?

The answer to the first question was easy. A writer isn’t necessarily a college graduate any more than a college graduate is necessarily a writer. A tremendous number of writers, myself included, are too excited about being out of high school and free at last to spend their golden hours putting words on paper to want to devote another four years to formal education. It’s part of the eagerness of youth, I guess, but after a couple more decades of living, it begins to become evident that there is a lot of interesting activity going on behind those ivy-covered (or, in my case, “adobe-covered”) walls. At a certain point in life, philosophy, psychology, history and literature can sound pretty exciting. But “Where is the money coming from?” was a more difficult question. I pondered a long time over that one before I came up with an answer. When I found one at last, it was deceptively simple: “I’ll sell the things I learn.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” my husband said.

So we made a deal—I would enroll part-time at the University of New Mexico, but if I could not put myself through college by marketing the knowledge gained from my classes, I would drop out.

Happily, that didn’t happen.

Luck was with me when I minored in psychology. I chose it because I thought it would be interesting, but the way it turned out, I had tumbled into a gold mine. Take a look at the women’s magazines and what do you see there? A million how-to articles on such subjects as how to make marriage work, be a good friend, raise your children, handle aging parents, deal with emotional crises, break bad habits and get along with the in-laws. Few of these are written by specialists. Most are turned out by ordinary people who have read some textbooks and presented the subject matter in terms the average reader can relate to.

I made my first major sale during Psychology 101, where we were training rats to run through mazes. The rats did what we wanted more willingly and were happier, better-natured animals when given rewards for running than when punished for not running. During the course, we learned to transfer this principle to dealing with human beings, and I wrote an article called, “Our Son Was Uncontrollable,” to show how these techniques could be applied to one’s own children. The article sold to the “My Problem and How I Solved It” column at Good Housekeeping for enough money to cover a full semester’s tuition.

With this success to bolster me, I signed up for a class on psychology of education, which provided me with material for “Those IQ Scores—What Do They Really Mean?” for The Woman. Other articles followed: For example, “What Ever Happened to Childhood?” (the psychological problems that confront adults who have not spent the necessary time in various phases of childhood); “Second Marriage—Ready or Not?” (the importance of an adjustment period after an emotional crisis); and “The Togetherness Myth” (the need for people to have freedom to develop their own identities). All those articles were based upon things learned through lectures, and in them I quoted our speakers, all authorities in their fields. Although I, myself, could not tack Ph.D. onto my own name, the articles were liberally sprinkled with the opinions of those who could.

The second most lucrative classes were journalism courses, especially those in news photography. Starting as a novice with a borrowed camera, I was soon able to illustrate my own articles and hugely increase their sales potential. My first photo series was taken for Black Belt Magazine to illustrate an article about a class of blind karate students. One of these students was a pretty teenage girl, so I wrote an article about her, slanted toward a youthful audience. That story and accompanying photographs sold to American Girl and, subsequently, to two textbook publishers. During the course of my college career, using a university dark room, I sold more than 150 photographs to periodicals and a book of children’s poems, illustrated by photographs, to a religious publishing house.

English classes also proved fruitful. A poetry-writing class at sophomore level brought sales to numerous magazines, including Guideposts and Woman’s Day. A literature class on American writers introduced me to the works of Poe and inspired me to try my hand at a Gothic novel. With Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, for inspiration, I wrote a book—Down a Dark Hall—which, amazingly, is still in print today. A class in Greek mythology led me into an attempt to rewrite some of the beautiful myths at an easy-read level and resulted in sales to the Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation.

For a Shakespeare class, I utilized information from a psychology class to write a term paper modeled after the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” articles in Ladies’ Home Journal. I wrote the three sections from the conflicting viewpoints of Othello, Desdemona and their (fictional) marriage counselor, who sent a protesting Othello off to a neurologist to be tested for epilepsy. Although I was chagrined to receive a C minus grade, I submitted the article to Ladies’ Home Journal with the suggestion that they might want to consider it for April Fools Day. They declined, but the editors were so impressed by the fact that I’d captured the style of those pieces that they began to give me assignments to conduct real life interviews for that popular series.

Of course, there have been many courses that have not been directly profitable in the financial sense. None of those was time-wasted as far as my career went. A study of literature exposed me to the work of writers whose abilities so surpass mine that I set new goals of excellence to strive for in my own work. Classes in philosophy have deepened my thinking and helped me to enrich my characterization. History courses provided me with background for future novels.

On the day of my graduation, I sat down at the typewriter (no computers back then) and triumphantly pecked out an essay called “A Graduate in the Family.” Six months later, that personal experience piece appeared in Good Housekeeping, illustrated by a picture of my middle-aged self, in cap and gown, exuberantly waving a diploma.

My husband snapped that photo.

We both got paid.

All in all, attending college proved quite profitable for me. My writing income, instead of decreasing as my husband originally feared, actually tripled immediately, and, in the years since then, has gone far beyond that.

Lois Duncan