Welcome Milt!… an awarding-winning
author, photographer, attorney, and world traveler. Milt has written
professionally for some 35 years: on the editorial staff of The Blood-Horse magazine (where
he covered Thoroughbred racing in the United States, England, Panama, and
Japan); a six-year stint as a freelance photojournalist living in China, Costa
Rica, and Colombia (where his clients included Soldier of Fortune); and more
recently as a frequent contributor of articles to The Horse magazine. He also is
the author of five
books about Thoroughbred racing and equine law, plus award-winning
short fiction…and so
much more….
Where are you in the
world?
I live in
Georgetown, Kentucky—spitting distance from the Kentucky Horse Park—with my
wife, equine veterinarian Roberta Dwyer, and a complement of animals
four-strong: Burdock, a headstrong Dalmatian that hates other dogs and was
expelled from dog school because of it; Echo, an adolescent Doberman who is the
only dog Burdock can abide; Plumpkin, an orange and white rescue cat who looks
like his name sounds; and Sherlock, another rescue known to the vet only as
“New Cat.”
Tell me about your
horses…
We don’t
have any horses now, but I’ve been involved with them in some capacity or
another for as long as I can remember. I grew up showing American Saddlebreds,
but I’ve also competed with hunters and in combined training and
dressage. I was a steward with the American Horse Shows Association
before the organization morphed into the USEF and I’ve served on the Board of
the Kentucky Horse Council and as Chair of the Kentucky Bar Association’s
Equine law Section.
When did you begin
writing?
I’ve been
writing professionally since 1972, when undeterred by a total lack of
experience I talked my way into a job as sports editor for a small newspaper in
Aiken, South Carolina. Aiken was—and still is—an important winter training
center for Thoroughbreds. My first day on the job, I was assigned an interview
with Greentree Stable trainer Jack Gaver, about his horse running in the
Belmont Stakes a few days later. Problem was, Gaver was in New
York, I was in South Carolina, and I had absolutely no idea how to interview
someone—or, for that matter, how to type. (Still don’t know where the
keys are!) I tracked him down, made my deadline, and the rest, as they
say, is history. It was a wonderful introduction to journalism, and I
haven’t missed a deadline yet.
I left
Aiken after a year to work for The Blood-Horse magazine in Lexington,
Kentucky. I was on the editorial staff until 1984, covering races all
across the US and in Japan and England as a writer and photographer. I
left The Blood-Horse for six years doing freelance news photography
in China, Costa Rica, and Colombia, and then returned to the States for law
school. I kept working as a freelancer all the while. I’ve been to the
races on every continent, and I’ve thrown away a lot more losing tickets than
ones I’ve cashed.
More
recently, I’ve been sending more and more time writing. I’ve done seven
books, along with two years of monthly equine law columns for The Paint
Horse Journal and three years as a weekly blogger on assorted equine law
topics for The Horse. I also interview authors as a Contributing
Editor for the online newsletter of International Thriller Writers, and I
contributed an essay about Lionel Davidson’s The Rose of Tibet for ITW’s Thrillers:
100 Must Reads, which was nominated for an Edgar Award.
What books have you
written?
I write
non-fiction, mainly because that’s what I like to write, but also because I
haven’t found an editor or agent with the foresight to take on my two
unpublished novels. My latest book is Noor: A Champion
Thoroughbred’s Unlikely Journey from California to Kentucky, which was released
by The History Press in early September. I call Noor the best horse no
one remembers because he beat Citation four times in 1950, and set three world
records in the process, but then dropped off the map for years. It wasn’t until
a commercial development project threatened his gravesite in Northern
California that Noor returned to racing’s collective consciousness.
Charlotte Farmer, an avid racing enthusiast, took up Noor’s cause and launched
a one-woman campaign to locate his unmarked grave, exhume the remains, and move
them to Old Friends, a Thoroughbred retirement farm in Central Kentucky.
My
previous book, Dancer’s Image: The
Forgotten Story of the 1968 Kentucky Derby, also was published by The
History Press. It won the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award for the best book
about Thoroughbred racing published in 2011 and an American Horse Publications
Editorial Award as the best equine book of the year.
Earlier
books included the Complete Equine
Legal & Business Handbook and a biography of the ill-fated filly Ruffian.
Where do you like to
write?
When I’m
working on a project, I think about writing just about everywhere.
For me, this preliminary mental organizing is the heavy lifting. The
writing itself goes fairly quickly as long as I know where I’m going. I’m
not a big fan of outlining, although I know some writers live and die by their
outlines. I use a similar technique called “mind mapping” when I have
something complicated that I need to help a reader understand. It’s a
visual flow chart that helps organizes information. For Dancer’s Image I had to condense
two weeks of complicated and technical racing commission hearing testimony
about the chemistry of drug testing into one chapter that made sense and the
“mind map” helped me sort things out.
I get
some of my best ideas when I’m walking the dogs, and some of the worst when I
wake up in the middle of the night with what sounds like the best turn of
phrase in the world. For me, the latter hardly ever pan out when the sun
comes up and I try and decipher the writing in the notebook on the bedside
table.
I have an
office at home when I finally get around to actually writing. I also
travel with a laptop, and on occasion I’ve managed to get some substantive work
done on the road.
How do you maintain
thoughts and ideas?
Because
of the subject matter, most of what I write is very research-intensive, and
keeping track of information can be a real challenge. It’s also an
absolute necessity, though, because readers are knowledgeable and will call you
out when you make a mistake. For me, research often is the best part of a
writing project. Conventional wisdom is that you should “write what you
know.” I think you should write about something you want to learn more
about. For me, that involves a significant amount of digging. It’s
a great feeling to come upon a fact or a connection that you weren’t expecting
to find.
There’s
nothing more frustrating than remembering some interesting tidbit of
information that I want to use, but not being able to locate the source.
I’ve got four large white boards scattered around the house and I feel like a
stockholder in the Post-It Note company. I try to carry a small notebook
around with me, but I usually forget that, and I’ve had some luck with using a
small digital recorder or the memo function of my smart phone for notes.
One of the neatest gadgets I’ve come across is a small, battery operated
scanner that I can carry around in my briefcase. I scan books, magazine
or newspaper articles, and photographs, download the files to my computer, and
organize them for future reference. It’s faster and more accurate than
taking notes. I’m experimenting with Evernote and One Note for organizing
information, but I’m not sold on either one yet. So far, what works best
is a big stack of file folders crammed with notes.
What are you currently
writing?
I’m researching
topics for a book proposal and for a few magazine articles. I’ve always
been intrigued by the kidnapping of Shergar in Ireland during the early
1980s. He raced for the Aga Khan and was one of the best Thoroughbreds of
the 20th Century. He was taken from his stall one night by an armed
gang (probably from the Irish Republican Army, although they never claimed
responsibility) and held for ransom. The money never was paid and the
horse never was recovered. The affair has turned into racing’s most famous
cold case.
I’d also
like to write about the history of performance-altering drugs in equestrian
sports and about how a dozen or so landmark legal cases have shaped the way
sports are conducted these days.
Do you have suggestions
for beginning writers?
I’ve got
a few suggestions for people who want to write:
First,
start from the ground up. Learn the rules of grammar, punctuation,
spelling, how to structure sentences, paragraphs, chapters. Getting the
fundamentals right doesn’t guarantee you’ll be published; getting them wrong
almost guarantees you won’t be.
Next to
my computer are the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,
the Chicago Manual of Style, The Elements of Style by Strunk and
White, and Bill Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words.
Within arm’s reach are a shelf of other reference books about writing,
copyright and publishing law (I’m Chair of the American Society of Journalists
and Authors Contracts and Conflicts Committee and I speak to writers groups
about copyright and contracts), and whatever topic I’m researching at the
moment. Good writers break the rules all the time, but always for a
reason. It’s not a good idea to break the rules because you don’t know
any better, or just because you can. Break them only when the end result
is better.
Cormac
McCarthy, one of my favorite authors for fiction, writes dialogue without
quotation marks. That’s technically wrong, but he knows what he’s doing
and he uses the technique to great effect, and to win a Pulitzer Prize.
It’s okay to break the rules if you know what the rules are, and why you’re
breaking them. Walk before you run.
Second,
write. I attend several writers conferences every year, often as a presenter,
and the mantra these days seems to be market, market, market. That’s fine
as far as it goes, but when you come away from a conference with a list of
things to do—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, web sites, the list goes
on—writing often is near the bottom. Writing is a skill that needs
practice. It isn’t something you learn through osmosis.
Third,
read—a lot. You need to read enough good writing so you can recognize it
in your own work. A few of my favorite authors are Mark Bowden (who wrote Blackhawk Down), historian David
McCollough, and David Halberstam for non-fiction; Cormac McCarthy, Jeffrey
Deaver, and John Sandford for fiction.
Finally,
find a mentor. You want someone who can read your work objectively, tell
you what’s good and bad without the inherent bias of a spouse, or family
member, or friend. Then don’t be afraid to toss your mentor’s suggestions
in the trash.
Do you have any
suggestions for beginning riders?
I haven’t
been on a horse in years, but riding—like writing—is a skill. Learn the
fundamentals from a good instructor and practice.
Follow
Milt…
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