The Other Side of The Desk:
Jack Botts the editor has evolved to Jack Botts the writer.
By Charlyne Berens
J Alumni News editor
The first book was no surprise. Jack Botts, retired UNL editing teacher, unleashed all the knowledge - and frustration - he had built up over years of practicing and teaching editing to produce "The Language of News: A Journalist's Pocket Reference."
The second and third books, about his boyhood in North Dakota and his experiences during World War II, weren't so surprising, either. You might expect memoirs from a man with an interesting past. But how to explain the two mysteries and the historical novel that followed? How to explain six books in 12 years?
Journalism grads remember Jack Botts the editor, carefully helping them learn to shape and improve other people's writing. They may not be prepared for Jack Botts the writer, turning out carefully crafted work of his own.
Bud Pagel, an emeritus journalism professor like Botts, wasn't quite prepared. "I never thought of him as a writer," said Pagel, who taught newswriting and reporting and still teaches one reporting class.
"I was surprised he was writing and that he wrote as well as he did," he said with a chuckle. "We writers tend to think editors don't really know how."
Botts didn't start writing books until after he retired in 1990. Thanks to teaching, grading papers, advising students and serving as department chair, he had no time, he said. "I can't write in 10-minute installments."
But once free of the daily routine, he launched right into the language book, just putting down on paper what was already all in his head. The Iowa State University Press published that work.
Then Botts decided he'd write a book for his family, stories about growing up along the James River in North Dakota. His dad had run the general store in Ludden, just a few miles north of the state's border with South Dakota, and Botts had good memories of life in the store and in a town where everyone knew everyone. He published "A Pocketful of Plums: Jim River Days" himself, thinking he wouldn't find much of a market for such a personal recollection.
But he hit the jackpot when he went to the 1995 reunion of the Oakes, N.D., high school he had attended. He sold 200 copies that day to people who shared his fondness for their native county and 400 more books after the fact.
In 1996, Botts followed the memoir of his early years with another personal recollection. "Straight and Level: Growing Up in the '40s" told the tale of Botts' duty as a B-17 radio operator in Italy during World War II.
He knew he'd be drafted when he graduated from high school, Botts said, so he got a jump on the process and enrolled in the Army's high frequency radio school at Wahpeton and, then, Grand Forks, N.D. He flew 51 missions on a B17 nicknamed Magnetic Maggie "because it attracted all the flak."
Botts kept a personal diary and a mission diary during the war, and he wrote letter after letter to his parents and his brother. His mother saved all those letters, and they and the diaries allowed Botts, 50 years after the war, to write with accuracy about his adventures in the Army Air Forces.
Then Botts switched genres. "Play Action," published in 2001, is a mystery with international crime at its heart. That was followed, in 2002, by "Home Place," a mystery set on a western Nebraska ranch.
In fall 2003, Botts shifted gears once more and published "Whitestone," a historical novel about the 2nd Nebraska Cavalry and what was known as "the great Sioux uprising" of 1863. The Nebraska volunteers fought the Santee Sioux at Whitestone, in what is now North Dakota, only a few miles from where Botts grew up. "We used to take picnics out there," he said of the battlefield.
He had known the general story of the battle since childhood but didn't realize the soldiers involved were from Nebraska until he read about the event in a back issue of Nebraska History magazine. His two connections to the battle - Nebraska and North Dakota - made the story fascinating for Botts, and he felt compelled to write it down. "I had to get that out of my system," he said.
For this last book, of course, Botts followed the historical outline of the campaign against the Sioux and included the characters history has recorded. But he added his own characters, soldiers in an imaginary I Company, and told the story from their point of view. That book required more research than the others had, Botts said. He kept running into situations he needed to know more about, like how a 12-pounder canon worked, what its crew was like, the difference between short and long rifles and what that meant to the way the men of 1863 could fight.
Botts has worn out two computers and is well into a third, getting his ideas and his words out of his system. He starts with a general idea and writes it down as fast as he can, then rewrites and reworks to make the stories sing. He takes notes as he works so that the hero still has the same color hair and the same number of children in chapter 10 as he had in chapter one, but he doesn't work from a detailed outline. "I know where the plot's going - but it writes itself," he said.
He seems to turn out books at a yeoman's rate, but he said he spends only a few hours a day writing. Dorris, his wife of 53 years, laughs at that claim. When he's really into a book, she said, her husband nearly lives with his computer.
Botts last three books were published by iUniverse, and the connection to that independent publisher has brought Botts back to his roots. The firm asked Botts to edit other people's work, and he accepted the offer of a part-time job, doing again the precise, careful work he did and taught for nearly 50 years.
No surprise there.
