I do not know if J. Williamson is male, female or "other" but I do know J. Williamson wrote to ask…
You've written about how you went to U.C.L.A. but I'm under the impression you didn't graduate. If so, why? And do you think it was valuable to your career to go to college? Some people think it's a necessity if someone is to have a successful career.
I'm only an expert on me and for me, it was a total waste of time. When I realized how total, I quit and have never regretted it for a moment. I am not suggesting that this move would be right for everyone; just that it was right for me when it was right for me. I'm sure there are professions where college is a necessity. Writing the kinds of things I write, it was not.
Why did I go to college at all? Four reasons, one being that my father desperately wanted that. Given his underprivileged childhood, he felt that merely getting into any college — let alone, one as prestigious as U.C.L.A. — was a major achievement. When I was accepted, he walked around like his kid had just won the Nobel Prize. In my family, we did a lot of things just to please each other.
Another reason was that there was this thing happening then…this war in Vietnam. My father desperately did not want me to be drafted and I wasn't fond of the notion. We didn't have the money to bribe some doctor to write me a medical excuse saying I had bone spurs but there were these things called student exemptions. They might save me.
At the time, I thought those were my only reasons but I later realized there were two other subconscious ones…and one of them was this: I always knew I wanted to make my living as a writer and I'd long figured, "As soon as I get out of high school, I'll start seriously pursuing that." Going on to college was kind of a way to not throw myself immediately into the deep end on a swim-or-sink basis. I would start trying to make my way in the world as a professional writer but if I didn't succeed right away…well, it wasn't a now-or-never thing. Going to college meant I was still in school. Without realizing it, I think I was giving myself an excuse for possible failure.
As it happened, in the few months after I graduated from University High but before I started at U.C.L.A., I began getting work. I wasn't yet writing for television or even comic books. I was writing magazine pieces and press releases and one semi-dirty book and other oddments and my confidence was growing that I could make a living as a writer. Suddenly, college was a distraction from the career I wanted to have, not a help.
What I was learning there was largely useless to me because I couldn't get into any classes that had anything to do with my chosen vocation. My first quarter, I found myself studying Anthropology, Economics and Portuguese. I don't know if I've mentioned it here but on that long, long list of things at which I am terrible, learning a foreign language is not far from the top. You could teach ballroom dancing to a snail before you could teach me more than about two sentences in any tongue other than English.
I wasn't that much better at the Anthropology or the Economics. I might have mastered one of them if I had studied a few hours each night but I'd landed a job working for a firm that did mail order merchandise for Marvel Comics and soon, I began working for Jack Kirby and then writing Disney comic books for the foreign market.
The latter job led to writing Disney comic books for the American market, which meant for Gold Key Comics. Gold Key also published the comics featuring the Warner Brothers characters like Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, the Walter Lantz characters like Woody Woodpecker, some Hanna-Barbera properties like Scooby Doo and others. Soon, I was writing for them as well, thereby trapping myself in the following conundrum: I was going to college to get an education and degree that might (might!) help me succeed as a professional writer…but doing college right would have meant turning down all this professional writing work I was being offered.
Two things happened in close proximity that led to me quitting U.C.L.A. I do not now recall which came first but I think they occurred in this sequence…
My editor at Gold Key was a lovely (to me) man named Chase Craig. One day when I was delivering scripts to his office, he leaned back in his chair, put one foot up against his desk and said to me, "You know, I could use a lot more scripts from you. I could probably use as many as you can write." It's a big moment in the life of any beginning writer when he hears something like that. All the work I can handle? And on something I love writing?
The other thing: U.C.L.A. was then the scene of frequent protests of the Vietnam War and, at that moment, especially the bombing in Cambodia. On other college campuses, there were general strikes — students and some faculty members declaring they would stop attending or conducting classes and instead demonstrate against U.S. involvement and actions.
I had finally gotten into an English Literature class — a class that had at least something to do with my chosen profession. It wasn't a very good class. I thought the professor was a bore and none of his lecturing was of any more use to me than those classes in Portuguese. But I attended, my mind often drifting off to the Daffy Duck story I would be putting onto paper as soon as I got home.
Then one day, he opened class by announcing he was closing class; he'd decided to go on strike. He would teach no more that quarter, we'd all receive credit for the class — I think he said that — and he encouraged us to use the time he'd freed up in our lives to become more politically active, whatever our views.
Within a week of the second of those two events, I quit U.C.L.A. I took on more assignments from Chase but I also did become more politically active. I think I've written about that here before. Having recently made that long, slow change-of-mind from generally supporting that war in which I did not wish to fight, I began participating in protests against it. Mostly, I became a spokesperson for a group that pushed the non-violent, non-confrontational approach.
My father, who was aware of and thrilled with how well my writing career was going, was kinda okay with me quitting college. He couldn't very well argue that staying in would lead to a better career since I was making more money than he was…and I was a lot happier doing it than he'd ever been in his work. But he did feel I should have waited until I got some sort of degree to do it. To give him hope that that might someday happen, I enrolled for part-time studies at Santa Monica College.
S.M.C., perhaps because it was about five miles closer to the ocean than the U.C.L.A. campus, then felt like going to school in a beach party movie. When it was sunny, students came to class in swimwear with perhaps a t-shirt or caftan covering. It was there that I realized the fourth reason I'd had for going to college at all, a reason that I hadn't explicitly realized before. You could meet a lot more girls going to college than you could sitting home in your bedroom in your parents' house, pounding a typewriter day and night. Call me shallow if you like but that mattered a lot to me at the time.
I went to S.M.C. for about a year and a half. I did not earn a degree of any kind, nor did I learn anything that in any way enhanced my writing career. I did though get some girl friends and I did get the whole idea of college out of my system…so going there was not without its value. Basically though, I learned whatever I learned about writing from on-the-job experience, not by sitting in a college classroom. I didn't even learn one friggin' sentence in Portuguese sitting in a college classroom. But I'm willing to admit and even emphasize that my case may be the exception. Just about everything in my career has been an exception of some kind or another.
