By that time I was very successful and I had one Emmy, so I didn’t need the diagnosis to validate me. Had I known earlier that there was a reason beyond my control that I was a low achiever, I may not have worked so hard in my late 20s and early 30s. I was writing and writing. I never stopped. I was working for no other reason than it felt so good to hear people praise me. I craved that praise because I was carrying the residue of academic failure around with me.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1960 I was convinced that I was not very smart. I remember a defining moment in the seventh grade. I was doing really badly in a history course–I did badly in all my courses–and my parents had been notified. My mother said to me, “I’m going to work with you on this for a full week. I’m going to show you what you can do if you put in the right amount of effort.” So we did. We worked on the history for a full week, an extra hour every day. Then I went to school and bricked the test, just like I always bricked it. It was really upsetting to me. So I went to a friend of mine who had gotten an A and I asked: “How long did you study for this?” He said: “I didn’t. I just glanced at it.” So what do you take from that? He must be smarter than I am.
By the time I got to college I had come to realize that I couldn’t spell no matter how hard I tried. So at the University of Oregon I would sign up for extra courses. I’d be in registration lines all day. Then I would go around the first day of class and ask each professor: “What’s your policy on misspelling?” If the professor said: “This is history. Let your English department worry about spelling,” then I’d hold the course. If he said, “Three misspellings is a flunk,” I’d drop it. I figured out a way to graduate–but it was more an escape than a graduation.
Even though I was an academic failure, I had a great time. I had a lot of friends and I was always popular. I was a good high school football player–a running back–which was important in those early years because I could read my name in the newspaper on Saturday morning. I never had a day when I would sit around and think, “People don’t like me.” But there were occasional, poignant moments for me. I would lie in bed and think, “What’s going to happen to me when I can’t play football? When I can’t get the strokes I get from my social life? I’m not going to be good at anything. I’m not going to be able to be a success like my dad,” who was a self-made millionaire and my hero.
Despite my doubts, I did become successful in my career, so much so that people now say to me, “So you’ve overcome dyslexia.” No. No. You don’t overcome it, you learn to compensate for it. Some easy things are very hard for me. Most people who go through college read 400 to 500 words a minute. I only read 200. I’ve never known my left from my right. I try not to dial a phone if I can avoid it because I sometimes have to dial three times to get the number right. I get that recording, “The number you have reached is not in service,” more than any man on earth.
Despite my obvious weaknesses, I view dyslexia as a gift, not a curse. Most dyslexics are good at right-brain, abstract thought and that’s what writing is. You’re starting with nothing and coming up with something all on your own that didn’t exist before. That’s my strong suit. I owe my career to my writing instructor at Oregon. Ralph Salisbury looked past my misspellings and gave me encouragement and hope. I have never looked back. I’m also very visual. This means nothing in school, but when I write my books or scripts I’m seeing everything in my imagination. I write quickly. I go like the wind. I can get up as high as 15 pages a day on a novel when I’m really smoking. Writing is not the problem. I have no problem downloading. It’s inputting where things get jumbled.
The real fear that I have for dyslexic people is not that they have to struggle with jumbled input or that they can’t spell, but that they will quit on themselves before they get out of school. Parents have to create victories whenever they can, whether it’s music, sports or art. You want your dyslexic child to be able to say: “Yeah, reading’s hard. But I have these other things that I can do.”
