For a moment, best-selling novelist Walter Mosley sounded like a late-night infomercial pitchman as he addressed a group of Union College students May 9 in Schenectady.
He wasn't promising them they would grow more hair, increase their sex drives or shed inches from their waistlines.
What Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, was hawking was something far more lasting and transformative.
Give him 90 minutes a day for one full year, he told the 30 students in flip-flops, cargo shorts and backward baseball caps, and he can make every last one of them a novelist.
"You're all writers in waiting," he said during a 60-minute discussion. He delivered the talk, spiked with political and social outrage, in a jazzy rhythm, his left hand fluttering in the air, rendering his chunky gold ring a flickering, mesmerizing flame.
He's a large, bearish presence with a gray goatee, clad in black jacket, black T-shirt, black jeans and black sneakers. His powerful words are delivered in a surprisingly soft, feathery voice with a slight lisp.
"There's not much to say about writing, and it's extraordinarily pedestrian anyway," said Mosley, who discussed his recently published book, "This Year You Write Your Novel" (Little, Brown and Company; $19.99), a 112-page primer on the craft.
The slim volume grew out of an essay Mosley wrote for The New York Times in 2000 as part of a "Writers on Writing" series.
Mosley said you must be motivated by an inner drive to tell a story and by the personal satisfaction that comes from exercising your creative imagination. Don't expect fame and fortune.
"If you want to make a lot of money, go into real estate," he said.
After publishing 28 books over the past 17 years — his first, "Devil in a Blue Dress," was a best-seller in 1990 and was later made into a movie starring Denzel Washington — Mosley has distilled the myths and mystique of writing a novel into three simple steps he laid out for the English literature class.
1. Write every day.
Spend a minimum of 90 minutes daily at your computer, no matter what. Mosley writes for three hours each morning, rarely missing a day. "Writing is primarily an unconscious activity," he said. "You get your 600 words down in 90 minutes and the rest of the day, your mind is working on the dream of your story."
2. Write without restraint.
"We're limited by false aesthetics," he said. "I'm against what the university has done with fiction writing. It doesn't own the field. Just because you're a Ph.D. doesn't make you a great storyteller."
3. Fight the urge to find excuses to avoid writing.
"Procrastination is the writer's greatest enemy," he said. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls. Keep at the writing. You'll discover a story to be told."
Binyavanga Wainaina, Union's visiting writer and an accomplished essayist and short story writer from Kenya, is admittedly frightened of tackling the long form of a novel.
"I'm the classic lazy procrastinator," he conceded to Mosley. "I start something new, get sidetracked and find ways to avoid the novel."
Mosley replied, "Don't expect to like writing a novel. Joseph Conrad wrote a lot about how much he hated writing."
Be ruthlessly disciplined and the words, and novels, will pile up.
"I finish a book on Tuesday and start a new one on Wednesday," he said.
Mosley talked about how he washed out of one college before earning a bachelor's degree, knocked around in a variety of jobs, including computer programming, before he hit his stride as a writer.
Mosley had to coax the Union students into admitting they had "committed fiction" in the past and might aspire to becoming novelists.
"It's OK. You don't have to be afraid to say you write," he said.
Mosley's message struck a chord with Ross Marvin, a senior English major who lugged a 2,500-page "Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism" under his arm and carried dreams of becoming a writer in his head.
"I'm planning to do the journalism thing for a while while I try to break into the literary field," said Marvin, of Clifton Park, a senior English major at Union and a 2003 Shenendahowa High School graduate who worked at the Borders bookstore in his hometown.
Marvin is also managing editor and a contributor to a campus journal of satire, The Dutch Oven.
He writes poetry and short stories for the Idol, Union's literary journal, and completed an 80-page senior thesis on suburbia.
After graduation, he'll attend a summer writing workshop, travel to Europe and then try to land a job as a newspaper reporter.
But his main aspiration, whenever he might be able to find the time, is to write a novel.
Mosley cut Marvin no slack on that score. Everyone's busy, busy, busy these days, he said, and he hears all the time from folks who say they'd love to write a novel if only they had the time.
"Make the time," Mosley said. "No excuses."
Look for inspiration no further than Homer.
"He was illiterate and blind and he was the greatest writer of all time," Mosley said.