Words of Wisdom
As a young writer, I badgered my elders for advice. Pored over interviews with big-shot writers. Cornered professors after class. Once I got in the game, I attended conferences and sat around many a New York City bar with agents, editors, and fellow scribes, trying to figure out how to make it.
I recommend seeking personal advice from the experienced. But there's a catch. John Keegan said that military historians have found that they can't trust eyewitness accounts. The experience of battle is so intense that survivors think whatever happened to them was the battle. A similar phenomenon occurs when authors talk about their careers. What they say is true, but how "generalizable" is their advice?
Below, I've listed words of wisdom I've frequently heard or read over recent decades. Click on a piece of advice to find out if the experiences of the "Class of Spring '77" bear it out or not.
1. The best way to make it as a novelist to create a big splash with your first novel.
2. The best way to make it as a novelist is to publish steadily and gradually build an audience.
3.The best way to make it as a novelist is to get a publisher, then write a "breakout book ."
4. The "midlist author" disappeared in the '90s.
5. If you want to write, write. Give your novel your all while supporting yourself with dead-end jobs that will look colorful on your jacket bio. Once you sell that novel, your financial worries will be over.
6. Get a job that allows you to support yourself and experience life, but doesn't require you to write
so you can save yourself for your fiction.
7. Start a career that somehow involves writing
8. If you want to write literary fiction, hang out in the groves of academe.
9. If you want to make a living as a writer, write genre
10. If Hollywood buys your book, it's great.
11.. Reviews make or break a first novel.
12. In the author game, men have the advantage over women.
13. If you want to be a writer, head for New York
14. An artist has to suffer.
15. The Internet is offering writers new opportunities.