Introduction
by David Linzee,
supervisor of The Writing Lab,
University of Missouri-St. Louis
How this web site came to be
Suppose you were a young person wanting to be a lawyer and wondering what careers in the law were like. But the only lawyers you could find information about were Supreme Court Justices.
This is roughly the position beginning fiction writers are in. Abundant information is available about Philip Roth and Dan Brown. But it takes a lot of digging to learn about any professional writer who isn't a prize-winner or a best-seller.
How are young people supposed to find out what writing careers look like?
One way, I thought, was to take a broad sample: the 37 writers who published their first novel in spring 1977. This group wasn't chosen entirely at random: I am one of them. Writing Lab tutors who are also apprentice writers, studying for their M.F.A. degrees here at the U. of Mo.-St. Louis, went to work researching these novelists' careers.
We realized that this is a unique generation of writers. They wrote their first novels on typewriters. Now, near the close of their careers, we could find a great deal of information on almost all of them via the Internet. In fact, technological innovation has changed the meaning of "getting published"--a fact we think many aspiring writers don't understand as well as they need to.
How to use this site
To get the gist quickly, go to By the Numbers Words of Wisdom Getting Published The Take-Home
In the career profiles, I would particuarly recommend these adventure tales of resourceful writers staying afloat in the choppy seas of publishing: George C. Chesbro Rob Swigart Robert Mayer Bruce Ducker and Rod Townley.
Researchers:
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Leeli Davidson, short story and novel-writer, in the MFA program of the English Department. |
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Rewa Chouieri, poet, in the MFA program. |
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Jeannine Vesser, short story writer, in the MFA program. |
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Capuchina Taylor, poet, in the MFA program |
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Daphne Drohobyczer, short story writer, in the MA program of the History Dept. |
The text was written by David, with contributions from Leeli and Daphne. Thanks to Karen Walsh and Donald W. Mertz, Ph.D.