“The novel as a literary form was born out of the Enlightenment, out of curiosity about and respect for the individual. Its traditions impel it towards pluralism, openness, a sympathetic desire to inhabit the minds of others. There is no man, woman or child, on earth whose mind the novel cannot reconstruct. Totalitarian systems are…
No, I’m not talking about self-publishing here. I’ll leave that for another post. Instead, I’ll describe a process that’s worked for me. Both my first novel Absolution and my upcoming second novel A Stone for Bread were submitted to their publishers without an agent. The Absolution manuscript was entered into the Novello Festival Press…
In my last post I talked about the value of an agent. Now here’s the grim reality: the odds for an unknown, unpublished novelist obtaining a literary agent is estimated to be something like 1 in 10,000. Some say 1 in 20,000. So why bother? Well, here’s what may increase a new novelist’s chances: –prior publication, such as…
“If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.” James Baldwin I…
“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler, journalist and biographer It always comes back to the chair. Okay, you’ve done your research, created your outline or filled a notebook with ideas, detailed your main characters complete…
Writing is a tough business. Gratification (publishing) can be long in coming. If and when it does, royalties are usually insufficient to live on, sometimes even nonexistent, especially when averaged over the months or years and costs it’s taken to finish a manuscript and get it accepted for publication. Once published, we have to…
My Uncle Grattan, my father’s oldest brother, was a brilliant man. He spent a couple of years in New York City in his twenties studying art before he returned to his native South Carolina. He then lived out the remainder of his life on the coast at Murrell’s Inlet, and for many of those years…
But isn’t it really about personal fulfillment? If you’re a struggling writer, you’ve probably had someone say this to you. In my long and frustrating journey to publication, I heard this a number of times, usually from friends who meant to encourage me. And, yes, there have been moments when I’ve asked myself the same…
Recently, the New York Times Book Review featured two writers asked to comment on the question, “Do critics make good novelists?” I wasn’t particularly interested in the question but was struck by two passages from novels cited by one of the responders. Both passages describe fictional characters named Daisy. In The Great Gatsby, the first view…
I heard Twyla Tharp say that to begin a new work of choreography, she enters a “white room.” Certainly, this is a metaphor, although a dancer’s creative space is likely an actual room/studio. But for writers, the white room is the blank page. Sitting in front of that blankness and typing in page 1 can…