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Advice To New Fiction Writers
If you treasure a highly-active social life, then you are in the wrong business. A career as a professional fiction writer leaves little time or energy to become a social butterfly. A writer lives mainly in the world of ideas and imagination. Sitting alone for endless hours in front of a typewriter or word processor can turn you into a hermit.
Forget about writing The Great American Novel or becoming rich and famous. No matter how well you write, you have a much better chance of winning your state lottery. Accept the fact that you will be lucky to get published at all. Only 3 percent of all novels written ever get published and the vast majority of them make little money.
Start with short stories. It takes only a few weeks or months to write a short story that may never see print. A novel could take years to write and have less chance of getting published.
Read only the best fiction writers. Don't pollute your mind with garbage from the current crop of best-selling authors like Stephen King. They aim for the lowest common denominator, which is spiritual suicide for a talented writer -- not to mention professional prostitution.
Develop your own style of writing instead of copying other writers. The best way to do this is by experimenting with different styles. Try several until you find one that works well for you. This could take years, so a lot of patience is required.
Write for posterity, not for the faddish reading public that exists today. You might as well take the high road since your chances of making a comfortable living are slim at best. Many of the best writers of the past were little read in their own time. That fact didn't stop them from writing and you shouldn't let it stop you.
Above all, keep writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald received more than a hundred rejections before his first short story was finally published. Now he is considered one of the greatest American authors and the editors who rejected his stories have vanished anonymously into history.
As scarce as it is, great writing is imminently worthwhile whether it makes any money for its author or not. It can change the lives of the people who read it. I value great writing more as a reader than a writer. It doesn't teach one how to write -- that is learned mostly by trial and error -- but it does enrich the inner life of the reader. Through the great books I have read, I came to realize that I was not alone in my joy and suffering, that the differences between people were less important than their similarities, that souls could communicate across the boundaries of time and culture.Love of Place in Literature, observations on the writings of Thoreau, Rawlings, Dineson and Wolfe.