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How To Be A Writer
By Theresa Alan
1. Write your very first short story. Be sure it is brilliant.
2. Send it to the most prestigious literary magazines in the country. (The
New Yorker? Why not?)
3. Receive form rejection letters from every magazine.
4. Scoff at said letters. Think of how stupid those editors will feel when
you are on the best-seller lists and have been given the Pulitzer.
5. Revisit rejected manuscript. Realize with horror that it is truly,
painfully awful. Wallow in humiliation. Hope editors at most prestigious
literary magazines in the country won't remember this story or your name. Hope
they will forgive you for subjecting them to such abysmal prose.
6. Toil.
7. Rework, rewrite, revise, critique. Spend hours refining a single
sentence. Throw away pages and pages of pitiful prose. Decide, at long last,
that your work doesn't completely stink.
8. Submit your work again to multiple publications. Worry that they will all
want to publish you. Then what will you do?
9. Learn that you needn't have worried. After months and months and months
and months and months of dashing, full of hope, to your mailbox every day
awaiting news that you will be published, receive form rejections letters from
every journal except the ones that have already gone out of business. Be
crushed.
10. Wonder if you have any talent. Become depressed and discouraged. Wonder
why you forego sleep and doing fun things with loved ones so you have time to
write. Wonder if you have what it takes.
11. Wish, just for a moment, that you could be happy working nine to five as
an accountant and never had literary aspirations.
12. Revisit rejected story yet again and, with sudden clarity, realize what
is wrong with it while being pleasantly surprised with some of your well-written
sentences. Feel pride that you wrote those lines.
13. Read. Be wildly jealous of published authors. Be even more jealous of the
ones who are better writers than you. Despise the ones who aren't as good but
are published anyway. Wonder why there is no justice.
14. Repeat steps one through 13 more times than you care to think about.
15. Have story accepted by a publication no one has ever heard of. Earn no
money. Be momentarily thrilled with your accomplishment then decide it's a
shoddy journal that would publish anyone. Want more.
16. Toil.
17. Finish novel. Feel bad about all the trees that were sacrificed to get to
The End but good about the fact you actually got there.
18. Begin search for agent. Get three form rejection letters on the same day
your boyfriend/girlfriend breaks up with you, you lose your job, and your car
breaks down. Consider giving up.
19. Decide you are ahead of your time.
20. Keep writing anyway because you can't not write.
21. Live for those moments when you're doing the dishes or driving to grocery
story and it hits you in a flash what you need to do to fix that pesky section
in your novel that wasn't working. Go to your notebook/computer and have the
words pour out of you.
22. Struggle to find the right words. Find them.
23. Discover things about yourself. Be amazed by the writing process. Love
how it challenges your intellect and your creativity.
24. Have things in your past that you thought you had forgotten come tumbling
out in fictionalized form. Have people you'd had brief, insignificant
conversations with years ago suddenly appear as characters in your novel.
25. Notice details about the world that other people miss. Don't mind
adversity since conflict is the key to plot, and you can use your negative
experiences in your work.
26. Find beauty in black words on a white page.
27. Reread your story. Decide it is just the kind of story you want to read.
Be proud of yourself.
28. Wonder why Joyce Carol Oates has to have a short story in every single
issue of every single literary magazine ever published. Can't she leave room for
little guys like you?
29. Hear about authors like Hemingway and John Steinbeck living in poverty.
Wonder how the hell you'll ever make it if they never got rich.
30. Hear about a twenty-four year old getting published with a half a million
dollar advance. S/he received a rave review in the New York Times.
Briefly consider manslaughter. At least in prison you'd have time to write.
31. Get a phone call from an agent who wants to represent you. Wonder if you
are dreaming. Agree to have him/her represent you.
32. Wait.
33. Wait more.
34. Continuing waiting.
35. Continuing waiting some more.
36. Get a phone call from your agent. A publisher wants to give you money to
publish you. Wonder if you accidentally consumed a hallucinogenic for lunch.
37. Be thrilled.
38. Tell everyone you ever knew, particularly your ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend
who left you for that tramp.
39. Be terrified. What if it's not good after all? What if no one buys it?
What if you can't ever write another novel?
40. See your book in book stores. See your name on the spine of a book. Be
shocked. Amazed. Feel surreal.
41. Sign your first book. Be amused that someone actually wants your
autograph as if you were some sort of celebrity. Don't let them know the truth
that you are just an average schmoe.
42. Get your first bad review. Wonder where you keep the razor blades.
43. Get positive reviews. Realize that that other reviewer was a complete
idiot.
44. Make checking your sales ranking on Amazon your full-time job.
45. Get fan mail. Be thrilled and amazed.
46. Keep writing.
47. And writing.
48. And writing.
49. And writing.
50. And writing.
Theresa Alan's
novels Who You Know (which spent several weeks on the Barnes and Noble
best-seller list), Spur of The Moment, The Girls' Global Guide To Guys,
and Girls Who Gossip are now available from Kensington's Strapless line,
and her novella Santa Unwrapped can be found in the New York Times
best-selling anthology Jingle All the Way with Fern Michaels and Linda
Lael Miller. She also has novellas in Sex and the Single Witch and I
Shaved My Legs for This?! Her novel The Dangers of Mistletoe will be
out in December 2006. Theresa was named Colorado Romance Writer's Author of the
Year for 2004. She lives in Denver, Colorado, and is hard at work on her next
book.
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