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FIVE OBSERVATIONS ON SUCCESSFUL WRITERS

by W.E. Reinka

When writers go on book tours, media escorts greet them at
the airport and drive them to bookstore appearances and
interviews. During my nine years escorting writers on San
Francisco tour stops, I enjoyed quiet dinners with Pulitzer
Prize winners and listened to the aspirations of writers with
unfamiliar names. But whether the writers I escorted were
famous or unknown, they were linked by common five traits.

1. They write the best book they can.
We’ve all muttered as we flip through paperbacks while standing
in the supermarket check-out line, “My grocery list has better
syntax than this garbage.” Maybe so, but best-selling authors
do not write down to their readers. Fakers don’t make it.
Whatever you’re writing, you don’t stand a chance if you write
down to your audience.

2. Writers write. Dreamers dream.
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler used to write fiction
on the commuter train to his day job. Edgar nominee Martha C.
Lawrence recalls how she only completed her first mystery
after she learned to say “no” to friends who wanted to party.
In The Observation Deck: A Tool Kit for Writers, Naomi Epel
relates how Flannery O’Connor used to force herself to sit
for three hours every day, whether she wrote or not.

3. What muse?
Ask any newspaper columnist, TV writer, or successful
freelancer and they’ll tell you that they can’t afford to
wait for inspiration. People in other professions work every
day whether they feel like it or not. So do professional
writers.

4. They aim high.
Some talented actors spend their lives in community theater
productions and amateur skits. Why don’t they make it on
Broadway or in Hollywood? Because they never leave Grand
Rapids or Topeka. Writers often follow the same pattern, never
submitting their work beyond the local library journal or PTA
newsletter. Every famous writer started as an unknown and none
became famous through secondary markets.

5. They read
T.C. Boyle wonders how people expect to write stories if they
haven’t read thousands. Mystery master Joe Gores reads 150
novels a year. National Book Award winner Alice McDermott
tells how she encouraged one of her undergraduate students
to read Faulkner. The young man resisted, explaining how he
feared that in reading Faulkner he might “sully” his own style.

McDermott patted him on the shoulder and whispered,
“Take a chance.”


--W.E. Reinka may be reached at wereinka@ix.netcom.com

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