I want it to be like a hazardous side- effects label. I want it to be a chart of the shoals between you and the port you're steering for. To do that, I'll talk first about my early career, concentrating not on the successes, as we all usually do, but on the mistakes. Mistakes I made, usually from ignorance, but also from pride and misinformation. Wrong turns I hope to help you avoid.
Then, I want to talk about some common misconceptions about writing; some common fears; and about some common misgivings, for those who entertain the idea of writing for a career, or, as it really is, a life's work. I want to examine how beginning writers think about themselves. The way I once thought about myself -- and contrast it with reality. And then, I'll suggest more fruitful models, more realistic and productive ways to think about your work, your career, and your chances.
I believe, with James Jones, that if a writer isn't making someone angry, he's not doing his job. Some of my remarks may cause offense. Others may strike you as obvious. But still, they're things you need to hear. Unfortunately, you won't hear them from writing programs or seminars, because they aren't "inspiring." They don't "encourage" you. But then, I don't feel that "encouraging" every would-be writer is my job, or wise, or even kind. Instead, I'm going to tell you the truth as I see it. And if I save some of you a few years of futile and bitter struggle -- then speaking out is worth it.
And last, I hope to share with you some thoughts, halfway around the dog-track of my life, about what rabbit sparks and darts ahead of my jaws; of what writing means to me now; and how it relates to the need we all feel to have our lives, when the torn-up tickets flutter to the ground, turn out to have been useful. Probably a good place to begin is with how a boy who grew up on welfare became what he'd always dreamed of being, and gave up everything else he'd ever wanted along the way.
Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth, points to what is called the night-sea journey as the underlying structure of all myth, story, and fiction. This archetypal journey begins with a call to action. The hero penetrates a realm outside common existence. There he undergoes an ordeal, symbolically purging those elements in his soul which correspond to the self. After this, he returns, changed, to share his wisdom with those he left behind.
I'm tempted to see my own life that way. Certainly it began with a call to action and has progressed through many an ordeal. I've worked as a naval officer, night watchman, engineer, editor, publisher, teacher, and economist. I've been writing for twenty years now, the early part of it in want and anxiety. But finally, for the last few years, in increasing success, security, and fame.
I knew I was a writer at the age of three. It seemed to me not only natural but inevitable. The first time I held a book, and realized what it was, I knew I would someday write these wonderful things.
I never expected to go to college. We were on welfare; my father was mentally ill and couldn't hold a job. I spent most of my adolescence at the library. I wasn't on the high school paper or the yearbook. But I kept a journal -- some seven hundred pages of it.
Being appointed to Annapolis was a turning point. The Academy was a ticket out of poverty into a larger world. I was, I know now, also searching for self-esteem, of which I had very little. I wanted what anthropologists call "ascribed worth" -- a status that accrues not from your own efforts, but by membership in an elite group.
How did I go from a secure career as a naval officer to that of a broke, struggling freelance writer? In retrospect it seems insane. I think it was the divorce, as well as a succession of true bastards for commanding officers, that made me decide I had to get out. Besides, there's no time to write at sea. Most Navy people work sixteen hours a day underway, or more.
But suddenly, in 1976, I faced three months in a cast up to my waist. So I bought a typewriter and a desk and started my first novel.
In early 1977 I resigned. I had no training as a writer, and very little knowledge of what I was about. So I plunged into a desperate attempt to imitate. Since I had an engineering background, I tried to reverse-engineer things that were already successful. I studied adventure novelists -- Jack Higgins, Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, Frederick Forsyth. Then I wrote a thriller called WHITE CONTINENT. I sent it out to fifteen publishers and got it back fifteen times.
I had something, though, that in the end seems more essential than talent or a master of fine arts degree. That was the determination that I would become a novelist or die.
Only stubbornness -- hell, pigheadedness -- can explain the fact that being rejected fifteen times didn't make me rethink my choice of career, as perhaps it should have.
Instead, I began freelancing for city magazines. I wrote science fiction and mystery stories. Freelancing's a rough way to live, but it teaches you efficiency and market sense. I lived in a shed behind a brickyard while I finished another adventure novel. It didn't sell either.
Gradually I realized that I was in deep trouble. So at the same time I was freelancing, I began a crash course in literature. This involved reading, from the beginning of their careers, everything that Stendhal, Faulkner, Dreiser, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Burroughs, Lawrence, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Dostoyevsy, Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Raymond Chandler, Mary Renault, Aldous Huxley, and Gustave Flaubert ever wrote, along with their letters, autobiographies, and criticism. And always, always, I kept slaving away on those seemingly unsalable novels.
This was the period I nearly starved. I was spending two weeks writing articles that brought in $100. I became adept at getting free meals. Urban renewal was going on at the time, and I raided abandoned buildings for the Civil Defense rations in the basements. I used a press card to scarf up free food at wedding receptions. And I worked nights as a security guard, sitting outside a warehouse full of microwaves and color TVs. It wasn't bad; I could write all night if I didn't freeze, and I got to talk to prostitutes and drug dealers. I even got shot at a couple of times. I had no trouble staying awake.
But if you work on, eventually the Universe seems to give up on discouraging you. It decides to try a taste of success. A newspaper editor persuaded me to pull my novel manuscript for WHITE CONTINENT out of a drawer and send it to a friend of his at Lippincott. Lippincott didn't like it, but my editor's friend's secretary was an agent's mistress. She stole it out of the return pile and made him read it. WHITE CONTINENT began my first wave of publication. I quickly rewrote the second book and sold it for ten thousand dollars. I sold a science fiction novel called STAR SEED. Then I sold another paperback original to Avon.
But in the meantime, thanks to this crazy self-study program, I realized that what I was producing wasn't very good. Gradually I began more ambitious work. THE RETURN OF PHILO T. McGIFFIN was the crossover, the point at which I began to write about myself, for myself, and at which I began to write, at long last, halfway decently.
MCGIFFIN, a comic novel about Annapolis, was something I'd known I'd write since plebe year. Diaries were against regulations, so I made notes and hid them in my shoes. In 1981 I decided it was time to attempt fiction that depended on character development and beauty of prose rather than plot. I rewrote the whole thing three times, and the opening seven times.
THE RETURN OF PHILO T. McGIFFIN was my first hardcover. It was also a very funny book. It's now a collectors item, selling for up to $130 in a signed first edition.
However, the $3600 advance didn't go very far. (I was stuck in the low four figures for a long time.) Shortly after PHILO came out, won an award from Book List, had its guts torn out by the reviewers, and died, I realized I was starving. It was time I got a job.
This may be the place to talk about backup professions. Many "would-bes" doubt whether they can make a living writing. And they're right to wonder. Teaching's fine, but it's not the only way to live while you write. Although I enjoy speaking, and love conducting workshops, on the whole I'm glad I'm not qualified to teach. Writing well takes so much time that teaching it too would drive me crazy. It's been nice, from time to time, to be an engineer, a consultant, or do research. And it's also a morale builder. Even if literacy finally dies out, I can wire houses, design ships, do economic studies, guard warehouses, and clean doughnut machines as well as write. And it gives you wonderful backgrounds for your fiction.
The second advantage is that being able to get bread in some other way means there's less pressure. You can take four years to do a book, and if it doesn't succeed you aren't devastated. At least not financially. I was practicing engineering, then, and later on consulting for a think tank in Washington, when I wrote STEPFATHER BANK, a thinking person's science fiction novel. This book's history sort of answers that common question, "Where do ideas come from?"
In the late seventies I was in a workshop with ten other fiction writers, and one day a poet showed up. He was fat and dirty and sat stolidly through the discussion, picking fleas out of his beard and cracking them between his fingernails. I never saw him again, but he obsessed me. A few months later I wrote a short story around him. It was turned down by the magazines, but it kept growing in my head, and a couple of years later was published as a novella.
Well, old Monaghan Burlew -- his fictional name -- still wouldn't stop growing. Eventually I lengthened the novella, added a new ending, and St Martins bought it.
Where do ideas come from? The answer is, They're all around you. You just have to learn to recognize them. The next book, and the turning point in my career, was a panoramic novel of the Navy and Marine Corps called THE MED. This was B.C., Before Clancy, and seven publishers turned it down. Big Navy novels didn't sell, they said. St. Martins finally begrudged me fifteen thousand for it.
THE MED sold out its first printing in two weeks. Bookstores all over the country were screaming for more. Even the reviewers were finally ready for a realistic novel in which military people were neither angels nor devils, but human beings. Library Journal praised it, the major papers, Publishers Weekly -- and suddenly we had an industry bestseller. And my life began to change. Since then there've been movie offers, movie sales, and three more increasingly successful books.
If I'd given up after getting fifteen rejections in a row, it would never have happened. Right now I'm working on what will occupy the middle portion of my life: two series of novels of serious artistic intent, and one series that I do just for fun.
The first cluster is set in Pennsylvania. It borrows the device of the imaginary county from Faulkner. Its theme, like that of everything I write, is the struggle between good and evil within the hearts of individuals. The Hemlock County novels portray the struggle of common people against the greed and violence of the privileged. THE DEAD OF WINTER was the first, WINTER IN THE HEART the second, AS THE WOLF LOVES WINTER the third, and THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN the latest (1999). They get excellent reviews, but they don't sell very well, not to put too fine a point on it. Well, one can't have everything.
The second line is an ambitious epic of the modern Navy. This seems to have more commercial appeal. THE MED was the first of these, set in the Mediterranean, as you might expect. THE GULF was set in the Persian Gulf. THE CIRCLE was set in the Arctic, drawing from a cruise I made there in the winter. THE PASSAGE is set in the Caribbean, and TOMAHAWK on shore duty in Washington. CHINA SEA, latest in the series, just came out in February 2000. The theme of the Lenson novels is the conflict between duty and integrity. Or, put another way: how can men reconcile their consciences, as beings with something roughly corresponding to immortal souls, to their roles within an institution that exists to do violence in the service of the state.
The third is the Tiller Galloway series. I think of them as well-written sea adventure. I write those for fun, and because the IRS lets me deduct my SCUBA diving trips because of them. HATTERAS BLUE was the first. BAHAMAS BLUE was the second, LOUISIANA BLUE the third, and most recent was DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
So that brings us up to the present.
Now let's talk about what I've learned from all this; and then move on to the meat of this talk; the caveat scribendur, the warnings to those who want to enter this vale of tears.
The first mistake I made was in starting too soon. I don't mean in terms of age. I mean in experience, and literary knowledge. Or, as Edward Gibbon said, "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."
I see a writer's ability as standing on three legs, like the tripods Homer speaks of as being dedicated to the gods. Talent, experience, and literary background. Add to these the container that holds the flame; determination; and you have the offering you will make to the Muse, and that, if you're lucky, she'll accept.
I started writing too soon in terms of my literary knowledge. I had enough experience by then. Actually, most children of twelve have had all the emotional experiences that constitute fiction. But I wanted to have a world in which my characters could move, a world which I knew intimately. By the age of 26 I had that. Still, I didn't know literature. Later I realized that, and designed a program to remedy it. But my early work would have been better if I'd done the studying first, and the writing later.
The single most important thing you ought to do is read. James Kilpatrick, a man with whom I often disagree, was right when he said, "The classics may not be necessary for the happiness of a bond salesman, but they are indispensible for our community of writers. It is from these enduring works that we form a reservoir of insight and allusion." It's really impossible for a writer to read "too much," especially when he or she is young. But I find myself reading continually still, and not just classics. Recently I've discovered Yukio Mishima, Colleen McCullough, and Vassily Grossman, and I'm reading new works by John Barth and old ones by Anthony Trollope with avid enjoyment. And every so often I'll jump up, because an idea has just struck me that has to go into the book that is growing now in the memory of my Pentium or the rich rotting compost-pile of my daydreams.
I wish now that I'd had a more structured literary education -- more American and English, Russian and French literature. If I had it to do over, I'd have spent less time on "useful" subjects and more on what I really needed in life: foreign languages, music, psychology, and art.
A second mistake I made was in agents. I've wasted a lot of time on them. My first agent was in Idaho. It cost me $150, a week's pay in 1976, to have this fool read the manuscript of my first novel. He "represented" it for a year and I doubt if he even sent it out. I still see his name in Writer's Market.
My second agent wasn't really an agent, he was a licenser. You know the toys the Saturday morning cartoons sell? He handled the rights to those. He sold three books for me to three different publishers. Slowly, the pressure increased. He wanted me to do myself a big favor. He wanted me to make money. He wanted me to write for the saturday morning cartoons. We parted amicably, but we parted.
Sometimes you have to just say no, even when the money's dangling right in front of your face.
My current agent (#4) works hard, has good literary sense, and he's a hard bargainer. But I would never have gotten to him if I'd been satisfied simply "having an agent." The point of all this for you is not to search too desperately for an agent. They're like doctors: a bad one's worse than none at all. Here are Poyer's Seven Simple Rules for dealing with agents.
1. Avoid anyone who advertises in the backs of writers' magazines.
2. Avoid anyone whose main office is in Idaho, West Virginia, or Mississippi.
Los Angeles and New York -- okay. Anyone else, forget it.
3. Avoid anyone who uses a quill pen or a flying horse as a logo.
4. Don't pay reading fees.
5. Don't pay more than ten per cent commission.
6. Look for hungry new agents in New York, or large, established, reputable
agencies with memberships in the AAR.
7. Don't wait for an agent. Start marketing your work yourself.
The third mistake I made was early in my career, when I failed to establish an ongoing relationship with a publisher. My first four books were all from different houses: Jove, Avon, Donning, and St. Martin's. I realize now this was an error.
When you publish a book, you're asking a publisher to make an investment in your career. The bigger the advance, and the bigger the ad budget, the bigger his investment. Your goal is to make him invest a lot. That way he has to make the book succeed. If he has very little at stake, the book will be out there on its own, and will most likely die a quiet death. Your goal is to stack the deck. You do this by staying with one publisher, even if they don't give you a great deal at first. Gradually, if your books show modest profits, your name recognition will grow. You'll sell more books with each new title. That's when you hit them for bigger advances, and that's when you'll get them.
But if you skip around, even if you get a larger advance, publishing houses will perceive you as a risk. It's not a matter of loyalty per se, though it's sometimes phrased in those terms. It's a matter of return on investment. I should have picked a reputable house early in my career and stayed with it. Luckily, I was able to do that from the fourth book on.
These are the major mistakes I made in my career. I've made lots of others, but these are the biggies. Avoid them. Make new, original mistakes of your own!
Now let's go on to this matter of misconceptions. Misconceptions waste time. They lead to disillusion, and that hurts. My goal in this talk is to help you. So let's talk about some weird ideas that beginning writers seem to have.
The first howler is that you're going make money in this shell game. Forgive me, but that's still rattling around in the back of too many of your heads out there. And I know where it comes from.
The general public thinks all writers are rich. They make scads of money. This is reinforced by periodic headlines in the NY Times decrying the fact that great sums have been paid for the latest Danielle Steele novel. Here are the facts. An Author's Guild study of writing incomes last year showed that they had declined, in real terms, by half since the early seventies. Ours is a shrinking profession with a great many would-be writers chasing a greatly reduced demand.
It's a little difficult to talk about this without using some of the language of economics. You already know that a monopoly means there's a single supplier of a good. An oligopoly means there are several suppliers; and a commodity market, like wheat or pork bellies, means that there are a huge number of suppliers fighting to sell nearly identical products.
This is an oversimplification, but you can see that a monopolistic seller, like Nintendo or Polaroid, can set their prices and their profits high. The oligopolistic seller, like Ford, can do this to a lesser extent. But the commodity seller has to price to meet the competition. Other things to remember about commodity producers are that there are no barriers to the entry of competitors into the market, and that over time prices will decline until the producers left are barely breaking even.
Now. The new writer begins as the producer of a commodity, and not a very efficient producer, either. He or she is also, typically, producing a relatively low-quality good. The inexorable laws of economics tell us that you are only going to sell this good at a price lower than it cost you to produce it.
The more successful writer, once he's established a trademark -- which we call Pen Names, in our industry -- becomes more like an oligopoly. They've established niches. Jonathan Kellerman, Robert Ludlum, V. C. Andrews, Stephen King, are examples of writers who have established brand loyalty. I don't say they're good or bad, but only that they're successful in the marketplace. (So successful, in one case, that she is still "publishing" long after her death.)
Now let's look at the buyer.
In my experience, publishers have treated me fairly, but generous is one thing they are not. They will not advance you a dollar more than they think you'll earn back. And in most cases, for a first-timer, that means no more than $5000 for a first novel.
That's right, that's for the book you've spent two years writing. You get to keep about 60% of that, once your agent and your friendly, writer-supportive government has its cut.
I know this is a difficult message to convey in America, but you don't get something for nothing. You will never earn a harder dollar than you will writing -- unless you happen to marry for money. The second pervasive and harmful misconception about writing is that it is dependent somehow on "inspiration" or "genius."
The idea of the artist as born with a divine fire in his breast -- the Byronic model -- is honored by time. Faulkner perpetuated it when he said, "I listen to the voices." Or Tennessee Williams: "All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols." I could give more examples. But I don't need to. I hear their echo in the scores of beginners, young and old, who ask me "Where do you get your ideas?" and "Do you write every day?" They ask me, "Are you inspired when you write?" and "How do you make yourself imagine things?" I don't deny that genius occasionally visits human beings. There's no other way to account for people like Shakespeare and Sophocles. Fortunately, if you're divinely inspired you don't need my advice. You don't need to spend money on writer's conferences; you ought to think about a career in Iranian politics.
But personally, I agree with Jean Anouilh: "Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance."
Worse than being arrogant, the idea that a writer is basically a helpless stenographer, a channeler for the Spirit of Poetry, is profoundly crippling to the beginner. Why? Because he's usually all too aware that what he or she is coming up with is hopeless sludge.
My advice is to set aside the entire concept of inspiration. Pretend you've never heard the word! Pick up your Scripto with a clear head, ambition, and the knowledge that your first draft will usually be crap. (Mine are!) But oddly enough, the more time you spend on it, the better it will get. If you can produce a final double-spaced page with less than four hours in it, then maybe you were inspired. I find, looking at my last two books, that that's about my own average: four hours of work for each 250 words; eighty-three words an hour. And someone who's really good will spend more time, not less.
No, I want to present you with a new model. I want you to think of yourself as an apprentice. What is an apprentice? An apprentice has talent and desire without much skill. She possesses native imagination and likes words, but hasn't much executory ability. She wants desperately, not to be a writer, but to learn to write well through doing it.
Or, as Jonathan Swift put it: "Blot out, correct, insert, refine, /Enlarge, diminish, interline; / Be mindful, when invention fails, / To scratch your head, and bite your nails."
Some beginning writers think this strange fact that nothing gets written without effort is "writers' block." It isn't. In the real world, nothing gets written without sweat, a sore butt, endless cups of coffee, and occasional screams and tears. Clausewitz said, "In war, everything is profoundly simple, and profoundly difficult." It's the same in writing -- exactly the same.
It never stops surprising me that so many beginners expect their first work to be accepted, praised, published, and trumpeted as the new masterpiece of our age. These are people who wouldn't dream of laying a brick patio themselves, yet they expect to write brilliant novels first crack out of the box..
Recently a man I met at some conference asked me if I'd read his first novel. Well, he said please, so I did. I couldn't read past the first sixty pages. I literally couldn't, his prose felt like tapeworms were eating my brain. Anyway, I don't need to eat a whole sheep to know bad mutton. So, trying to help, I sent him a letter pointing out the problems I saw.
I got a hymn of hate in return. How dare I say that the child of his heart was ungrammatical, unconvincing, dull, violated the rules of storytelling, and was told in summary instead of scene? Didn't I believe in helping young writers? To him, I think, what that meant was supplying compliments, praise, and an introduction first to my agent and then to my editor. His final, withering remark was that he'd been thinking of giving me part of the royalties, but since I was so unhelpful, I could forget it!
Is it necessary to hurt sometimes, in order to help? It reminds me of Irving Stone's story about being rejected by the literary magazine at Berkeley. His short story came back with the note, "Why don't you learn how to write?" So he did. If they'd accepted his story, we'd probably never have heard his name.
Harrison Ford, the actor, once said in an interview: "I don't think you have the right to believe in yourself in the beginning. . . . . Success is a statistical anomaly, no matter what the profession . . . many of those other actors who got off the bus with me were as talented as I am, or more talented. But I feel secure because I know how hard I've worked."
It takes me a year to write even a short novel, working six to eight hours a day. All my work is rewritten at least six times, and the opening, ending, and crucial passages are rewritten up to sixteen times. Once the first draft's finished, I spend hundreds of hours cutting words, finding ways to make one do the work of three. The novel becomes a vast jigsaw puzzle, a crossword puzzle, a labyrinth, a complex program for the most complex computer in the world. Each chapter is read aloud at least three times; it is criticized by the workshop I belong to, by a few of my writing friends whose opinions I respect, by my agent, and by my sources, before it's ever seen by an editor.
No, what writing really is -- well, I think we're misnamed. We shouldn't be called "writers" at all, but "rewriters." Because that's where most of the hours go, and that's where the real work gets done.
Actually, it's the work you do after the novel seems to the eye of the average reader to be finished that is the true test of the novelist. The final one percent of the job, from an almost- complete draft to the published book, absorbs as many hours as the entire process from first concept. It really is almost impossible to impress on someone who hasn't done it how much sheer polishing, sheer travail, has to go into a novel to make it not just publishable, but worth putting your name on.
Does this sound like literary masochism? Then let me ask you this: if you don't submit a manuscript that is perfect -- spelled right, with good grammar throughout, with consistent characters speaking believable dialogue, with all plot lines tied up, with the theme relevant to the central image, with no violations of point of view or lapses in credibility and the fictive dream -- then who will? The acquisitions editor doesn't have the time. Copy editors today are deficient in grammar skills and getting worse.
The answer is: You have to. You're the author. And if you can't, or don't want to, or don't know what I'm talking about, or don't think it's that important, then maybe you'd better rethink your choice of career. The third misconception is that there's some trick to getting published, or that who you know is more important than what you write, or how well you write.
Granted, you may save time if you have a sibling who's the acquisitions editor at Simon and Schuster. But no editor is going to publish you just on the basis of friendship. And I just don't perceive it as that hard to get published if you're producing quality work. Larry Brown, author of the critically acclaimed Facing the Music, Dirty Work, and Joe, began publishing in Easyrider magazine. And there are dozens of well known authors who served their apprenticeships in the little, literary magazines. There are markets that welcome beginners; markets where the demand is always higher than the supply. True, the reason supply's so low is that these markets don't pay a living wage. But we're talking about getting started, not finding a place where you can spend your life. Worry about your writing, not about who you know. Far too many beginners worry about finding an agent when they should be looking for a composition teacher!
The fourth misconception is: that even if you don't make money, you'll have prestige. Someone will care, or respect you. And somehow this is the most pathetic error of all. The vast majority of people you meet will have no idea what you mean when you say you're a writer. They literally do not understand what you are talking about.
And now let me give you two short pieces of advice. The best I have to give. The first: to grow professionally, you need to belong to a workshop.
Good workshops aren't classes. They're more like therapy groups, or very small, fanatical sects. They're 5 to 12 obsessive writers who meet regularly to read their work, criticize it, talk writing, live writing. Join one or start your own. Everything else, all the tips, how to write, how to lure in a reader -- you'll learn in a workshop. Artists learn by making mistakes, and you can make them fast and cheap there.
The second piece of advice has to do with failure. Last year, beginning writers wasted 1.2 million hours being depressed by rejections and difficulties. Worse yet, they gave up without really giving it all they had. Because they got discouraged.
I recommend you adopt the Rule of 32. That is, beginners get 32 free failures. That's the price of learning the job. Only after 32 rejections, insults, bad novels, misfired short stories, do you get to start counting.
Have I succeeded in communicating how cruel this profession can be? Does it dismay you, the thought that it's not going to be easy?
Good. Because now I'll tell you why, for all the drawbacks, there's nothing else on earth I'd rather be than a writer, and nowhere I'd rather be than sitting at a keyboard.
I set my own tasks and answer to no boss. All my employed life I had to work for people less intelligent, less imaginative, and less idealistic than I was. When I tried to use my talents, I was stepped on.
Writing is one of the few creative activities left in our culture. Manipulating money, advertising, producing, policing, selling -- all these meet goals set for us by others. Only in the arts can we express our own convictions, our own way. In a way, my novels are conversations with friends I've never met. And more; I can render them a service.
Mario Vargas Llosa called us "mutilated beings, burdened with the awful dichotomy of having only one life and the ability to desire a thousand." But fiction lets us step outside our lives and into those of others. They teach us respect for others, and even love. That, in the end, is the best reason I know for writing: for your readers. It's as simple as that.
Good luck!
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David Poyer is possibly the best known writer of American sea fiction
alive today. His most recent book is THAT ANVIL OF OUR SOULS (Simon
& Schuster, July 2005). Check out his work and career advice at
the Home Page location below.
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