On her website (http://www.jenniferweiner.com), the author Jennifer Weiner has a list of advice if you want to be a novelist.
Weiner is the author of the novels The Next Best Thing, Then Came You, Fly Away Home, and others.
For books about writing to read, she writes “run, do not walk, to your local bookshop and buy Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s utterly indispensable Bird by Bird, and Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings and Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft.”
I would add a few more, but that can be for another time.
A synopsis of some of the other “tools” you need are:
Books by Jennifer Weiner
2) The Miserable Love Life: “Again, a crucial ingredient for the formation of a novelist – romantic humiliation and heartbreak.”
3) Major in Liberal Arts (but not necessarily creative writing): “…a liberal arts education gives you a framework in which to place your own experiences, a context you can use to look at everything else ….”
4) Get a Job (not an MFA): She admits this one might be a bit controversial. But she says she thinks journalism “is just about the perfect career for aspiring young writers.” And if you can’t get a jog in journalism, camp counselor, cook, nanny or anything else that takes you out of your comfort zone is good.
5) Write to Please Yourself: “Tell the story that’s been growing in your heart.”
6) Get a Dog: Getting a dog can help teach you discipline and discipline is what you will need to be a writer.
7) Get Published: Submit, submit, submit. Expect to face rejection, but submit.
8) Find an Agent: This may take as much work, at least for a while, as being a writer.
9) Be a Smart Consumer: Advice on how to screen an agent that is interested in you. You don’t have to take the first one that says yes to your query letter, synopsis, finished novel.
10) Read: “Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, red hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.”
For more details on these tools, go to http://www.jenniferweiner.com/forwriters.htm.
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