I finished the novel within three and a half months, writing longhand on legal yellow pads. When I went back to work I typed it up in the evenings and made the changes, and sent it off to a publisher. The best I was hoping for was a letter saying, ‘Not quite good enough but if you work at it you can get there.’ I was very surprised to get an enthusiastic letter back offering to buy the novel. Then I tried to negotiate some minor points of the contract—I didn’t have an agent—and I was equally shocked to get a letter back withdrawing the offer. (The publisher believed that a beginning writer should not quibble.)
It didn’t matter, because I decided I would ignore the second letter. The first letter said I could write. There were things happening at work that I found very irritating. So I cleared my desk and I completed every project in the pipeline, and I laid down my resignation. ‘You can’t go!’ I said, ‘Read the resignation. I’m going.’ I was told, ‘If you do this, you’ll never work for the United States government again.’ I said, ‘Could I have that in writing?’
My wife once said to me—when I’d been writing for ten or fifteen years—that I could always go back to being a nuclear engineer. And I said to her, ‘Harriet, would you let someone who quit his job to go write fantasy anywhere near your nuclear reactor? I wouldn’t!’
I leaped right into writing, and I know a lot of writers who have done that. Other people need to develop the facility.
I know as many different ways of writing as I know writers. To develop your own way of writing, read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Especially read what you want to write, and write what you like to read. . . because if you don’t like to read it, you won’t be able to write it.
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