Do you have any advice for any young writers out there who are trying to follow in your footsteps?
Yeah. The reason I wrote so many books before I got published was not because I was a terrible writer, though at the beginning I was. It was because I loved writing, and I didn’t want to stop writing to go do all this marketing stuff. And I think that actually helped me, because I got to spend a lot of time playing with my style and deciding what my impact on the genre would be. And it also taught me that even if I never got published, I would keep doing this for the rest of my life. I’d be writing a book every year. No matter what job I ended up in, that was just what I was going to do.
And so, if you don’t love writing to that extent, it’s going to be much harder for you to break in. And so I say, build good habits, write what you love. And make sure that you enjoy the process. Enjoy the busy work parts of it. I went to school freshman year as a chemist. I only changed to English when my sophomore year began. And one of the reasons I made the change is that the busy work part of chemistry, I didn’t enjoy. While the busy work part of writing, I loved. So, love it. And then keep at it. Don’t give up, just keep going.
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