New Novelists Note

From Barnes & Noble.com new novelist Diane Setterfield offers this advice:

1) Before you write a single word, spend several decades reading.
2) Forget advances, best-seller lists, publishing trends. Just write the book you most want to read.
3) Find a handful of honest people who know what they are talking about and who are not afraid of hurting your feelings. Show them your work and listen to what they say.
4) When you have written the best book you possibly can, edit, edit, edit to make it even better.

We have to guess that she followed her own advice in creating her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, recently published with a $2 million advance in America. She has a quaint/techie website and the book was launched with lots of online brouhaha, so I was eager for my friend Karen to lend it to me. I'm not the only one to feel the whoops and hype were a bit overextended. The book did not satisfy after following through all the loops and machinations of the plot.

[writing fiction]

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