How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author

As a part of my “Books on Craft” campaign, a resolution I am keeping for 2010 and beyond to read one book on writing for every two I might read for fun, I read Janet Evanovich’s How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author.

Sadly, this book was not quite as insiteful as Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel, but I did get a snippet or two of advice. This book is really a compilation of dozens, perhaps hundreds of questions that Evanovich has gotten over the years from her fans. It’s even very lightly edited such that it looks like a Q & A article out of a writing magazine.

As I said, I didn’t get much out of it and the fact that she illustrated many of the techniques she discussed using excerpts from her books rather bothered me. What did I get out it? I found out that prior to Evanovich becoming even moderately popular, she was a romance writer for many years. Then, it took her ten years just to get that first book off the ground! Ten years! Here I am complaining about 1 year. I’ve set a new deadline for myself, it’s 10 years. It’s similar to the goals I used to make on significantly long road marches in the army. Whenever road marches got hard I looked ahead at the Rangers in front of me and decided that if they could make it to that point where I saw them, then so could I. When I got to that point . . . I looked up and made it to the next point. So in that spirit . . .I’m looking ahead to Evanovich. If she can have the determination to out last 10 years, then so can I.

Of course, I neglected to write that the goal setting method I used in the Ranger’s only worked when you weren’t leading the way. But in this case, I’m not, so it should work for me.