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Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. His first novel, Did You Ever Have a Family, hit the New York Times bestseller list and was longlisted for the National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Bill has also written for The New York Times, Lapham's Quarterly, New York magazine, The Guardian, and Harper's Bazaar.
Bill Clegg's website
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As someone who has been both an author and a literary agent, do you have any advice for aspiring novelists? Is there anything you wish you had been told at the start of your career?
Write!! And then write more. And keep it to yourself for as long as you can before sharing with others. The real writing comes in solving the problems that come up after you've been at it a while. I flopped around for over a year transcribing notes I'd email to myself all with "Novel" in the subject line, and took even longer taking stabs at how to tell the story that I only sensed I wanted to tell but had no clue as to the specifics. Take your time but don't dawdle. You have to get comfortable with experimenting and getting it wrong and also staring at the computer screen with nothing to type. All this discomfort and doubt and frustration in the beginning is just what you have to go through to get to the place where something begins to take shape. Sometimes this period can last a long time. Sometimes not. Either way, it's just as necessary as the days where you feel like you're transcribing something that already exists and your fingers can't move fast enough to put down the words that flow so easily (these days are ...
Barbara D'Amato is a playwright, novelist, and crime researcher. She began writing full-time in 1973, first co-writing plays with her husband, Anthony D'Amato.
After trying different genres, her first published novel in 1980 ...
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If you enjoyed:
Did You Ever Have A Family
Try:
White Male Infant
by Barbara D'Amato
Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Purity, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Did You Ever Have A Family
Try:
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
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