Write What You Want, Open Your Own Doors

Lovers of books, buy the July 13th issue of Newsweek (a magazine that has lately been looking so smart, so right in its new designer threads). The editors have called this issue "What to Read Now," and there's no mere lip service to books paid here. This is the real thing, with articles titled "What to Read Now. And Why." (which lists The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Brooklyn among the top 50!!!), "The Write Stuff," "Best Books Ever," "Now, Read it Again," The Reluctant Poet Laureate," "My Favorite Covers," and "Homer & Langley: An exclusive (E.L. Doctorow) excerpt."

Readers of this blog know that I'm a huge fan of Olive Kitteridge, and that I had the privilege of seeing Elizabeth Strout read from this Pulitzer winner not long ago, and of speaking with her for a spell. She's one of the interviewees in this Newsweek issue, and what she has to say—not just about how hard writing is, but how essential— is worth the price of the magazine.

But there are also these pristine words from Lawrence Block. What Block expresses here is a notion in which I, too, have put my faith. My first book was rejected by the house that had stated, unequivocably, that it had plans to buy it, because, the house marketing team reported, it would never sell (and then it did). FLOW, my autobiography of a river, was considered unsalable; a university press took it on, and that book changed my life in Philadelphia. I write literary novels for young adult readers that are devoid of vampires and salacious details; somehow or other (that somehow being the blog community), those books still find their readers.

It can, in other words, be done. Lawrence Block:

"...I think the less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do. The enormous mistake a lot of young writers make is that they want to know what people want."