Hi Everyone! For the record, I want that picture to be left justified, but it's late and I'm on the road, and I can't figure it out so I'm just going to leave it like that. :)How'd I get started as a writer. I think, in a way, I was always a writer. And I think that's what most writers will tell you. When I was 7, my favorite activity was sitting in my room and making up stories and writing them down. This was the same when I was 17, and 27, and luckily for me and my career, 37. I started out in college as an English major but then I thought that since I spent so much time reading and writing anyway, I should learn something else and so I switched over to Art History. Which was really nice, as it gave me something other than books to love and talk about and learn about. I've never lost the love I gained for art and it shows up in most of my books.
After college, I wanted to write. I wanted to write a novel, but I didn't feel like I had anything to write about. So I did other things, I lived a really fun life in New York City. I worked in magazines and in the art world and then, at around the time I turned 30, it slowly started to hit me: I had a novel to write. I took every class I could, at NYU Continuing Ed and the New School and wrote in all my free time. Eventually I had a first draft of my first novel, If Andy Warhol Had a Girlfriend, based not so loosely on the decade I'd spent waiting to write my first book.
The best advice I have for aspiring writers? In this order: READ, write, take classes, meet other writers (online or in person) and stay in touch with them and talk to them a lot about writing. To this day, ten years into my career as a novelist, I couldn't do it without my writer friends, or without reading, everything, all the time. Do those things.
And in other news: that picture up there, that I can't get left justified? It's the cover of the mass market edition of my second novel, PUG HILL. This is the cute, little paperback version and it comes with good extras like a readers group guide and the first chapter of the sequel, A PUG'S TALE. And, as ever, it has the Metropolitan Museum of Art, angst, public speaking, New York City, and pugs. It's coming out on November 1. I hope you'll get a chance to check it out...
Till next time,
x Alison
Great post, Alison! Thanks for it.
ReplyDeleteI completely sympathize with your long wait to write your first book! It took me about forty years to get my first Birder Murder mystery written, but now they come out every year!
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with everything you said in this post! I, too, wanted to write my whole life. And I, too, think you need to READ, write and take classes. And, of course, hang out lots with your awesome writer friends. :)
ReplyDeleteI just finish of read this book like 3 days ago and I recommended because it is so good
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