Product Description

This may come as a shock, but brilliant writing and clever wordplay do not a published author make. True, you’ll actually have to write if you want to be a writer, but ultimately literary success is about much more than putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys). Before you snap your pencil in half with frustration, please consider the advice writer, teacher, and self-made lit star Ariel Gore offers in this useful guide to realizing your literary dreams.

If you find yourself writing when you should be sleeping and scribbling notes on odd pieces of paper at every stoplight, you might as well enjoy the fruits of your labor. How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead is an irreverent yet practical guide that combines solid writing advice with guerrilla marketing and promotion techniques guaranteed to launch you into print—and into the limelight. You’ll learn how to:

• Reimagine yourself as a buzz-worthy artist and entrepreneur
• Get your work and your name out in the world where other people can read it
• Be an anthology slut and a brazen self-promoter
• Apply real-world advice and experience from lit stars like Dave Barry, Susie Bright, and Dave Eggers to your own career

Cheaper than an M.F.A. but just as informative, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead is your catapult to lit stardom. Just don’t forget to thank Ariel Gore for her inspiring, hands-on plan in the acknowledgments page of your first novel!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194606 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-27
• Released on: 2007-03-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307346483
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Booklist
The best thing about this writers' guide is that it doesn't sound like any other writers' guide. Gore tells you to do a lot of things that other authors say are either wrong or irrelevant. Sure, you can waste time making yourself a lovely little space to write in, but how's that going to get your name on a published book? What you need to do, Gore says, is just be a writer. If you have a story to tell, tell it, and once you've told it, promote the hell out of it. Publish it yourself, if you have to, and then sell it. Check the local papers, find a spoken-word open-mike night, and go read your material in front of an audience. Send out press releases; publish your own magazine. And, most important, learn real fast that nobody out there will give a damn about what you have got to say until you make them pay attention to you. One of the snappiest, most useful books a writer for hire is likely to read. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Ariel Gore is the author of The Hip Mama Survival Guide, The Mother Trip, and Atlas of the Human Heart, as well as the novel The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Write

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

--Rita Mae Brown



Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: You need money and a room of your own if you're going to write. But I've written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I'd waited for money and a room, I'd still be an unpublished welfare mom--except they would have cut my welfare off by now. It might be nice to have money and a room (or it might be suicidally depressing--who knows?), but all you really need is a blank page, a pen, and a little bit of time.

Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you're dead, you'll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren't holding any paper. They've got plans, lemme tell ya, and their book is going to be better than yours. Too bad it's written entirely on the sheaves of their imagination.

I don't know all the reasons folks pay good money to take my classes and still don't write, but often it has to do with their own high expectations of themselves and wild notions about genius. They think stories should spring fully formed like goddesses from their Zeus-heads. They read novels by masters and imagine their own books snuggling up with the classics at the bookstore. They can't fathom the reality that all these masterpieces were once messy scrawls across ripped pages. First drafts of masterpieces are rarely recognizable as such--and good writers don't leave the price tags on their work. Inspiration comes mythic-magical, but an annoying thing happens in the transmission from inspiration to worldly draft: Things come out a little fuzzy. Introductions are clunky, transitions are awkward, dialogue sounds forced, and sensory details are wholly lacking. A writer's privilege is that she can fix it later. And then fix it again. There's magic in the first raw draft of a story, but the real alchemy happens in rewriting.

It doesn't take a world of discipline to put words to paper--plenty of writers are famously undisciplined procrastinators--but it does take a commitment bordering on obsession, and it takes some humility.



It's Thursday evening and my dreamy student walks in and takes her seat, empty-handed.

"Didn't get a chance to write anything this week?" I ask.

She shakes her head, looks down at her lap. "I didn't have time."

And I nod.

"When do you have time to write?" she asks.

And I answer as honestly as I can: If I'm on deadline, I write furiously. A chapter a day. One of my best writing teachers, Ms. Sarah Pollock back at Mills College, taught me that it isn't the most talented writers who are widely published, but rather the ones who meet their deadlines. So I've always met my deadlines.

Left to my own inspirations, I write in spurts and stops--sometimes every day for hours and sometimes not at all. Weeks pass. I think I'm blocked. What does that mean, "blocked"? I decide I'm empty. With some relief and some nostalgia, I think it's over--this need to put thoughts to words and words to paper. I consider other jobs, like carpentry or bartending. I romanticize more physical hobbies like weight lifting or cooking. I forget all about it. I get distracted. And then one day I wake up from a strange dream of elephants stampeding over bridges and I sit down to a blank page and see what comes of it.

That doesn't answer my student's question, of course. The answer is that I write when I can.

As a teenager, I traveled all over Asia and Europe, almost never enrolled in school, almost never punctuated my days with a regular job. I didn't have much money, so I slept in hostels, squats, train stations, and doorways. I had all the time in the world. Sometimes I sat in near-empty caf*s, bored out of my mind. Aside from a cork-covered journal that took me four years to fill and an hour to burn, I wrote nothing.

I've never been more productive than I was in my early twenties. I had a baby, took a full load of college classes, worked part-time, spent a day out of every week dealing with bureaucracies at the welfare office, the financial aid office, or family court. Still, my daughter's infancy lent an urgency to my days. I wanted to be a writer. Even if I produced nothing publishable or otherwise presentable to the world, I had to write. Something. Every day. Sketches. Observations. Whatever. I wanted to be a writer, so I became one. How? I wrote things down.

Later, when I finished grad school and my daughter started elementary, I wrote every day from nine A.M. to one P.M. Four hours seemed a goodly chunk of time, but I kept to a leisurely pace. No mad-rushing, computer-key-banging, scribbling-across-a-blank-page-just-to-fill-it dash through the night toward the inevitable moment when the baby would wake, hungry and demanding a tit, pulling me away from the kitchen table and into the bedroom we shared, forcing me, finally, to lie down, to feed her, to fall asleep. And dream. Nine A.M. to one P.M.

Then I invited a partner to come and live with us. Nine A.M. to one P.M. But wouldn't it be nicer to go out to breakfast than to write? Wouldn't it be just as well to sit and talk?

I'll write nights, I decided, before I go to bed. Night: The sun sets, painting things orange. My daughter needs help with her homework. She needs to be tucked in. Kiss me good night, Mama. Tell me another story in the dark. At last she's asleep. Or she's not asleep and I leave her with instructions to count porcupines. From the dark of her room to the flickering light of the living room . . . there's a trashy Lifetime movie on TV and we've got some cheap wine. My neck hurts. The chiropractor says it's because I use the wrong muscles to move my arms. Oh, well. Weary eyes, tired of focusing. I've seen this movie before. I take out my contacts and change into my pajamas, jot a few blurry lines across the top of a yellow legal pad. Should I get my glasses? No. Turn out the light, dear. You can write tomorrow.

And so it goes. There are children to be raised, money to be earned, wine to drink, movies to watch, lovers to kiss.

When do I write? I write when I can. I've learned that I work best on deadline, so I invent my own closing dates and trick myself into believing something bad will happen if I don't have, say, twelve pages by Tuesday. I write during the day when my daughter is at school. I write at night when everyone else is sleeping. I write in the morning before they get up. I write in the afternoon when my daughter is on the phone. I bought a blue velvet couch at a garage sale and put it out on the covered porch and it became my office. I've picked up the pace. If I get an hour, I can write five pages. It's nothing Kerouac would have been proud of. Fuck Kerouac.

I write while I'm driving. This is probably rather dangerous. Worse than being on the cell phone, really. But I try to be careful. I write in my head and then I speak it out loud so I won't forget and then I jot it down at red lights.

This is why I do not take the freeway.

I learned to write while driving when my daughter was small and her car seat provided the only respite before sleep. Later she got a plastic car and tooled around our concrete backyard muttering half-lines of poetry as she turned the wheel because she understood that this was how to drive--you mutter and then you write at red lights. I don't even look down at the notebook in my lap as I scribble, because if I do, the person behind me inevitably starts raging on his horn when the light turns green and I don't budge. I keep my eye on the signal, hoping it will stay red just a little bit longer, and I write in a shorthand that's part English, part Chinese, and part random symbolism. Arrows and circles and plus signs and ankhs and a cursive that would make my third-grade penmanship teacher weep serve as my first draft. It's pretty hard to decipher it all when I get home, but I do the best I can.

"But I don't have any time to write," my student says. And I don't ask her how it is, then, that she has time to come to class. I'm glad to have her, even empty-handed. Instead, I offer some suggestions: If you don't have time to write, stop answering the phone. Change your e-mail address. Kill your television. If you don't have a baby, have one. If you have a baby, get a sitter. If you work too much, work more. If you don't work enough, work less. If there's a problem, exaggerate it. If you're broke, go to the food bank. If you have too much money, give it away. If you're north, go south. If you're south, go north. If you don't drink, start. If you drink, sober up. If you're in school, drop out. If you're out of school, drop in. If you believe you have a year to live, imagine you have a hundred. If you believe you have a hundred years to live, imagine you only have one. If you're sane, go crazy. If you're crazy, snap out of it. If you've got a partner, break up. If you're single, find a lover! The shock of the new--shake yourself awake. There is only this moment, this night, this remembrance rolling toward you from the distant past, this blank page, this inspiration yielding itself to you. Will you meet it?

You don't need money and a room of your own, you need pen and paper, and my gift to you now is Marcy Sheiner's most excellent poem, "I Write in the Laundromat."

I write in the Laundromat.

I am a woman

and between wash & dry cycles

I write.

I write while the beans soak

and with children's voices in my ear.

I spell out words for scrabble

while I am writing.

I write as I drive to the office

where I type a man's letters

and when he goes to lunch

I write.

When the kids go out the door
<...

Customer Reviews

Never Too Late To Learn
I wish this book had been written several years ago, when I first started my writing career. Ariel Gore's wit and wisdom could have spared me a lot of error and grief. How to Be a Famous Writer Before You're Dead is a breezy and informal guide for the writer looking for that first publishing score. Using her own experiences, as well as those of other writers, comedians, and entertainers, Gore speaks to the reader as if to an old friend and "tells it like it is." Launching a writing career is a scary, but rewarding, endeavor. Gore's encouragement and practical advice should inspire any first-time writer to keep at it. Hell, her book inspired me, even after five books of my own; after all, I'm not dead yet.

John Kachuba
[...]

This little book is a delight.
Got a postcard at school advertising a book on journalism. Before I tossed it (I'm retiring -- what do I need another book on journalism for?) I turned it over. There was a picture of Ariel Gore's book, with a brief blurb. I was intrigued and ordered it via amazon when I got home. What a gift to myself it turned out to be. I needed this boost. I've wanted to write for years, and resigned myself to the comments written on students' papers and my own online forum. After reading just the first couple of chapters, I know there are no excuses. I consider this book a godsend. Fun to read, beautifully written, wise and wonderful. Thank you, Ariel Gore!

My new favorite writing book
It's funny, it's true, it's irreverent, and it's one of the best new books on writing and publishing available. (Literary snobs won't agree, but who asked them?) I've got three shelves crammed with writing books, and while most are pretty good, they all offer the same safe advice. Gore stresses the importance of marketing and promoting yourself and getting your stuff OUT THERE -- even if it means self-publishing your poems on a copy machine or posting a humor column in the PTA newsletter. While Gore's clear, take-no-prisoners style will appeal mostly to the young and the hip, I'm recommending this book to everyone in my writing workshops, no matter how old (or un-hip) they are. -Cindy La Ferle