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brother, and my sister knew I’d been writing all those years. My wife and I called our friends and said, “We have something special to tell you.” They thought we were having another baby. I said, “Actually, we are having another baby. But I’m the one delivering it. It’s called a book.”
    All I’d known to that point was rejection, so for the next year I kept my day job. Finally my wife and I sat down and I said, “This is something I’ve been working for my whole life. I’d like to have my shot.” We agreed I’d quit, and if the book flopped I’d go back to practicing law. It was nerve-wracking, waiting for the book to come out. I knew if it didn’t sell, with a big advance like that, I was done.
    This sounds a little corny, but the day I felt I’d made it as a writer was the first time I saw a book of mine on a bookstore shelf—in the Borders in the World Trade Center. After that I stopped waiting for the publishers to say, “We’ve had a changeof plans. You have to give the money back.” I realized the writing career was working out.
    Scared to death. Every time.
    Every time I start a project, I sit down scared to death that I won’t be able to bring the magic again.
    You’d never want to be on the operating table with a right-handed surgeon who says, “Today I’m going to try operating with my left hand.” But writing is like that. The way you get better is by pushing yourself to do things differently each time. As a writer you’re not constrained by mechanical devices or technology or anything else. You get to play. Which is terrifying.
    William Goldman, who wrote the script for
Absolute Power
, gave me some great advice. He said, “Write everything as if it’s the first thing you ever wrote. The day you think you know how to do it is the day you’re done as a writer.” He was right. If writing ever becomes a job for me—if I start thinking I’d rather be out playing tennis, so I start taking shortcuts, doing it this time the same way I did it last time—I’ll hang it up.
    Sometimes I envy myself twenty years ago, sitting in my little cubbyhole with nobody knocking on my door, writing stories without worrying about the touring, the money, the foreign travel. But every day I try to face the screen as if there’s no commercial world out there, as if I’m doing it for free, for the pure joy of telling my stories, the way I did it for the first sixteen years.
    David Baldacci’s Wisdom for Writers
Whatever genre you write in, familiarize yourself with what’s current in your genre. What thrilled the reader even ten years ago doesn’t necessarily thrill today. Check out the competition.
Whether you’re writing a novel or a cover letter to a potential agent, shorter is always better. Remember what Abraham Lincoln said, paraphrasing Pascal: “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have time to write a short one.”
The upside of the current state of publishing: it’s a lot easier to self-publish than it ever was. Publish on the Internet, or on demand, or self-publish in print—but whatever you do, if you want to share your story,
publish it.
“Writing for your readers” is a euphemism for “writing what you think people will buy.” Don’t fall for it! Write for the person you know best: yourself.

C HAPTER T HREE
Jennifer Egan
    It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall….
    —Opening lines,
A Visit from the Goon Squad
, 2010
    H ow is Jennifer Egan exceptional? Reviewing her 2006 novel,
The Keep
, the
New York Times
counted the ways. “Jennifer Egan is a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist; she deploys most of the arsenal developed by metafiction writers of the 1960s and refined by more recent authors like William T.