Advice for Novelists (Part 8)

C.J. Darlington, co-founder of TitleTrakk, is running a great series on her blog: She started a series of blog posts in which industry professionals (editors, agents, publicists, authors, etc.) share their responses to this question:

"If you could say one thing to aspiring novelists, what would you say?"

Mike Silva had this to say: Just one thing, really?

I'm an editor at WaterBrook, but in my free time, I'm an unpublished
novelist.

So I've developed these 3 steps to writing fiction that I call my "formula" and interestingly, all of them essentially come down to one thing. Masochistic devotion. I don't know how universal this is-and it's certainly not natural. But I'm a little weird, which doesn't hurt in this profession. And while it's taken me a while to hammer out the 3 steps, something like 8 years, maybe 9, I've never seen anything like this in all the top recommended writing and editing books, which are great. Until I translated all that advice into my own steps and practice, I never felt I was writing my best stuff. You know, not really. And I don't really know if I'm writing my best now, but it feels different, like I've passed the point of no return and it'd be harder to stop now than it would be to keep going.

Kind of like love.

Read the rest here.

Mick Silva, Editor, Waterbrook Press (Visit Mick's blog here for those three steps!)

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