Sometimes you just have to tell the
story you have to tell. It may be way out here, like having a dog for a
narrator (Who’s going to publish that?) or a story about a spider or one told
by a dead girl.
You have to be brave. It’s hard.
It’s very hard to write something that you know is pretty far out there. When I
began my ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES novel about aliens landing
and taking over the world and enslaving everyone, I thought—really? Am I really
going to try to write this? It’s so, well, weird. Who will publish it? You
don’t want to have these thoughts. You just want to write, but most novels take
a year or more to finish. It’s a chunk of time and your life. But ultimately
we’re writers and that’s what we do and part of that is taking chances,
following our passion. I suppose this is the writer’s way of following Joseph
Campbell’s advice: follow your bliss.
Every time you write it’s a kind of
leap of faith. You have to be brave. If your story is a strange one and it’s
going to be told in a strange way, it may be harder to sell to a publisher.
That’s true. But who knows what will happen then? An author named Stein did
write a book from a dog’s point of view called THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN.
Great novel. Great reviews. Bestseller. And of course Charlotte’s Web is a
great novel about a spider and ELSEWHERE and THE LOVELY BONES are novels with
POV narrators who are dead girls. You just never know. You have to write what
you have to write. You have to be brave.
Marcus
Zusak, writer of the much-honored best-seller, THE BOOK THIEF, talks about
taking chances in writing this phenomenal book.
Another
writer explores the importance of taking risks and gives some specific advice.
http://www.adventuresinscifipublishing.com/2012/01/the-importance-of-risk-taking-in-fiction-writing/http://www.adventuresinscifipublishing.com/2012/01/the-importance-of-risk-taking-in-fiction-writing/
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