The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing
- Author
- David Morrell
- Year
- 2008
- Cluster
- the writing life
- Format
- book
David Morrell wrote First Blood — he invented Rambo — and then kept publishing thrillers for decades while teaching literature. The Successful Novelist (2008) distills that career into lessons with an unglamorous, built-to-last quality: why do you want to write, and will your reasons survive year ten? Where do ideas actually come from, and how do you tell the ones that can carry a novel? Plot, character, viewpoint, research — then the part most craft books skip: agents, contracts, promotion, and the long middle of a career, when the industry has stopped being impressed that you exist.
Morrell’s test for advice is brutally practical: did it keep him published? That gives the book a commercial-fiction center of gravity, and writers with literary or experimental ambitions will feel the fit pinch. It also gives the book its value — this is what the profession looks like from inside, described by someone who never confused luck with method.
The natural companion to Booklife: Morrell for the profession as lived, VanderMeer for keeping the practice alive inside it.
You want one working genre novelist's whole-career view: craft, agents, contracts, promotion, endurance.
You're allergic to commercial-fiction pragmatism — Morrell measures advice by whether it kept him published.
Booklife — career strategy for the internet era · On Writing — another life, different lessons