So now Lady Haywood is found dead and our main character has the necklace and we’ll take it from there.” Mary Higgins Clark
Mary Higgins Clark was a petite pen-poised dynamo. Over her long and successful career, she wrote some 56 books and sold 100 million books in the U.S. alone—and counting. Some writing advice from a pro:
• “I walked down to NYU and signed up for a short story course and the professor told us, “There’s a secret in your family that people are whispering about. Turn it into fiction…. Take the most interesting situation and ask two questions, ‘Suppose…’ and ‘What if…’ And I’ve been doing it ever since.”
• “I often will find a story in a newspaper. Take a news story and take the DNA out of it and turn it into fiction. Take a true case and spin it around.”
• “Sit down and do it: that’s the hardest part. You have to start on page one. Everyone has a myriad of excuses. The trick is to sit down and start it and maybe look at books you’d like to write and analyze them. I took a Daphne de Maurier book [Rebecca], and I wondered how she did that first paragraph and that last one and everything in between. Those are the tricks you can teach yourself.”
• “It’s a marvelous thing to be able to do what you love to do….I never get bored because I can sit for hours and write the stories in my head.”
For more advice, go to Mary’s website: http://maryhigginsclark.com/ Reading her bio, I learned that her first short story, “Stowaway” was out 42 times before she finally sold it for $100. Now, that’s persistence!
Tips from a seasoned pro to inspire and enliven us as we all write on!
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