Susan Straight Finds La's Secret Heart In

... You Should Wait Until The Book Is Finished Before Making A Judgment On Its Content. By The Time You Have Gone Through Twenty Drafts, The Characters May Have Developed Lives Of Their Own, Completely Separate From The People You Based Them On In The Beginning. And Even If Someone, At Some Time, Gets Upset With Your Words - So What? Live Your Life, Sing Your Song. Anyone Who Loves You Will Want You To Have That.

I Used To Worry About Money And Career And What Was Going To Happen. How Was I Gonna Succeed Or Fail In The World? And I Thought About It Enough That I'm No Longer Worried About It. I'm Not... I Don't Worry About What's Gonna Happen In My Life. I Don't Worry About Telling Me About Dying, My Own Mortality. That's A Given.

The Biggest Misconception That People Have About The Literary Life Is The Romance Of It. That A Writer Has This Large World Available To Him Or Her Of People, Of Ideas, Of Experiences, Of Interchange Of Ideas...

This Is All You Have To Do. Sit Down Once A Day To The Novel And Start Working Without Internal Criticism, Without Debilitating Expectations, Without The Need To Look At Your Words As If They Were Already Printed And Bound. The Beginning Is Only A Draft. Drafts Are Imperfect By Definition.

Literature Is The Adventure. It's The Story, It's The Fight, It's People Falling In Love, It's People With Deep Personality Disorders Who Succeed Anyway Beyond Themselves. That's What Great Literature Is.