Hi, writers. This blog post is for you-or really, for anyone who takes the risk of following their artistic vision and putting it out into the world. I recently gave a talk at the Southern California Writers Conference in San Diego that I called 7 Rules to Write By. Here’s Rule 1. I’ll cover the rest in subsequent posts.

I described my talk as part memoir, part how-to, and part fairy tale, and this rule (like most of them) starts with memoir. Every writer has rejection stories. But I have one of the worst. Seriously. After having five paperback mystery novels published in the 1990s, I wrote my breakthrough book, a thriller. My agent loved it so much that when she sent it to editors, she immediately scheduled an auction. That means she set a date on which they all had to tell her what a whopping big advance they were going to offer, and then she’d go back and forth among them and see who’d ultimately come up with the most whopping of all. On the day of the auction, I got up early- when it’s 6 a.m. in San Diego, New York editors are already at work. I even dressed up a bit to go into my office next to the bedroom. You can tell what’s coming, right? We held an auction, and nobody bid. Nor, over the next several months, as she took the book to a number of other publishers, was she able to sell it.

This is where I’m supposed to say how plucky I was, that I picked myself right up and started a new novel. Uh-uh. I was so heartbroken I decided to stop being a novelist.  I got into dance journalism and into teaching writing, both of which I genuinely enjoyed. Ah, but after a few years, I missed the total immersion that comes with working on a novel. And I’d had an idea simmering in my mind. I’d been fascinated by a minor character in The Big Sleep, and I wanted to tell her story. There was only one problem. I saw this book as a departure from the genre fiction I’d done in the past, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. As I wrote in a note to myself at the time: This feels to me like a potentially BIG book. Way too big for me even to risk.

Which leads to…

RULE 1: Go toward what scares you.

It’s what will challenge you and make you grow as a writer (and probably as a person, too), and it will bring out your most meaningful work.

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