1. If while you were asleep, Rumplestiltskin crept into your home and wrote your book for you, that would be a wonderful thing. Because it would mean that you were either a retired President of the United States or a has-been TV personality.
2. Some extremely successful self-published authors often ask their many online readers for advice on plot and character development. This is like asking strangers on the subway if you should get a nosejob.
3. All writers deserve legal access to medical marajuana. And medical vodka.
4. I knew a wealthy woman who lived in a 12-room apartment. Her doting husband also bought her an additional studio apartment in the same building, and furnished it at great expense, for use as her designated Writing Room. She also purchased a special writing wardrobe and a writing hat. As far as I know, she never wrote a word.
This may be why Virginia Woolf didn’t call her classic essay A Co-op Of One’s Own.
5. Some people imagine that talent, life experience and ambition are a writer’s fuel. This is incorrect. Snickers bars are a writer’s fuel.
6. The new way of lying about having read an author’s work is to tell them, “I just downloaded you onto my Kindle.”
7. Just as with grief, at the end of a working day a writer passes through several stages: Exhiliration, Exhaustion, Doubt and If I Have to Think About This Book for One More Second I’m Going to Kill Myself Or Even Better, I’m Going to Kill Anyone Who Answers the Phone at Time-Warner Tech Support.
8. Writers have their own cherished versions of urban legends, including:
The classic play that was written in a weekend.
The author who wrote his or her best work while drunk or high.
The notion that having had an abusive childhood will make you a great writer. Or a better parent.
The writer who was struck by inspiration at Starbucks, and instantly scribbled an outline for what would become their massive bestseller on a napkin.
The writer who was struck by inspiration at Starbucks, but didn’t write their idea down because they couldn’t find a pen or a napkin, and died in poverty and disgrace.
All of these legends are TRUE.
