conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Tom, Borderlands with the genre: Reference, Writing, Research & Publishing Guides?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing a Novel'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing a Novel
  Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. Lee spends his spare time reading; listening to music; and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
  Writing has two halves—the mental and the physical. I had always done the mental stuff—the daydreaming, the "doing narrative"... I started doing the physical side when I needed a job.
  It was "Killing Floor"—the first Jack Reacher novel. It was a thriller, a suspense novel, a crime novel, a Western.
  I worked exclusively in entertainment—theater, and then television. Both indirectly helped enormously, in terms of understanding deadlines, and most of all in understanding that the audience is king.
  I underestimated two things: how patient publishers were prepared to be, in terms of slowly building a career; and how nice everyone in the business would be.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing a Novel
  Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. Lee spends his spare time reading; listening to music; and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
  Writing has two halves—the mental and the physical. I had always done the mental stuff—the daydreaming, the "doing narrative"... I started doing the physical side when I needed a job.
  It was "Killing Floor"—the first Jack Reacher novel. It was a thriller, a suspense novel, a crime novel, a Western.
  I worked exclusively in entertainment—theater, and then television. Both indirectly helped enormously, in terms of understanding deadlines, and most of all in understanding that the audience is king.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Many talented people have no discipline whatsoever. You can be brilliant but directionless, in which case the brilliance is of little consequence. To have a worthwhile career, you have to be able to put in long hours at the keyboard. Discipline and diligence are evidence not just of a writer who's a good businessman, but of a writer who is committed to his vision both as an artist and a craftsman.
  Don't scope the market with the hope of writing what is wanted, and avoid buying into the intellectual fashions of your time, for they will look foolish in years to come. The novelists and playwrights who were Stalinists during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, and who allowed their Stalinism to color their work, are unreadable now, and the writers themselves appear naïve at best. For some reason, writers have a desire to be seen as intellectuals, although the history of intellectualism is packed full of monsters and fools. Think for yourself, hold fast to your common sense, identify the enduring truths that intellectuals routinely strive to deny, and your work will be human and humane, rather than ideological. Because the great majority of fiction is always consciously or unconsciously slavish in its service to intellectual fashion, you will stand out as different from others, and your work will find an audience.
  Kat is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she majored in anthropology and history. Her early works were historical romances, but she has since found an enthusiastic audience for her romantic suspense novels.
  It was mostly by accident. I was helping my husband with his grammar in a novel he had written—his first attempt—and discovered I loved the work. I thought, "Maybe I should try this myself." And so I did.
  It was a romance. I loved reading romance novels and I was by nature an extremely romantic person. I still am.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I write outlines in order to deceive editors into buying my stuff. They are a separate prose form that has nothing to do with my work. If my characters aren't surprising me, I'm in trouble.
  Economically, the best thing is getting a check for a million bucks. The worst is going bankrupt. I've done both.
  Spiritually, the best thing is discovering the actual potential of human beings. When you do that, there is a sense of escaping from a web you did not know had captured you.
  Intellectually, the best thing is being interested. The worst is when you are not. I've never written anything that didn't absolutely fascinate me, but I have tried and it's soul hell.
  Discipline and time management are absolutely crucial. When it's going well, I can do 10 pages in a day. Twenty, when I'm white hot. But usually I am not white hot. Usually, I am struggling. The morning, the empty page, the awful sense that my career is over. Day after day. The key for me is to sit there all day, no matter what.