Everything feels so urgent sometimes, doesn’t it?
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From Episode 38 of the First Draft podcast, in which Sarah Enni interviews Kristin Halbrook:
SE: “In the introduction, he [Donald Maass] says like, Most of the books that I would define as ‘breakout’ took the writers between 5 to 10 years to write. And I remember reading that and being like, Oh god.”
KH: “For every author that gets touted as this huge breakout debut, there’s a whole lot of hard work and years behind it, usually. That you never see.”
SE: “You have to get to a stage where it’s okay to take time. You can’t be an impatient author.”
KH: “Yeah, I spent the first few years of writing in a race. A race against… I don’t know what. A race against something. Just to get published. It was such a goal, and I just thought I could run toward it, run toward it, run toward it. But… you can’t run toward it.”
2 responses to “A race against what, exactly?”
True in music, too. There are exceptions (Lorde, for example), but mostly that first big hit has some years leading up to it.
No, just did a little research, and it turns out that Lorde worked for some years before “Royals” — she just started really young.
LOL! Yep. I’m sure there are a FEW “overnight” successes who are more or less truly overnight. But they are the exceptions to the “exceptions.”