I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.
I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.
I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.
I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.