7.22.25: Questions Answered

As I've made my way through this process, I've started to answer a lot of questions I've had as a reader.

• Why do authors always set books in the same place or general location? I always wondered why, say Stephen King mostly wrote stories that took place in New England. Turns out it's pretty hard to write a story, or at least a credible one, about a place you don't know. I naturally wrote one story and am writing another set in two places where I've spent a LOT of time.

• Why do so many stories that take place in a single region have different dialects and speech patterns? Shouldn't everyone in the Midwest talk like a Midwesterner? Fun fact I'm now learning-it's reallly f***ing boring when every character sounds the same.

• How do writers make conversations and dialogue sound natural? Generally speaking, if a conversation or quote sounds like a writer wrote it, it's probably pretty lousy or forced. There's a real art to word selection, pacing, and balancing dialogue vs. actions that mirror real life and it's something I have a long way to go on.

• How did writers get their starts? More importantly, how did they get rich and famous? I've gone through a LOT of success stories, and sadly for me, the vast majority of them had the same recipe-write a bunch of stories that are probably crap and then keep writing until they get less crappy and, eventually, turn into something people will want to read. The Martian was technically Andy Weir's first NOVEL, but he said himself he wrote three or more unpublished novels that gathered little to no interest. JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is an all-timer and was his first novel but took ten years to complete.

• Do really good books get turned down by agents and publishers? All. The. Time. Any classic or Great American Novel out there was probably turned down by multiple agents and publishers. Gone with the Wind? 40 or more rejections. Harry Potter? At least a dozen. The all-time unofficial record holder is Chicken Soup for the Soul (according to the interwebs) with 144 rejections and, unfortunately, probably zero relevance today to anyone under the age of 30.