Agents & Editors Recommend

Read widely and attentively. Read interviews and letters from writers.

Find a writing community and keep it until you grow ready for a new writing community.

You are a person who makes things—poems, essays, short stories—but this is not your whole identity. Go do things, outside, with other people.

Writers are vital parts of communities who archive and render legible ideas, events, and exchanges that might otherwise be lost or have only the short life of some piece of gossip.

I once edited a contemporary “vampire novel” set in an elite private school. When I asked the author to write a brief essay about her use of the vampire as a metaphor for the high school experience, she told me the novel wasn’t about high school—it was about writing. I suddenly understood why the editing process had been such a pain in the neck.

Another novel I worked on appeared to be about the interconnectedness of the lives of disparate characters in the Philippines. The author told me, to my great surprise, that the book was actually a condemnation of religion.

You don’t need to wait for an idea to be perfect to start playing around with it. Books come through in many guises: Some ideas arrive masked as other concepts; some come with a companion or a twin, the road not taken; others need outside input, research, or further development. But if you catch the scent of an idea, don’t hesitate to see where it leads you. 

In Jesse May’s cult classic Shut Up and Deal, the narrator offers an insight that’s been quoted by everyone from the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt to James McManus. It goes like this: “Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck. That’s philosophy. Understanding luck is philosophy, and there are some people who aren’t ever gonna fade it. That’s what sets poker apart.