I Never Wrote Anything That Was Published

I Have Only One Bit Of Advice To Beginning Writers: Be Sure Your Novel Is Read By Rodgers And Hammerstein.

I Would Suppose I Learned How To Write When I Was Very Young Indeed. When I Read A Child's Book About The Trojan War And Decided That The Greeks Were Really A Bunch Of Frauds With Their Tricky Horses And The Terrible Things They Did, Stealing One Another's Wives, And So On, So At That Very Early Age, I Re-wrote The Ending Of The Iliad So That The Trojans Won. And Boy, Achilles And Ajax Got What They Wanted, Believe Me. And Thereafter, At Frequent Intervals, I Would Write Something. It Was Really Quite Extraordinary. Never Of Very High Merit, But The Daringness Of It Was.

I Was A Navy Officer Writing About Navy Problems And I Simply Stole This Lovely Army Nurse And Popped Her Into A Navy Uniform, Where She Has Done Very Well For Herself.

If Your Book Doesn't Keep You Up Nights When You Are Writing It, It Won't Keep Anyone Up Nights Reading It.

Being Goal-oriented Instead Of Self-oriented Is Crucial. I Know So Many People Who Want To Be Writers. But Let Me Tell You, They Really Don't Want To Be Writers. They Want To Have Been Writers. They Wish They Had A Book In Print. They Don't Want To Go Through The Work Of Getting The Damn Book Out. There Is A Huge Difference.