Much can be learned by studying the lives of classic and famous writers. What habits furthered their career? What did their career arc look like? And most important, what lessons can you apply to your writing life?
Jane Austen
While fans of the movie The Jane Austen Book Club might be encouraged to think, "What would Jane do?" in times of romantic crisis, Jane Austen actually had difficulty conforming to the mores of her time. But her failure to marry -- as all of her heroines did -- was our largesse: in her life as a single woman, she penned some of the wittiest, most entertaining novels of the English language. Find out how.
Avi
Born with a learning disability, Avi is proof that anyone with a gift for storytelling and a willingness to work can become a writer. "I enjoy writing and it is hard," he says. "But then it is hard for everyone to write well."Raymond Chandler
Though America's finest hard-boiled detective novelist is known for exposing L.A.'s seedy underbelly and for his streetwise (if poetic) writing style, he was actually a highly educated, even genteel man, who studied in England and France. Not until adulthood did he come to Southern California, the place that was to dominate his fiction.Larry McMurtry
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Author of some thirty novels and 71 screenplays, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Larry McMurtry is a prolific and ambitious novelist. Throughout his long career, he's maintained the same schedule, and clearly it's served him well. Learn what worked for him.
Katherine Anne Porter
Hard-drinking, oft-married, and restless, Katherine Anne Porter offers more examples of what not to do as a writer than what to do. Despite her dissolute lifestyle, however, she managed to pen some of America's greatest short stories -- and she left a life story as compelling as anything she wrote.Mark Twain
Like Raymond Chandler, Mark Twain wrote to make a living and was famous in his day not for works like Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but for his travel writing. "High & fine literature is wine," he said once, "and mine is only water; but everybody likes water."