Writing Success

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I never really thought I’d succeed. Children always have grandiose plans to become astronauts and Major League pitchers and movie stars. But somehow in real life that translates into accountants and stay-at-home moms and sales reps. Still, in the mid-1980s, I struck off for a creative writing program at Princeton University, certain I was going to set the literary world on its ear.

“My professor was Mary Morris, an astoundingly fine writer herself. The day my first story was being workshopped, she made me sit on the floor with a glue stick, scissors and construction paper. As the class ripped my masterpiece to shreds, I was to cut and paste together their suggestions. I left the class that day in tears and edited my piece over and over until Mary finally told me to send it to Seventeen magazine. Three months later, an editor left a message on my dorm-room answering machine. They wanted to publish the story. And did I have any more?”
—Jodi Picoult, in Writer’s Digest