What I Wish Someone Had Told Me about Becoming a Writer #3: Russell Smith
By Zoe Whittall
Russell Smith is most recently the author of Confidence, but has written a total of ten books, and is a regular arts columnist for The Globe & Mail. Here's what he had to say for the Q&A series.
What do you wish someone had told you before you published your first book?
I wish someone had explained to me that excellent reviews, great media coverage and even prize nominations can have no effect whatsoever on sales. Not that I would have done anything differently, but I would have been less disappointed, and perhaps thought about obtaining some kind of steady employment instead of optimistically buying nice suits and a lot of optimistic coke and dreaming about how my next book would certainly be my breakthrough.
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What advice do you give emerging writers?
Advice I would give to young writers of fiction is to write an outline. The outline includes an ending. This is always very unpopular advice.
The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.
Zoe Whittall’s next novel, The Best Kind of People, will be published in fall of 2016 with House of Anansi Press. Her novel Holding Still for as Long as Possible, won a Lambda Literary award, was shortlisted for the Relit award, and was an American Library Association’s Stonewall Honor Book. She’s published three books of poetry, and works as a freelance TV writer and journalist in Toronto.
Her books have been translated into French, Swedish, and Korean.
