Comments on: Wishful thinking http://stevendkrause.com/2008/03/13/wishful-thinking/ School, work, life, and everything else Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:46:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.2 By: Christopher Weuve http://stevendkrause.com/2008/03/13/wishful-thinking/#comment-219 Christopher Weuve Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:40:30 +0000 http://stevendkrause.com/2008/03/13/wishful-thinking/#comment-219 Steve writes: "Didn’t J.K. Rowling get her start as an unwed mother living on the UK’s equivalent of welfare? Didn’t Stephen King write his first novel while working in a laundromat? Didn’t Faulkner write As I Lay Dying while he was a night watchman at a power plant or something?" For the counter argument (maybe), see Dan Simmons's website, especially the Writing Well series (http://www.dansimmons.com/writing_welll/writing.htm). Now, I think Simmons is wrong, and you don't have to have a snooty appreciate of every single classic to write fiction (there are too many examples which refute him), but on the flip side Simmons does have this tendency of winning the major award in a chosen genre with the first book he writes in the genre, so I will at least entertain his argument. Steve writes:
“Didn’t J.K. Rowling get her start as an unwed mother living on the UK’s equivalent of welfare? Didn’t Stephen King write his first novel while working in a laundromat? Didn’t Faulkner write As I Lay Dying while he was a night watchman at a power plant or something?”

For the counter argument (maybe), see Dan Simmons’s website, especially the Writing Well series (http://www.dansimmons.com/writing_welll/writing.htm). Now, I think Simmons is wrong, and you don’t have to have a snooty appreciate of every single classic to write fiction (there are too many examples which refute him), but on the flip side Simmons does have this tendency of winning the major award in a chosen genre with the first book he writes in the genre, so I will at least entertain his argument.

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