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Does Everyone Have a Novel in Him, or Not?
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Tim Clare of The Guardian risks shunning by the writing community as he dares to question the truth in the old adage that everyone has a novel in him.

There is an auld axiom beloved of burnt-out English teachers, glamour-impoverished fantasists and a million other drudges seeking to transcend their lives of quiet desperation: everyone has a novel inside them. This slogan has been appropriated as an article of faith by the amateur writing community, whilst its corollary - as a novelist, you have six-and-a-half billion potential rivals - remains the gravest of heresies. Like a blind man in a room of ill-positioned rakes, any group indulging in such wilful myopia is doomed to a series of unpleasant collisions with reality.

Curiously unsatisfied with the idea that being a successful novelist requires the ability to write books that a consistently large number of people are prepared to buy, jaded scribblers search instead for an explanation that will permit them to retreat with their pride and delusions intact. As W Somerset Maugham put it: "I have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull."

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Queuing is what made our nation great. If anything, the British publishing industry is too open to new writers at the expense of skilled stalwarts. Cheap as chips enterprises such as the Macmillan New Writing imprint saturate the market and harm the prestige of publication. Picking authors before they're ripe represents a bad deal for all concerned. Instead of promoting an attitude of "everyone has won and all shall have prizes", the industry needs to remind people that brilliant writing is very, very hard, that there are many dragons to be fought on the way to publication, and that perishing in the battle is no shame.

Cai and his colleagues call the technique "Electro Pen Nanolithography" (EPN). They sweep a very thin metal tip across a film of organic molecules. The tip carries an electric voltage, which causes the region under it to "oxidize," or undergo a reaction that changes the chemical makeup of the film. In a single sweep of the pen, organic "ink" molecules are transferred from the tip to the oxidized regions, creating an extremely thin line.

Each line is just one molecule thick, but the researchers can produce multilayered patterns by writing over the existing pattern. This gives them the ability to create three-dimensional nanoscale "landscapes." Moreover, by turning off the voltage, they can use the tip as a tiny "scanner" to "read" and create an image of the pattern just written.

As for John Marco, he suggests people not slack off on their day jobs. The likelihood of actually making a living from your writing is pretty slim, he says, even though he is one of the few who does.

He started work on his first epic fantasy novel in the late 1990s. That's when he was still a technical writer for a Long Island software company, often working 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. so he could keep weekends free for writing. His wife-to-be took care of all household needs and chores. He put on hold his part-time classes to earn a BA degree. "You name it, it was given up," he says.

The payoff - the sale of his first novel, The Jackal of Nar, which came out in 1999. Because his agent also cooked up a lucrative overseas deal, he was able to resign from the software company seven years ago and focus on his next five novels, with the latest, The Sword of Angels, coming out next month from DAW Books.

To see a book through, "you need to have the juice to keep going," he says. "It's not about becoming a superstar author. First and foremost, it's about writing, and if you truly want to be a writer, you know that in your heart."

The glamorous image of a Hollywood scriptwriter's lifestyle as an endless round of leisurely lunches and celebrity parties has been exposed as a lie by a class action lawsuit filed against one of America's biggest television networks.Fox TV is accused of overseeing and airing shows that were produced by writers who endured intolerable working conditions, being forced to skip meals, submit fake time cards and work more than 80 hours a week in cramped and overheated offices. "The conditions in this industry resemble sweatshops," said the suit on behalf of writers on seven reality TV series.

Daniel Petrie, western area president of the Writers Guild of America, which is backing the action launched by 10 writers and editors on such shows as Trading Spouses, Joe Millionaire and Married by America, said working conditions had pushed some writers to the brink. "We've heard stories of people breaking down from the strain, of men and women working from nine in the morning until after midnight with no meal breaks, of location shoots where eight people were required to work in hot trailers meant for four," he said.