How's your day going, writer?

I was flipping through A Reader’s Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year by Tom Nissley this morning, looking for a little inspiration on this grey, cloudy day.

Here is one of today’s highlights, dated 1952:

When Allen Ginsberg struck up a correspondence with his fellow New Jerseyan William Carlos Williams – “from me, and unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county in the world” – he sent him samples of traditional, rhymed poems. Williams didn’t much like them, so two years later Ginsberg pulled out some “short crappy scraps” from his journals and tried those instead. Those the old poet liked (he also like Ginsberg’s letters, which he later quotes at length in the fourth book of Paterson), and his enthusiastic response on this day – “You must have a book. I shall see that you get it. Don’t through anything away. These are it.” – led Ginsberg to write to his pals Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy that this was their big break: “We’ll have a huge collected anthology of American Kicks and Mental Muse-eries.”

You just never know where your “big break” will come from. Maybe it will be a book review, maybe it will be a chance encounter with a literary agent, maybe it will be a phone call made on your behalf. Who knows? The secret is to not depend on that big break, but rather to focus on doing the legwork to get yourself there.

Seek out a mentor. Keep writing, keep revising. Read lots of different types of things. Go to writers’ conferences. Talk to other authors. Interact with the world around you.

Writing is a solitary act, and you cannot become a successful author unless you put yourself out there. Consider this your reminder to be brave, and to take a chance on yourself.

Also, happy birthday to John Steinbeck (1902) and N. Scott Momaday (1934), and R.I.P. to Edward Dahlberg (1977) and William F. Buckley (2008).

To you and your book!

PS – If you’d like to purchase your own copy of A Reader’s Book of Days, here you go:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3IXWvXC

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/89876/9780393351699?

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