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that most writers have been obsessed with the idea of becoming writers before the nature of what they might write about revealed itself to them. It’s easy to accept this premise about the nuts-and-bolts commercial writer, but the same initial uncertainty is every bit as likely to characterize the early years of writers with impeccable critical reputations. The identification of self as writer comes for most of us before we know what sort of writer we’ll be or what we’ll write about, and that seems to be just as true whether our ultimate literary product is Moby Dick or Trailer Trollop.
    (This might be a good place to suggest, incidentally, that fiction writers of every stripe have a great deal more in common that the disparity of our work might suggest. The fact that we write unites us far more than the nature of what we write separates us.)
    Let’s suppose, then, that all you know at this point is that you want to write a novel. Why you have this curious urge is not terribly important. It’s enough that you have it in good measure. Whether you’ll prove to have other elements essential to novelistic success—talent, perseverance, resourcefulness—is not something you have to know at this stage. Indeed, it’s not something you’re in a position to know. You’ll find out in due course.
    How do you decide what novel to write?
    It seems to me that this question can best be answered by asking a few others. First of all, what kind of novel do you like to read? I would not go so far as to say that we can only produce the sort of fiction that we most enjoy reading ourselves.
    I’ve known of too many instances where this is simply untrue. When I was knocking out soft-core sex novels, for instance, I did not commonly spend my free hours reading other people’s soft-core sex novels. And I’ve observed that a substantial number of people who write westerns are very much averse to reading in the genre. Contrariwise, most mystery and science-fiction writers seem to enjoy reading in their respective fields.
    When I was starting out, confession magazines constituted the most receptive market for new writers. They paid fairly well, too. Their numbers have shrunk since then and their rates of payment have actually declined, illustrating once more how the short story writer’s lot has gotten worse over the years, but back then they were an excellent place for a neophyte to get started.
    I think, because I read a lot of them, I understood what a confession story was, the basic structure of its plot, and what made one story good and another unacceptable. During the year I spent working for a literary agent, the two confessions I yanked out of the slush pile both sold on their initial submissions, and the author of one of them came to be a leader in the field, ultimately going on to make a name for herself in the field of romantic fiction.
    Well, I was game. Confessions back then paid several times what I was earning for suspense short stories, so on several occasions I went out and bought or borrowed confession magazines and set about reading my way through them. I never quite made it. I could not read one of the damned things all the way through without skimming. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. And I couldn’t shake the conviction that the entire magazine, from front to back and including the bust-developer ads, was nothing but mind-rotting swill.
    Nor, consequently, could I produce a confession story. The ideas my mind came up with were either mind-numbingly trite or at odds with the market’s requirements. I never did turn one of these ideas into a story that I stayed with beyond a couple of tentative pages, never completed a confession until one bizarre weekend when I wrote three of them to order for a publisher with a couple holes to fill and a deadline fast approaching. I wrote them somehow because I’d accepted the assignment, and he printed them because he had to, and that was not the easiest money I