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ever made in my life, let me tell you.
    How much do you have to like a type of novel in order to have a chance of success at it yourself? Well, let’s suppose you sit down one weekend with a stack of gothics or male adventure novels or light romances or whatever. If you have to flail yourself with a whip or whip yourself with a flail in order to get them read, fighting a constant urge to hurl the books across the room, and if your ultimate response is something along the lines of “This stuff is garbage and I hate it,” I think you might want to look a little further.
    On the other hand, if you find the stories reasonably riveting even though you never lose sight of the fact that you’re not reading War and Peace, and if your final reaction is more in the vein of “This stuff’s garbage, all right, but it’s not bad garbage, and while I might not want word to get around I’ve got to admit that I sort of like it,” then perhaps you’ve found a place to start.
    There are other questions to ask yourself. Here’s one—how important is it for you to be rewarded for your work? And what sort of reward’s most important? Money? Recognition? Or simply seeing your work in print? While the three are by no means mutually exclusive, and while the great majority of us want all three—in large portions, thank you—each of us is likely to find one of the three of maximum importance.
    When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, and secure in the knowledge that I’d been placed on this planet to be a writer, it didn’t even occur to me to wonder what sort of thing I would write. I was at the time furiously busy reading my way through the great novels of the century, the works of Steinbeck and Hemingway and Wolfe and Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and all their friends and relations, and it was ever so clear to me that I would in due course produce a Great Novel of my own.
    I’d go to college first, naturally, where I might get a somewhat clearer notion of just what constituted a Great Novel. Then I’d emerge into the real world where I would Live. (I wasn’t quite certain what all this capital-L Living entailed, but I figured there would be a touch of squalor in there somewhere, along with generous dollops of booze and sex.) All of this Living would ultimately distill itself into the Meaningful Experiences out of which I would eventually produce any number of Worthwhile Books.
    Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this approach. Any number of important novels are produced in this approximate fashion, and the method has the added advantage that, should you wind up writing nothing at all, you’ll at least have treated yourself to plenty of booze and sex en route.
    In my own case, though, I learned quickly that my self-image as a writer was stronger than my self-image as a potential great novelist. I didn’t really care all that deeply about artistic achievement, nor did I aspire to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. I wanted to write something and see it in print. I don’t know that that’s the noblest of motives for doing anything, but it was at the very core of my being.
    Let’s suppose, for a moment, that you regard yourself as similarly motivated. While you’d certainly like to write something in which you can take great personal pride, something that might win you a measure of critical recognition, something that might lead stockbrokers and accountants to vie for your custom, your primary purpose as a writer is to get something published.
    If that’s the case, you would probably be best advised to find a place for yourself in the field of category fiction, a term which covers the broad group of novels—generally paperback originals—which lend themselves readily to categorization as mysteries, adventure, romance, gothic, science fiction, historical saga, western, or whatever. These categories change slightly over the years; too, they go hot and cold, with one year’s hot ticket next year’s drug on the