Angel Gavrikova asked Maggie Stiefvater:

What are some of your favorite books that influenced your writing?

Maggie Stiefvater Dear Winged Demon,

My storytelling style/ subject matter is, like all writers, the hodgepodge end result of consumed media, internalized facts, my specific upbringing, my current lifestyle, and general aesthetic preferences. I could (and have) list fiction that clearly belongs in the pedigree of my writing, but such answers will always be incredibly incomplete — like an alien asking what Earth is like and being provided a photo of a ferret. The ferret's true, but it doesn't really prepare you for the billions of other truths.

Instead I'm going to answer this time with a nonfiction book that influenced my writing hugely: Donald Maass's THE CAREER NOVELIST. I read it long before I was published, back when I was a teen, when I also voraciously downed copies of Writers Digest and read each year's WRITERS MARKETs from cover to cover. THE CAREER NOVELIST was one of the first (and only) books I read that treated art as a business without implying that such an attitude was a compromise or a betrayal of what art stood for. Moreover, it didn't wring its hands or whine about how difficult it was to get published and stay published. Maass merely wrote about what he felt it took to translate your artistic vision into something salable, and what it took to keep being salable. He wasn't emotional about it. It was just business.

I loved it.

I never needed to be told it would be easy to be a career novelist (in fact it would have put me off). I never even really needed to be told it would possible; there were novels in stores, of course it was possible, someone was obviously writing them and getting paid for it. I didn't need to be told it was going to be okay and I didn't need someone to tell me how to protect my artistic baby when it went out in the world.

I simply wanted to know how to make a career out of painting with words and making stories. I didn't need to be told it was okay to be a writer and not to give up. That wasn't in danger. What I wanted was hard-headed business advice about selling stuff that just happened to be soft-hearted art. This book was the first one I'd read that felt like it hit that mark

To this day, I remember a piece of advice I read in this book, years and years before I got published: don't quit your day job until you have five books in print, no matter how good that first deal might seem. Maass urged new writers to remember that publishing is peaks and valleys — don't fly too close to the sun. No matter what level you're at in any creative profession, it's wise advice.

THE CAREER NOVELIST is quite old by now and I haven't read it in a long time, so I'm not sure how well the details hold up to publishing nowadays — it was written, for instance, long before eBooks or social media became important. But I fondly keep copy of it on my shelf. A lot of pieces joined together to make my career what it is today, but that is one of the biggest and oldest of them.

urs,

Stiefvater

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