Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.

Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, no one's going to recognize you on the street, and you're promoting your book, not yourself.

Whatever one may say about the perils of workshops, they help writers internalize an awareness of audience.

I worked every waking minute, nights and weekends, in order to make enough money to buy those summers off, and even then we wouldn't have made it except that my mother helped out with a yearly check and my father bought me a car when my old one die

I figured that to be a writer I would need to have been born in the nineteenth century, be British, or have three names. So I turned my sights elsewhere . . . to acting.

If you have some other profession that allows you your evenings or weekends, terrific, stick with that. Having a profession other than writing also has the potential side benefit of providing you with material, something to write about.

That requires quite an imaginative leap because it's hard for me to imagine that my biography would be of much interest to anyone, and because I'm a fairly private person, the notion doesn't appeal to me.