Wally Lamb, On Becoming a Writer

00:08 [Wally Lamb] I began when I was about 30 years old, I started writing something that I didn't even know was a short story and finally a couple years later, several drafts later it was not only a short story, but it got published. How thrilled was I! Then I wrote a second story, and after I'd finished a

00:30 third, I entered a program at Vermont College, a low-residency master of fine arts degree because I had slammed into the wall of all I still didn't know about how to write. And so I worked there with a wonderful teacher and writer named Gladys Swan. I remember bringing my latest short story to her, and it was about maybe twenty five, thirty pages, and she'd read it in advance to our

01:00 meeting. And she said to me, "Well, my dear, this is interesting, but I think you've got a few too many pots on the stove." And I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Well, there's a lot of stuff going on in this thing, and I don't think really it can survive as a short story." And so I said, "Well, what do you want me to cut?" And she said, "Well, maybe you don't want to cut anything. Maybe you're trying to tell yourself that you want to write a novel." Well,

01:30 if I had known that it was going to take me nine years and turn into the many challenges that I faced along the way to writing She's Come Undone, I probably would have run out the room screaming. But I didn't; sometimes ignorance can serve you well. And so I just kept going, and indeed that story did become She's Come Undone, which was my first published novel.