An Author Speaks - Steve Berry

I attended a very interesting meeting of the Georgia Writer's Association this weekend where author Steve Berry ("The Amber Room", "The Romanov Prophecy", "The Third Secret") gave a talk on his approach to writing and the difficulty in getting published. His website is at www.steveberry.org/

His genre is the international thriller. He wrote nine unpublished novels over ten years before finally selling "The Amber Room" to a New York publishing house and getting a contract to write several more. Now he has sold hundreds of thousands of hardback and paperback books, and has been translated into 33 languages.

So it was a very interesting talk. What follows are my notes on the high points of his talk. Any errors are my own, of course:

• He works much harder at his writing than I do. He writes two hours of new material every morning, and revises for two hours in the evenings. During the day he works full-time as a lawyer.


• "Write what you love, not what you know." His first book was a legal thriller (he's a lawyer), and he never sold it. He states that you must love what you are writing since you live with it for years while rewriting and editing. He loves the suspense of international thrillers.


• "Writing is not fun." He stated this emphatically, but listening to him talk it was obvious he loved his writing and it brought him great joy to create his books. I think he was just trying to stress how much hard work it is.


• "Set a goal." His goal was to get a contract with a New York publisher and he didn't settle for self-publishing or a small press.


• "It's much harder to get an agent than a publisher."


• His seven rules of writing:

1. There are no rules. Do anything you want as long as it works.


2. Don't bore the reader.


3. Don't confuse the reader.


4. Don't get caught writing.


5. Don't lie to the reader (unreliable narrator).


6. Shorter is better.


7. Tell a good story.

• He impressed me with his total knowledge of his genre. He has read all the other thriller writers and knows many of them personally. He knows what books are coming out, how well the other authors are doing, and who his competition is.


• He was writing in the genre at a time when it wasn't popular. He predates Dan Brown ("The DaVinci Code") by several years. The genre had fallen out of fashion with readers and Dan Brown revived it. Berry was able to capitalize on that.


• You have to write a million(!) words before you begin to get good at your craft.

This was the best author talk I have ever attended. I'm not a thriller writer, but Berry's hard work and determination were an inspiration.