There was one question in particular of interest to us book lovers, and that came from a woman who asked what Obama would say to young writers. He was surprised by the question, which he admitted was one he hadn't heard before, but didn't hesitate to answer. He referenced his two books, and specifically mentioned how he wrote them himself, along with many of his speeches. With a light inflection, he said, "In terms of getting a job, knowing how to write is a good thing."

He talked about how he kept a journal, and how it was important for teaching him not only how to write, but also how to think. But my favorite part was when he said, "Over the course of four years I made time to read all of the Harry Potter books out loud to my daughters. If I can do that and run for president, then you can find time to read to your kids. That's some of the most special time you have with your children."

And I meant every hyperbolic word of it. See, sometimes you can judge a book by its blurber.

"I have no idea at this point how many books I've blurbed," says humorist Jonathan Ames, who is approached frequently to dish out book-jacket praise.

"It may be about 50. It might make some long, strange poem if I was to collect them all."

In fact, one of his blurbs was even declared "best blurb" by New York magazine for "The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own," which Ames notes, "on the title alone, deserved a great blurb."

While he tries to blurb honestly, he does admit, "Once I promised someone that I would blurb their book, and then I read it and didn't feel so strongly about it. This was years ago. But I blurbed it anyway, and then a fan e-mailed me and said they bought the book because of my blurb and were sorely disappointed. I felt bad about this. But I guess it shows that blurbs actually do work once in a while."

Oh, they totally work. Even if it's just to generate an article about blurbing.

Publicist - and now best-selling author - Sloane Crosley (who, yes, has a blurb from Ames) has seen press from Radar to New York magazine about her bevy of notable blurbs as a first-time author, the question being whether she "cheated" by using her publishing clout to secure out-of-sight blurbs.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans...

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

A few years ago, the author discovered her writing had taken a back burner. She was spending too much time editing scripts for movie deals that never seemed to go anywhere. "I finally just said, 'I can't stand it anymore! I want to go back in a little room -- because wherever I am, I work in a little room -- and write something that I know will happen.'" So she wrote. Double Fudge, her first book in four years and the last in the Fudge series, came out in 2002. Dream two -- get back into that little room.

"I never stop writing," she said, looking out at the boats blowing about in the pond on an uncharacteristically cool and windy August day. "If something comes, I just write it and put it away. It gives me a sense of security." One day a story came to her about losing a tooth. She raced to her laptop and started writing. As she did, she realized the characters were the same ones that had starred in her 1984 picture book, The Pain and the Great One. "My daughter was the Great One," she said. She had written the original story on a day long before the book was published, when the rain had trapped her two children, six and eight, inside. "She called him [her brother] The Pain," she said, speaking of her daughter who is now in her 40s, "and said, 'I am the Great One, the older sister.'"

Morning routine: I get up just before six and come downstairs, put food out for the cats and open the cat flap. Then I work out for 35 or 40 minutes - I have a very large bathroom with an elliptical cross-trainer and a bicycle. After that I listen to the Today programme while I have a shower or bath. I'm usually downstairs by 7.30 and have my breakfast, just fruit. I start work by 8.45 and go on for about three hours.

Fitness routine: I try to have an hour's exercise a day at least. So say I've done my 35 minutes on the machines, I will walk for the remaining 25 minutes (except Wednesdays when I go to a Pilates class).

Regular route: I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair. At the moment I am thinking about a novel set in and around Portobello Road and the market, so I walk there a lot.

*****

Gadget: A memory stick. I have one with a couple of novels on it, and lots of articles and speeches. It weighs nothing and goes in your handbag. It's so easy.

*****

Writing room: I've got a small office at the top of the house, where I can be sure of being away from anyone. My housekeeper comes in four mornings each week (she's marvellous - I'm not enamoured of housework and I don't really do any). But I've got a round table downstairs where I sometimes work at weekends.

But Uglies takes place 300 years in the future. Names probably won't be the same as now. So I needed something that's not a current name, but that doesn’t make your brain fritz when you read it. So I chose a regular word in English.

That's right: "tally" as in "count." As in "Hey, Mr. Tally-man, tally me bananas."

Thus, the little spell-checker in your brain doesn't ping every time your eyes scan across those letters. (And the real-world MS Word spell-checker doesn’t draw a squiggly line under it.) "Tally" is capitalized, of course, so you know it's a name, but otherwise "tally" reads as a perfectly normal word.

But not too common. When’s the last time you actually used the verb "tally" in a sentence, like "Let me tally those Scrabble scores for you, Old Chum?" Too common could be very bad, like if you named a main character Ask, or Her, or The. (Actually, "Said" would be the worst. Even writing about the late writer Edward Said can be quite tricky.)

A friend rings and tells me that my novel Into the Woods (David Fickling Books) is at 2,993 in the Amazon rankings. This is like offering crack cocaine to a recovering drug addict. I have been trying to wean myself off my obsession with the Amazon rankings. I'm not quite ready to go cold turkey, but I am desperately trying to limit myself to just one hit a day.

Why are we first-time authors so obsessed with the Amazon rankings? Partly because, like pretending to do your tax return or essential research, it offers yet another displacement activity to avoid the real hard business of writing. But it's also because once your book is out there, all alone in the big wide world, you desperately want to know if it's thriving or has got completely lost - and for a considerable period nobody can tell you.

The Amazon rankings are something to cling to, even though you know in your heart and head that they are both meaningless and psychologically damaging - unless you are a consistent bestseller like Jacqueline Wilson or God. (I have taken ridiculous and entirely childish comfort from the fact that that while the King James Bible sits many thousands of places above Into the Woods in the rankings, it only has an average 4.5-star customer review rating, while my novel has five).

In fact an Amazon ranking pretty well tells you nothing at all unless you are an Amazon sales executive or the kind of person who, when logging on with the intention of buying Into the Woods suddenly decides that The Institute of Electrical Engineers On Site Guide (BS7671: 2001 16th Edition Wiring Regulations Including Amendment 2: 2002) might be a far better read because it sits at number 69 in the top 100. I suppose for some readers there is probably a perceived safety in numbers.

1. Use up all your good ideas. "Collect all the notes you've made on index cards, and put all the good ideas you haven't used yet in the last volume because you can't say you'll put them in the next book. I had a sign over my desk that said 'Now or never.'"

2. Kill off at least one person. "I just think death always makes a nice ending, except maybe to my life. Well, I definitely plan on dying later. I just haven't worked out the details."

*****

5. Have something in mind to do when you are done.

No restless bouts of booze-fuelled creativity for this writer; he doesn't even tap out a word of narrative until he has sunk eight months into researching and planning his plot.

"You have to work very carefully on the book's structure and its pacing," he explains. "The clue has to appear at this point. And the solution has to appear at that point, and so on.

"The other reason is that some ideas just don't work. I had this great idea once about there being 206 bones in the human body - each one of them has a name, and I thought, well I'll have two hundred and something chapters and each one of them will be named after a bone. It sounded like a great idea. But it just didn't work. If I'd started to write without planning the structure carefully, I could have written half the book and then realised: this is stupid."

"The lady on the plane next to me yesterday explained, when I told her I was a writer, that as a former English Major she had had dreams of being a major novelist, but she was making a living instead, and she hoped to one day have enough free time to write."

"And I remembered Gene Wolfe getting up at 5.00 am every day and writing two pages before going in to work, and I told her that if she wanted to be a writer she ought to write. ('It's like most jobs,' I told. 'It's amazing how much of it just consists of showing up.' But she didn't believe me.)

Novelist Thinks People Shrug 10 Times More Than They Actually Do

BOSTON-According to his handful of readers, budding novelist Mosley Forstner, 23, thinks that people shrug with much greater frequency than they actually do. "Every time a character responds to something in Mosley's book, it's "'Suppose that's the way of things,' she shrugged" or "'Fine, then I'm leaving,' he shrugged," said Rodney Klein, a fellow student and peer reviewer of Forstner's. "Can't his characters just 'say' something once in a while?" When informed of the criticism, Forstner responded with a grunt and a curt, dismissive motion of his shoulders intended to convey nonchalance.

MEG CABOT'S BOOK SIGNING DO'S AND DON'TS FOR WRITERS:

1) DON'T BE A SLOB

Writers, I recognize that you are sensitive artists who want to be known for your creative writing, not your fashion sense. But for the love of God, people, you are at a book signing. Your readers are seeing you live and in person for the first time. SO WHY DIDN'T YOU BRUSH YOUR HAIR?????

*****

2) DON'T BE A WEIRDO

If there is anything that burns me up more than an author who makes no effort to look nice for his or her readers, it's authors who act all weird because they think people in the "creative arts" are "special."

I am not talking about throwing on a tiara and a feather boa, either. I am talking about authors who pretend their books aren't written by them, but by their characters. As in, "I didn't want to kill off So-and-So, but Name of Main Character insisted on it! There was nothing I could do!"

*****

...I fear that some authors say things like this so often, they are actually starting to believe it. I know this because authors are saying it to ME, in private conversations, with no readers present. And I find myself going, "Uh-huh. Really? Your characters actually talk to you? That's so interesting, because you know, I made my characters up, so they can't talk to me, because they ARE NOT REAL."

The truth is, authors, characters cannot act and think independently of you because they are FIGMENTS OF YOUR IMAGINATION. When your character says or does something, it is because YOU MADE THEM DO IT. Your characters DO NOT ACTUALLY EXIST except on paper and in your head.

She can't draw. She can't sing or dance. But she's always been able to sit in a corner and listen. And she has loved to read since she was 3 years old. "When you read all the time, language comes naturally to you," Susan Straight said by phone from her Riverside, Calif., home. Her most recent novel, "A Million Nightingales," traces the amazing life of a young slave girl growing up in Louisiana in the early 1800s.

Straight, who lives with her three daughters, teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She does most of her writing by hand in little notebooks while sitting in the car waiting for one of her daughters. Then she does the rest in the evenings after her daughters are in bed. "Being a good listener is essential," Straight tells her students. In fact, she believes most writers are natural eavesdroppers. They work hard to learn "the natural rhythms of people's speech. You have to get the dialogue right."

As a lover of language, Straight also speaks French, Spanish and Swiss-German. She found it difficult, though, during her research trips, to be fluent in "Louisiana French," which has its own dialect. "Nightingales" is Straight's first historical novel, although she has written four previous books.

I recently attended a lecture by a prominent academic who theorized that creativity was somehow connected to mental illness. She cited a number of examples that ran the gamut from Lincoln and Churchill to numerous famous writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, and artists like the posthumously acclaimed, institutionally committed painter Vincent Van Gogh.

Citing the fact that Lincoln and Churchill allegedly suffered from depression and novelists like Hemingway committed suicide, while Faulkner and Fitzgerald were alcoholics, she seemed quite positive that her theory was correct. As further evidence, she named a number of other brilliant scientists like Newton and Einstein, the latter because he had a schizophrenic son.

What began as mere disagreement with this thesis, grew into a vehement and accelerating antagonism. Boiled down to its essence, this academic spread the notion that to be truly creative you had to be off the beam or whatever the politically correct term is these days for varying degrees of mental illness.

The absurdity of this idea amounts to insult. It is probably true that some creative people, like others in the population, have some form of mental illness. But, I would argue, that the vast majority of creative people do not fall into this category. There is only one common thread. They are creative. They create ideas and invent things that have not existed before. That alone makes them different.

*****

The fact is that worldly success for a creative person requires, aside from Lady Luck, a certain singular mindset, an obsessive pursuit of recognition, a selfishly organized life in pursuit of one's creative dream which can be stressful enough to push people over the edge of sanity and, perhaps, bring on some manifestation of mental illness.

*****

Not to realize one's dream can, indeed, drive one crazy. It is not, as the professor alleges, the other way around.

"It’s the locations that I know, like the Northern Midwest. I wrote a couple novels out of Nebraska—one called Dalva and one called The Road Home. I currently live in Montana—that’s where Legends of the Fall came from—and now I live down on the Mexican border in the winter, so I go to Mexico a lot. None of this would have happened if I had become a professor, but I didn’t like it. I tried it for a year and a half, and it drove me crazy. I don’t want to teach anybody anything. Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves. That’s my attitude anyway."

"Just read all that is good and then write. I’m shocked when I go around giving lectures, how little some people have read in these M.F.A. programs. It’s pretty startling. How can you know how to write unless you’ve read the best? That’s my attitude anyway. But it’s partly that our educational system sucks, so there you are. For every good university, there are 100 colleges that aren’t much good at all."

One of the most common questions I get is "Do you ever get writer’s block?"

The thing I love about that question is that it reveals a wonderful optimism in the person who is asking. I suspect that the people who ask this question believe they possess deep wells of creativity and talent that are inexplicably blocked. All they need is the secret unblocking spell from a cartoonist and then a geyser of bestselling books will spray forth.

I wish I had that kind of attitude. I imagine myself asking an NBA player how he deals with Jumper's Block, under the theory that if I can learn how to unblock my jumping skills, I will no longer need a car. I'll just jump wherever I want to go, like the Hulk, but less angry.

13. think about maximizing the manuscript of the novel in microsoft word
14. think briefly about my future
15. feel a little doomed
16. drink the rest of the coffee
17. look on the internet for something to inspire me
*****
35. select-all my novel and change the font size to eight and single-space it all, to gain perspective
36. scroll down, quickly, like a game
37. stop suddenly
38. read over a section
39. delete a comma that i had added the day before
40. delete an adjective that i had added the day before
41. delete some other things that i had added the day before
42. go to the part that i consistently enjoy working on and write one or two sentences and add em-dash parentheticals to a few places
43. rewrite those one or two sentences for a long time
44. finally combine the two sentences into one sentence and rewrite that sentence and then finally get a really good sentence there
*****
54. tell myself to spend one hour straight only working on the novel
55. acknowledge to myself that it won't happen
*****
84. google myself
85. google my favorite authors
86. google my name and the names of my favorite authors
87. maximize my novel and think about screaming
88. check e-mail
89. go to amazon.com and read reviews of books by lorrie moore etc. also, i left out 'check how many people have visited my blog,' 'read other people's blogs and make amusing, irrelevant comments,' 'put my head down on the desk and listen to one or two songs without thinking,' and some other things

"Writers have to be promoters if they believe in their work. Blogs are a way for authors to communicate directly with readers and establish a personal connection. It's a way to reach readers who may not attend bookstore events, and it's more convenient for authors, too. I haven't met too many writers who were eager to fly to Houston for a day -- though I'm sure Houston is lovely this time of year."

Ever since my first book, She's Got Issues, got published, the first question everyone asked me was, "How do you think up your characters?" At first I lied. I said, "Um . . . I don’t know, I guess they're a composite of people I've met over the years." I thought that sounded good. I've heard other authors use that line, so I figured, what the hell.

But the truth is . . . I hear voices. I can easily imagine how frightening that must sound to people who don’t. That's why I typically keep that information to myself.

A while ago, I just couldn't take it anymore so I went into my bathroom with a tape recorder and put together a tape of voices that are constantly vying for attention in my head. You can't imagine the racket I live with on a daily basis. But I never complain. Mostly because I'm so grateful that my affliction never developed into the other kind of "hearing voices." Schizophrenia has got to be infinitely more distracting.

When I made my CD of voices, I started with cartoon characters and then I moved on to friends, relatives and neighbors. Before long, I had a little story going about someone who was eavesdropping on their neighbor’s conversations which were accidentally being picked up on their baby monitor. The idea of me making a tape of voices started out as a joke. The next thing I knew I had a CD and my husband was playing it at parties as soon as I left the room. He’s much funnier in person.

Anyway, once I got the voices on tape, one by one, they all seemed to disappear. But then, another whole crop of voices took up the little vacancy and before I knew it, I was putting them down on paper. My whole book is about people talking to each other. I take full credit for writing it but the truth is all I did was write down what other people were saying.

At times, it helps to think of writing as carpentry. That way, writers and editors can work from a plan and use tools stored on their workbench. You can borrow a writing tool at any time. And here's a secret: Unlike hammers, chisels, and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened, and passed on.

I claim that that's how you design a novel -- you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of this is creative work, and I can't teach you how to do that. Not here, anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity -- getting it organized into a well-structured novel. That's what I'd like to teach you here.

But here's the problem. It takes time to make a living from arts and letters. It really helps to be unencumbered in your 20s. In the past, these folks would live in group housing, make money waitressing or driving a cab, and squeeze in their creative stuff wherever possible. Many would save a couple thousand bucks and take long trips abroad. They were free to invest in themselves, and it paid off.

It's much harder to invest in yourself this way if you emerge from college with big debt. Or graduate school with bigger debt. The 20-somethings I know are diving for money right away. Many of them know that good money at 25 leads to dead-ends a decade later. It's no secret that those entry-level jobs in banks and brokerages are vulnerable to computers and body shops in Bangalore. But while they'd love to follow their passions, too many of today's young cannot afford to postpone paydays. Sounds strange, but being a poor struggling young artist or writer is all too often a privilege of the well-to-do. Everyone else has to make real money.

"There is no secret. I listen when people are talking. I listen when they're talking to each other, and I listen when they talk to me. You just have to listen to the words people use, and the patterns of their speech. ... And I don't see any reason for using any other verb after a line of dialogue other than 'said.' It's what the person's saying that's important, not what the writer thinks is a good word. And adding an adverb to 'said' is just as bad."

The insanity of being a writer includes ridiculous hours; even though all my friends think I wake up late, write for a few hours, and then spend the day either wandering the local beaches or meeting fascinating people.

The truth is -- I'm disciplined as a writer, probably more so than I am in anything else in life. I am at my desk within thirty to forty minutes of waking....

....In terms of daily output, this varies. My best days can come out with 25 good pages; my worst days, I am loathe to admit, end with me cutting 20 pages that aren't so good. But cutting those pages helps me move on with the novel. No use getting tangled up in brambles and deadwood. I don't come up with a book, sit down to write it and have it done six weeks later (well, depends on the book.) But I usually stew over a book for a good long time before sitting down to write it.

When I do sit down to write it, yes, that first draft comes fairly quickly (it's the discipline of writing -- it actually gets easier after doing this for more than a decade.) But "fairly quickly" ranges from six weeks to about four months, depending on the novel.

I know some novelists who write terrific novels in two weeks; others take years. I've had one novel, titled You Come When I Call You, that took me about 12 years from start to finish (although I worked on many other novels in between the start and finish.)

I am banning myself from the Internet.

No, not completely (though that might be nice). E-mail is pretty much a professional necessity for me at this point. I'll continue keeping this blog, because I enjoy writing it and others seem to enjoy reading it. I'll continue reading and occasionally responding to my LJ friends list, because it's one of the best ways I have of keeping in touch with friends (both real-life and electronic). I'll continue my eBay sales, because that little bit of extra income helps a lot. I'll maintain my website, and may even overhaul it soon. I'll keep reading eGullet, because it's a valuable food-writing resource and their membership policies keep the number of idiots way, way down.

That's the problem, you see: I have idiot fatigue. I don't except myself from this; the Internet has definitely made me dumber. I can't do anything about the other idiots, but I can do something about myself. I don't want to use Feedster to find out what people have said about me on their blogs. I don't want babybats who think I should just discreetly keel over dead if I'm not going to write that Lost Souls sequel.....

I've long said that the Internet can be a valuable tool for resource and promotion, and I still believe that. People used to liken it to CB radio. I think it's more like a gun: not inherently evil, but dangerous as hell if you mess around with it. The more time I spend online, the less I spend reading and writing, and I can't have that. It's time to get back to work. Fo' rizzle.

So far, the idea to blog-away has worked for me. Instead of selling books, I pitch my speaking services. I have been blogging for four months and because of the blog, I have received ten for fee speaking engagements.

The point to the List above is that even the best writers make these mistakes, but you can't afford to. The way manuscripts are thrown into the Rejection pile on the basis of early mistakes is a crime. Don't be a victim.